Rail Theft Soars in California

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-16/rail-theft-soars-los-angeles-pilfered-packages-littering-tracks

by ilamont • 5 years ago

170 276 5 years ago

Bostonian2• 5 years ago

Ungated link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ugly-rail-thefts-leave-tracks-130... . Politicians, prosecutors, and activists who belittle the harm of property crimes are wrong to do so.

ldiracdelta• 5 years ago

When police protection is removed from society:

* the rich buy security guards and security mechanisms.

* the middle class try their best to do the same on a budget.

* the poor have no protection.

Then a politician comes along and says, "Let's socialize the cost of security so that everyone is protected, not just the 1%"

And then you get police again.

dv_dt3• 5 years ago

From the same article, while rail thefts are up 160%,

“According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime was up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019.”

Bostonian2• 5 years ago

When people know property crimes will not be prosecuted, they are less likely to report it. When the police know that people who commit such crimes will be released without charges, they are less likely to arrest such criminals.

Ekaros• 5 years ago

Also when people know that police will do very little about a crime, why even waste time reporting it. Specially if the perpetrator is unkown.

topspin2• 5 years ago

According to LAPD

This is a trustworthy source of information?

andrewmunsell• 5 years ago

The LA Police Department?

baggy_trough• 5 years ago

It's probably greatly understated.

ultrarunner2• 5 years ago

For only one example, Buckeye, Arizona was accused of misreporting crime statistics to make it the safest place in Arizona for a while [0]. I'm sure this happens to some extent throughout many jurisdictions, and the idea of the LAPD reporting favorable statistics doesn't seem far fetched at all.

[0] https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/are-buc...

rdtsc• 5 years ago

Wonder if in this case how they’d count the stats. Are these packages counted each as a single instance of theft? Wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t count at all as occurring in LA but in the state where the train is owned.

Lammy2• 5 years ago

This is total speculation on my part until I can find a better reference, but I assume it's tracked in terms of rail cars since that's how STB tracks other statistics: https://www.stb.gov/reports-data/rail-service-data/

Though I'm not sure how that calculation would work when we're talking about intermodal container theft, since modern intermodal "well cars" can consist of one, three, or even five permanently-coupled platforms holding two stacked containers each: https://www.gatx.com/wps/wcm/connect/GATX/GATX_SITE/Home/Rai...

tonymet• 5 years ago

these stats are meaningless

kodah• 5 years ago

Important to note, LAPD does not track crimes on railways. The railroads have to staff and supply their own police force.

nradov2• 5 years ago

I don't trust any crime statistics other than murders. Police in many cities barely investigate minor crimes and often actively discourage victims from filing reports, so the statistics are artificially low.

dv_dt3• 5 years ago

Given the same organization and same measurement biases, one can still compare data from past times on a relative basis.

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

Recent related discussion, 2 days ago, 598 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970

Twitter thread with video of package litter and opened containers on rail cars.

LA Times does add significant detail and context to the story, and mentions John Schreiber's Twitter posts.

ryantgtg3• 5 years ago

This news report from a month ago has a golden response from the sheriff https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg

It’s remarkable to me that he didn’t have any awareness of this issue. But then again, who has jurisdiction over the railways?

olivermarks2• 5 years ago

https://www.up.com/aboutup/community/safety/special_agents/i...

ryantgtg3• 5 years ago

That’s what I thought. I was just being lazy about confirming that.

Still, it has to be a multi-agency effort, given that UP’s jurisdiction is only like 50 ft wide.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

I’ve heard the railways have their own jurisdiction but the environments around those railways sure have a way of breeding criminals, giving them cover, and contributing to all of this. It’s hard for me to view this as anything but a result of California policy and the kind of justice system promoted by folks like Gascon (LA DA) or Boudin (SF DA). After all, we don’t hear about train raids in Texas or Montana or whatever.

olivermarks2• 5 years ago

I agree and am anti Boudin/Gascon and other Soros sponsored DA's, but the destination of rail transported goods into LA, Chicago etc are typically through very poor neighborhoods. Stopping in these port and transport hub areas, whether semi trucks or trains, has always attracted crime and looting. The difference now is the centralization bottlenecks Amazon has created. Huge amounts of predictable opportunities have not gone unnoticed...

ryantgtg3• 5 years ago

anything but

But from the above quotes from the sheriff, doesn’t it also seem like that dept is asleep at the wheel?

Perhaps we read into this what we already want to read into this. I do agree that our current criminal reform looks to have swung too far in one direction. But I also think the sheriff is a dick, and the dept is practically a gang enterprise.

monkeybutton2• 5 years ago

The photos look like something out of a 3rd world country.

rootusrootus• 5 years ago

It is a mess, for sure. Somewhere I read they clean it up every few days. It's been happening for years. But also, those pictures were taken with a long telephoto lens from quite a ways off, which compresses distance and makes it look like an even bigger mess than it really is.

caf• 5 years ago

Yes, the foreshortening is easy to see in this case because of the apparent spacing of the railway sleepers.

ALittleLight4• 5 years ago

A news report posted elsewhere in this thread[1] says the mess goes on for "miles" and thieves are there "daily". It doesn't seem to me like this is a visual distortion caused by lens type.

Anecdotally, in the past few months I've had five or six packages just never show up from Amazon whereas in all the years prior that happened so rarely I don't recall any such thing.

1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

Even close shots and shots across rather than down the tracks show tremendous amounts of packaging.

John Schreiber's original Twitter thread shows plenty of cross-track, close-in, and overhead shots from both bridges and drones all lacking telephoto compression and revealing abundant strewn packaging:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html

throwawayay02• 5 years ago

Most of the US is.

humaniania2• 5 years ago

lol what? Weird comment comrade.

john_moscow2• 5 years ago

Well, for the past few decade or so, the country has been gradually destroying the underlying mechanisms that made it different from the 3rd-world countries, so you can hardly be surprised by those actions starting to bear fruit.

gfdgfdgfdgf2• 5 years ago

What policies are you talking about? The urban decay is happening in cities like LA, SF, NY and not places like Texas or Florida.

bmitc2• 5 years ago

There are many parts of the country I would consider so, including parts of cities, such as we see here.

This is what growth optimized capitalism looks like.

solveit4• 5 years ago

Does 'capitalism' even mean anything any more? No self-respecting capitalist would allow theft in broad daylight.

rasz• 5 years ago

Its LA so yes. Also look up Skid Row.

SSLy• 5 years ago

As previously seen on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970

Gigachad• 5 years ago

What is the solution here? Do trains need armed security when passing through unsafe regions?

dls20166• 5 years ago

But Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.

Half-way through the article we get the point. This is just another example of how our retail supply lines are optimized at every turn to shovel maximum crap through the pipe... be it minimally-staffed stores or unsecured trains. It's all about cash flow, baby!

Let the market fix the problem.

ALittleLight4• 5 years ago

How can the market fix the problem? Some people aren't abiding by the market so how could the market constrain them? It's like advising a chess player to just play better when his opponent is snatching his pieces off the board - that might not work.

If the market reacts by making it harder to steal, then presumably this will increase the cost of goods which will, presumably, increase the value of stealing them. The market doesn't have a lot of options that I can see.

flyinglizard4• 5 years ago

Optimization is good. It means everything is efficient, cheaper, more abundant and new things can be built on top of old things. It's a wonderful quality.

Now, in which first world country do freight train need guards across their route? And it's not like the train is being hit in the middle of the desert, Breaking Bad style. There are few spots where this happened.

It seems to me like police across the US are either scared of doing their job or simply don't care, together with a public which has been desensitized to crime.

newsclues• 5 years ago

Restore law and order to society.

CameronNemo• 5 years ago

The trains already have their own police force from what I read in the tweets from a couple days ago.

ALittleLight4• 5 years ago

Their police force seems really bad.

adolph• 5 years ago

This is the Twitter thread from 1/13 that I think kicked off the coverage. In some ways the thread is a lot better than the LA Times article in that the latter has only a few stills and no additional context.

https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384

Hokusai6• 5 years ago

recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.

This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world. Poor people are neither violent nor thieves. But they can be convinced to become that when inequality is so high.

sennight2• 5 years ago

If that were true, then it would be reflected in crime stat jumps during periods of recession, but it isn't.

HarryHirsch• 5 years ago

Wait, copper theft did go up around 2007, didn't it?

nuclearnice1• 5 years ago

We find that the average arrest rate for a cohort entering the labour market during a recession is 10.2% higher than for an otherwise similar cohort entering a more buoyant labour market. [1]

…

Weinberg and his collaborators Eric D. Gould of Hebrew University and David Mustard of the University of Georgia examined young males with no more than a high school education—the demographic group that commits the most crime—they found that average wages and unemployment rates were directly linked to the incidence of property crimes. [2]

…

Crime has increased during every recession since the late 1950s, sociologists said. [3]

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/03/do-recessions-increas...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-recessions-inc...

[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

mberning• 5 years ago

It could be that. Or it could be the lax prosecution of property crimes.

awb5• 5 years ago

Or the difficulty in actually solving them.

Hokusai6• 5 years ago

The USA has death penalty and the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It's it the safest, thou?

ameister144• 5 years ago

With 2.2 million people in jail or prison I think it's a bit ridiculous to argue that the US has lax prosecution as an issue relative to any other countries.

I'll be a bit more specific - there are about 400,000 people currently incarcerated in the US for property crimes. That's higher than the per capita rate of incarceration for any crime in Canada. If the US is lax in prosecuting property crimes, then I don't think any other developed country is hard on crime.

gjsman-10005• 5 years ago

Being poor is not an excuse for criminality. These people aren't stealing bread to live or clothing to not freeze. They are stealing valuables ("Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools") because they can, knowing their poor status will cause people like you to express sympathy for them and thus allowing them to get away with it.

They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.

Hokusai6• 5 years ago

Being poor is not an excuse for criminality.

Nor being rich.

Supermancho• 5 years ago

Once you have to live in the permanent mindset of "how can I make money?", it quickly becomes "how can I make the most money".

floatingatoll2• 5 years ago

That’s an awfully dismissive broad-brush viewpoint about homeless people, that isn’t supported by studies of — and social support of — homeless people around the world.

ectopod• 5 years ago

If you have a genuine choice of steal or starve, even then you won't necessarily steal food. You might steal whatever is easiest to and sell it to buy food.

salawat• 5 years ago

Well, if you paid them enough to buy wares, made the wares cheaply enough they could be afforded, and structured the entire thing to be relatively painless, equitable, and easy for everyone involved to participate in constructively, there wouldn't be a problem, now would there?

Society subject to stabilizing optimizations formulated by intelligent free agents acting in a way counter to the desires of system architects who decided to scale beyond what they could actually guarantee the security of.

Who'd'a thunk?

Ma8ee• 5 years ago

I have some mixed feelings. On one hand I certainly can sympathise with people that feel that they never got a fair chance and they think that the only thing they do is making Jeff Bezos slightly less rich.

Inequality is a big part of it. I know that in the US property rights are considered holy. But many people never even got the chance to go to a good school because they were born by the wrong parents, are working their asses off just to keep their noses above the water, and at the same time are being surrounded by wealthy people that work less than them whose only advantage seems to be that they were lucky enough to be born by the right parents. Some of the unlucky people might think that there are fundamental unfairnesses and that trying to balance those should trump property rights.

Ourgon3• 5 years ago

Isn't it odd that crime is skyrocketing in places which are governed by people who think in these terms? It is almost as if policies which are based on those ideas lead people into a life of crime where they would otherwise have been given the satisfaction of taking care of themselves. It is not as if it is hard to get a job right now after all?

nopenopenopeno• 5 years ago

If you think The Democratic Party gives a damn about poor people, you are the one getting taken for a ride.

And if you think “a job” is all it takes to not be poor, then you are just completely out of touch with reality.

Hokusai6• 5 years ago

It is not as if it is hard to get a job right now after all?

What makes you think that poor people does not have jobs? Search the term "the working poor".

cortesoft• 5 years ago

I have no idea what you mean by "those terms" and "those ideas"

scollet• 5 years ago

It's hard to make a living wage right now, yes.

dls20166• 5 years ago

Uhm… so we ignore that rail yards in LA are super busy relative to those in “more respectable” towns?

ameister144• 5 years ago

What do you mean by 'skyrocketing?'

Does that mean 'consistently lowering over the last 10-20 years and now significantly lower than it was 20 years ago?' Because that's a pretty odd definition.

Odder still - while CA homicide rates have increased in 2020-2021, they have done so by a percentage LOWER than the national average. So basically, CA is safer and has lower homicide rates than the national average and your suggestion is to change leadership to be more like the rest of the country?

Lammy2• 5 years ago

Isn't it odd that crime is skyrocketing in places which are governed by people who think in these terms?

"Fun" facts: California was the epicenter of the 20th-century American eugenics movement[0] whose ideas became very famous around 1940, was the place that invented single-family zoning[1] (in Berkeley in 1916) immediately after banning land ownership by non-whites in 1913[2], that once passed a state referendum to explicitly nullify a state-level fair-housing act[3] passed a year prior, that passed the first modern firearms-restriction act on explicitly racial grounds[4], and that pioneered regressive segregation-with-extra-steps property tax laws[5]. It is an extremely racially-segregated place, to this day[6], and always has been despite our leaders' constant pandering to the contrary. There are so many things to love about California, but this isn't one of them and I'd urge you to reconsider what you know about it :/

[0] https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/josef-mengele/

[1] https://globalurban.org/Berkeley_Zoning_Origins.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_14

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

[6] http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea

cjbgkagh6• 5 years ago

I think statistically less intelligence correlates to higher violence and poverty. Therefore, those who are poor due to low intelligence are more likely to also be violent.

Hokusai6• 5 years ago

less intelligence correlates to higher violence and poverty.

Poverty and violence causes mental and physical health problems. Fix poverty if you want educated and intelligent citizens.

tomp• 5 years ago

You're conflating two issues: poverty and inequality.

US is one of the richest countries, has less poor people than other rich countries, the "poor" in the US are richer than the "poor" in e.g. UK or Italy, and "average" (mean and median) incomes in UK or Italy would be considered "poor" in the US.

see: https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1469070902813995014

So, inequality is irrelevant, only absolute poverty is relevant.

EDIT: NOTE: the graph in the link above is disposable income (a.k.a. above cost of living)

Personally, I don't think that poverty is the issue here. People aren't looting Apple stores because they're poor. But the lack of social safety net (income, health, mental health) for the poorest probably doesn't help.

tomjakubowski• 5 years ago

only absolute poverty is relevant.

No it isn't. Cost of living matters.

Impoverished people in richer countries have, to a limited extent, some advantage from increased capital investment in their vicinity (e.g. in theory, on average, better local infrastructure than in absolutely poorer countries). They are still crushed by living expenses.

jl27183• 5 years ago

Okay then let’s hear why they are looting Apple stores.

jdkee• 5 years ago

Not many Barnes and Nobles were looted in the summer of 2020.

smsm425• 5 years ago

It takes a very specially cultivated state of mental confusion to genuinely believe people driving in in multiple high-end cars, smash-and-grab robbing a jewelry store and departing in the same cars are doing it because they're so poor they can't find any alternative to feed themselves. And this state of mental confusion seems to be carefully cultivated among Californians.

leto_ii2• 5 years ago

US is one of the richest countries, has less poor people than other rich countries, the "poor" in the US are richer than the "poor" in e.g. UK or Italy,

Certain structural factors matter a lot:

How affordable is it to get decent healthcare?

How affordable is it to get decent food?

Is drug use criminalized?

Is there a high rate of violent crime?

Do people own their own homes?

Are there informal social relations that act as social safety nets?

A relatively poor country that nevertheless answers those questions correctly will likely provide a better life even to its poor.

emj• 5 years ago

Of course an conservative think tank will say that! That graph does show why you should move to the US to earn big bucks, it says nothing about being poor in those countries. It is a complex subject. Just going aroudn on gapminders site about how much people spend around the world it's easy to understand how complex it is.

https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/

The numbers on the US states I've seen puts them in the lower brackets of the EU countries if you count precentage of the population that are poor, not bad by any means but not good. These numbers are meaningless though, especially on the subject discussed here.

walrus012• 5 years ago

One needs only google "income inequality chart usa" and look at images to see that the present trends are not going to result in anything good in the long run. What we'll end up with is something like wealthy parts of mexico where the richest 1-2% live in fortified enclaves protected by private armed security, and the poor are desperately poor. Not unlike the rich burbclaves predicted in Snow Crash, actually.

jl27183• 5 years ago

So you’re saying they steal not because they are poor and need things, but because other people are rich and have things.

BobbyJo• 5 years ago

One need only look at a smattering of poor villages around the world to see that this is indeed true. When they are as well off as their neighbors, people rarely complain, or steal to get ahead. One problem is that the internet has given everyone extremely wealthy neighbors.

smsm425• 5 years ago

This has nothing to do with "inequality". The existence of Elon Musk does not make people rob the trains. The refusal of the law enforcement - openly and clearly proclaimed - to actually enforce the law does. If it has been publicly said that theft won't be prosecuted and in general property crime is not a true crime ("it's all ensured!") then why not do it? There's literally not a single reason not to do it. So people are starting to do it.

nitwit0052• 5 years ago

There's nothing unusual about it though. In every country in the world, when criminals need to recruit people, they generally target the poor.

Why would a wealthy person want to participate? They can just buy the stuff and not be involved in a crime.

Diesel555• 5 years ago

This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world.

I find this statement to be misleading. If one person in the entire country lived in extreme poverty than there would be some population that is among “some of the poorest populations in the world.”

However, while the US does have issues which should not be ignored, the US cannot be compared to countries where much of the population lives in extreme poverty and other human rights issues. This comparison hurts the real cause that other countries desperately need help and that entire populations do truly live in extreme poverty.

The United Nations Development Programme puts out the Human Development report which has a great website and iPhone / Android app to access the data. A good indicator is the percentage of the population living below the income poverty line. Explore this site, it’s great. Here is a link to one stat.

http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/167106

App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/human-development-report-app/i...

mountainb• 5 years ago

Governments that aren't willing to use force to defend property inevitably wind up discovering that they have become ex-governments. Even Lenin had to dial it back to stave off the famines.

jeffbee• 5 years ago

This really has almost nothing to do with governments. The Union Pacific has mountains of specific laws that give it sweeping police powers. They could stop this instantly.

AnimalMuppet2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't say "mountains" of laws. And I wouldn't say "sweeping" police powers. I believe it does have police power on its own property, though.

q1w2• 5 years ago

Laws are irrelevant when there's not law enforcement.

Arrested individuals are being released the same day by the LA DA and court.

asdff8• 5 years ago

The UP police arrest over 100 people and they are released the next day thanks to special directives from the DAs office on these sorts of crimes.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-t...

dahfizz• 5 years ago

I genuinely feel like I've been scammed. All your life, you hear "the government keeps you safe", "the government builds the roads", etc etc.

The roads are so bad I had to replace my bent wheels from the potholes. The government can't be bothered to stop, investigate, or prosecute rampant crime. My tap water isn't even safe to drink. And I get absolutely robbed at tax time anyway.

jorblumesea• 5 years ago

Feels like the country is failing to solve any real issues and is coming apart at the seams. You can blame many people, events and factors. But it's hard to ignore it anymore. Where the average person was 25 years ago and where they are now are not even comparable.

partiallypro• 5 years ago

A lot of the lawlessness we are seeing is a direct result of us just standing idly by last summer when Manhattan was ransacked and cities had properties burned all over with windows knocked out everywhere. I even think (controversial opinion) that that lawlessness was a "green light" for what happened on January 6th. Why wouldn't you think if you see DC helicopter video of several blocks aflame in DC that you could storm the Capitol? Seems fairly rational to me (though wrong.) I don't think the "broken window theory" is 100% right, but there is certainly something to it. Instead of letting up on drug prosections, we've let some actual criminals go free, something I simply don't understand. Minor property descrtuction and theft can snowball.

woodruffw7• 5 years ago

I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior; only marching. Commercial theft seems to have been, overwhelmingly, performed by opportunists and not the protesters themselves, and only one actual property fire was recorded[1].

This is in direct contrast to the efficient cause of the riots during January 6th, which was political and not opportunistic in nature. Attempting to discharge the responsibility of those involved in the latter by appealing to the former is distasteful, to say the least.

[1] https://citylimits.org/2020/06/09/how-widespread-was-violenc...

ui4jd73bdj• 5 years ago

To me the comparison is very accurate. On both occasions there were mostly peaceful protests and some opportunist. The fact that you call one a protest and another a riot is quite telling of your bias.

zepto5• 5 years ago

I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior;

No, you witnessed a tiny portion of the protests.

I personally know of business owners whose businesses were looted, literally just local store owners.

eric_b• 5 years ago

Well I can assure you the protesters in Minneapolis were violent, destructive, and I personally saw hundreds of protesters looting stores, breaking ATMs, smashing windows etc. etc. Hell, the protesters even burned down the police precinct.

The riots in Minneapolis were worse by every metric than Jan 6. And in some cases orders of magnitude (cost of damage, for one). And I'll tell you what else - a lot more people are going to jail for the Jan 6 riots than the Minneapolis ones.

walrus012• 5 years ago

"Manhattan was ransacked" is total hyperbole and absurd. The whole island of Manhattan was ransacked? Of what? When, exactly? You know Manhattan is a really big place, right? Have you been there?

As to the "letting up on drug prosecutions", in the Reagan-esque war on drugs, the Drugs won that war a long time ago. Maybe it's time to start treating serious drug addiction (meth, coke, heroin, etc) as a mental health crisis instead. Turns out that it actually costs a lot of money each year to keep a person incarcerated, and when they get turned loose back into society without addressing the underlying metal health and addiction issues, it just repeats in a loop.

adam_arthur6• 5 years ago

Pretty easy to Google images of retail in Manhattan. Huge percentage of stores were vandalized and had their goods stolen.

Here you go: https://www.google.com/search?q=manhattan+2020+protest+retai...

There was effectively no police response for the first few days and each night looting got worse. Eventually the police mobilized and normalized the situation

jlmorton• 5 years ago

Given the massive and disproportionate police response in DC to the protests over the summer, I find it extremely puzzling how you could conclude anyone would see that very large response as a green light for a protest, let alone storming the Capitol.

BoorishBears4• 5 years ago

- Near unprecedented unemployment after (mis)handling of a global pandemic

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/11/unemploymen...

- K shaped recovery driving near unprecedented acceleration of wealth inequality

https://www.businessinsider.com/k-shaped-recovery-definition

- Raging mental health crisis bearing down on an already overwhelmed medical system

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/16/well/mental-h...

- Raging drug crisis also raging on concurrently

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/wk/ane/2017/00000125/...

- Clogged supply chain resulting in unprecedented amounts of vulnerable goods

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supply-chain-issues-cargo-theft...

I could keep going, but all of this and you think... protests caused this?

You saying "Manhattan was ransacked" is hilarious, I live in Brooklyn, next stop after Barclay Center, where global news networks were painting a picture of a warzone using an overturned car...

Almost every person who marched at Barclay went past my apartment and you know what the damage was? The police removed the trash cans on my street in anticipation, so for a good two weeks afterwards there was trash everywhere as people just dumped it in the street instead.

Oh yeah, and some businesses took way too long removing their plywood defenses despite 0 signs they were actually tested.

Actually one cool story literally steps from that burning car was those same protestors stopping would-be rioters from breaking into stores...

Seriously, we need to drop this narrative that the iron fist of the law is what would stop this.

So many people trying to run interference by pointing the finger at "defund the police" chants... is the only thing stopping you from stealing from a train the idea the police might catch you?

Criminals are criminals, they don't respect the rule of law so you're not going to get them by sprinkling more agents of the law to crack down on people.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001112871038226...

(Note the author here, Gary Kleck, this is someone who's practically a patron saint of tough-on-crime proponents after his work on DGU. And even his study can't seriously back the claim.)

Now you can try jailing all the criminals of course, and just keep growing your jails until you've exhausted the sources of crime...

But even with the harshest prosecutors, eventually these people need to leave. If our prisons were about reform it'd be one thing, but crime is rampant is our prison system.

So all you're doing is sticking criminals in an incubator while screwing over the communities they're from and setting the next generation of criminals in motion...

x86_64Ubuntu• 5 years ago

Linking all of this to the War On Drugs losing the wind in it's sails is a Reaganesque leap. We've had broken windows policy, all it's done is rope a lot of black and hispanic people into the system after manufacturing crimes through the War On Drugs.

sd8f9iu• 5 years ago

Manhattan was not "ransacked" last summer. You clearly don't live in one of these American cities. The overwhelming majority of the protests were peaceful [1].

Your claim that an attempted coup was somehow spurned by protests relating to the extrajudicial killing of black men is a rather bold one to make with absolutely no supplied evidence. I suppose finding cause in the drastic uptick of far-right violence [2] you have conveniently omitted, which would serve as a much better basis for the "broken window theory", is too easy of a conclusion to make. As is finding cause in the president quite literally inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on the basis of false claims of election fraud. No, it's those protesters!

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

cjbgkagh6• 5 years ago

You’d think that all the empty packages on the ground would be a clue that there is package theft going on and that they should do something about it. Like avoid stopping in those areas, organize security, something. USPS recently lost my package in transit through LA, given the timing it seems likely it was stolen in one of these raids.

jevoten2• 5 years ago

Like avoid stopping in those areas

That may be illegal due to various anti-discrimination laws:

But Free and other riders were baffled over proposed legislation that would lower mandatory penalties for taxi drivers who refuse to pick up certain passengers, or turn down requests to take passengers to a specific destination.

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-fines-...

EdwinRobbins2• 5 years ago

These are freight trains, so unlikely to fall under such laws.

cjbgkagh6• 5 years ago

I figured cargo was separate to passenger. I assume they have their reasons to stop, like making way for traffic, or waiting for more cargo. Just wish they’d prioritize alternative solutions. At this stage I’m going to have to send packages by air instead. A little harder to hijack.

ip262• 5 years ago

Never taken cabs in New York, but that seems insane. How can cabbies be legally compelled to take fares e.g. somewhere they fear for their own safety, or on a route that will lose them money?

EdwinRobbins2• 5 years ago

I think they are forced to transit these areas. Only so many rail lines that exist and they have to slow down due to practicalities of congestion at freight and trainyards which the low speed makes them vulnerable to being boarded.

asdff8• 5 years ago

Especially given that its the port of LA we are talking about that these trains are traveling to and from for the most part. Most goods from Asia in this continent have come through that port.

Justin_K• 5 years ago

They have been making arrests but the D.A. releases on $0 bail the next day. So theses criminals just go right back at it.

ameister144• 5 years ago

Until they are convicted, sure - the problem with cash bail is of course that it's a 3:1 ratio of unconvicted to convicted people in jail at any given time and it massively disproportionately affects the poor. The average person unable to make bail has a salary of around 14k; the average bail is set at $10,000.

You're a retail worker making 26k a year. You're arrested, and can't come up with $1,000 to get a bond, so you stay in jail for a couple of weeks, lose your job and get evicted. Now the prosecutor comes to you with a choice: take a plea deal and get out now with time served or go to court - the court date is of course in a month and you'll have to stay in jail over that period.

Innocent until proven guilty matters.

sudosysgen• 5 years ago

That's not how it works. They're going to have bail and will probably pay it no matter what. People shouldn't be imprisoned until their trial outside exceptional circumstances. Stealing packages doesn't qualify.

gruez4• 5 years ago

they should do something about it. Like avoid stopping in those areas, organize security, something

"UP considering rerouting it’s trains out of LA county. UP asks DA to be harder on theives. Says they’re back out on the tracks a day after released"

https://twitter.com/CBSLAKristine/status/1482115852216385538

cjbgkagh6• 5 years ago

Thanks, I guess the wheels are turning. My comment was facetious, clearly they know, I just wish the people involved given the evidence would be able to act faster and more decisively.

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

https://nitter.kavin.rocks/CBSLAKristine/status/148211585221...

russellbeattie• 5 years ago

This stuff is a temporary problem caused by the backlog of shipping containers, giving an opportunity for some the less fortunate in L.A. to take advantage of the stopped trains. As soon as things are moving more smoothly again, the issue will go away.

This isn't indicative of society's collapse, nor of the anti-work masses rising up, nor even of a catastrophic government failure. It does point out once again that California has an untenable disparity of wealth and we need to continue to work on fixing that problem.

aemreunal• 5 years ago

https://archive.fo/xwppc

sha256sum2• 5 years ago

Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California’s role as a hub for the movement of goods.
Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County

Both e-commerce and LA’s status as a hub are established. So why the increase now? I didn’t see a mention of economic realities driving crime, aside from the increased presence of homeless camps, such as skyrocketing costs of everything.

Means: your new home in California being a tent or car by the railway tracks

Motive: money.

Opportunity: unguarded rails and bottlenecked supply chain

America’s problems, especially the tragic amount of homelessness in CA, are becoming a lot harder to hide.

oliv__• 5 years ago

Could it be a problem with policies rather than the country's structural failure you imply?

LA alone dedicated close to $1B to fight homelessness in 2021! [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989015659/la-dedicates-1-bill...

sha256sum2• 5 years ago

I’m implying that people don’t resort to theft when they can afford food, housing, medical care, and that the solution is probably a lot more complex than just throwing money at one symptom of deeper problems.

Cycl0ps• 5 years ago

"SCOTT: Yeah. Well, you know, it's not just an issue of money; it's also about spending it well. I've talked to many homeless advocates who have been in this world for decades who argue that city officials misspending, even wasting, resources that they do have over the years is a big part of what has gotten LA to this point, with more than 40,000 people homeless on its streets."

at $25'000 per capita we should be seeing some improvements, but it's hard to know how much of that has disappeared to 'administration fees'. Also the article talks about how the main push for this was creation of affordable housing, that has a long lead time and with material shortages I would be surprised to find any new units built last year.

Tiktaalik2• 5 years ago

$1B doesn't sound like a very large number. Google says there's 63,706 homeless.

If LA for example is needing to build new low income housing for even a small part of that 63k number, well with spiking construction and land costs, that's going to be well more than $1B

asdff8• 5 years ago

Organized crime has been taking advantage of an opportunity created by rising e commerce and a DA office that has been unwilling to prosecute a lot of petty crimes:

"In a letter to Dist. Atty. George Gascón, Union Pacific’s Guerrero estimated that more than 100 people have been arrested but they “boast to our officers that charges will be pled down.” "

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-16/rail-the...

hourislate• 5 years ago

Is this happening in any Red States? I've not heard of these kinds of issues in Texas or Florida etc. Is it just in NY and California and some other Blue states?

awb5• 5 years ago

Not sure how much you can conclude based on one city. You’d need per capita package loss data on dozens of cities while also accounting for package volume per city.

finiteseries• 5 years ago

It’s 90% Chicago & LA 90% of the time, historically.

There are two ports where consumer products enter the United States from the ocean/Asia: LA, and to a much lesser degree Seattle. That’s it.

Both essentially lead directly to Chicago from the west coast, with very little inbetween.

Eg Texas freight lines are for transporting things like animal feed and crushed gravel to export terminals with little in the way of hubs. Florida isn’t significant and its port capacity is minuscule, repeat for most of the country.

Massive (unguarded) consumer products hub x population, Chicago is the only other qualifier, where rail theft is unsurprisingly also a constant issue.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Easy to figure out what's going on here. Online shopping has increased dramatically, but the amount of security around packages hasn't increased proportionally. Perhaps packages are harder to secure than retail stores, so we need a more than proportional increase.

labrador• 5 years ago

This is one of those flashy problems that criminals come up with and then gets solved. Find an exploit, patch the exploit. I find it humorous because it give Republicans like Megan McCain to bloviate about what a shit hole California is. I'm writing from there now. Everything is fine.

paul7986• 5 years ago

Another reason that makes California look like not a great place to live from the sky high homelessness (i experienced that first hand WoW and in 2013) to this to the landslides, earthquakes, raging annual destructive forest fires, sky high cost of real estate... am i missing something (oh Google blatantly stealing from Sonos to MIT students)... im sure there's more.

I guess the good is the nice weather and beaches... what am i missing in terms of good?

Havoc• 5 years ago

Deja vu

Wasn't this a twitter thread like a week ago?

lsy2• 5 years ago

This is a great case study in how news media manufactures hysteria over commonplace occurrences. A reporter "keeps hearing of train burglaries on the scanner" and goes to take pictures, then tweets them. What did the location look like before? We don't know. Are the reports on the scanner more common? Also not discussed.

The tweets prompt reporters to start calling the usual suspects: The company experiencing losses gives one misleading comparison to locked-down 2020 and an absolute figure for losses rather than a relative comparison over time. That makes sense, because they want government and cops to step in so they don't have to cover it. Next up the reporters call LAPD, who have a political motive to imply that the problem is worse than ever, to justify increased jurisdiction and funding.

And that's… pretty much where it ends. Nobody bothers to look back to 2019 or before; nobody bothers to see whether a higher percentage of rail cars are looted, or whether there are now more rail cars and online shopping in total; nobody bothers to analyze whether the increased wait times or any other factor are in play. I would love to actually understand this issue, but the article is designed to shock me with photos of debris and make me feel as if anarchy has descended upon the streets of Los Angeles, a fear-based reaction that apparently many HN commenters are susceptible to. It's dismaying and ultimately unsatisfying to read when the only goal is to drive clicks and engagement.

gruez4• 5 years ago

What did the location look like before? We don't know.

I'm going to go on a limb and say that the tracks being absolutely covered in discarded envelopes isn't normal.

lsy2• 5 years ago

Good reporting involves investigation, not assuming that the first time you’re seeing something is the first time anyone is seeing it. If you’ve gone anywhere near railroad tracks in industrial parts of Los Angeles in the past decade, you’ve seen things that are hard to believe are happening, but have indeed been commonplace for years. I’m not asserting this mess is commonplace or isn’t, but it would be great if the reporter bothered to investigate whether it was, so that readers have context.

awb5• 5 years ago

Pictures are worth way more than 1k words.

The photos are disturbing and a crime by definition is an attack on our social structure and shouldn’t be ignored.

But to put it in context, the rail company is reporting $5M in losses from theft last year, on $5.56B in revenue, or 0.1% of revenue. Not ideal but not massive either.

However, we don’t have pictures of white collar crime, just stats: https://techjury.net/blog/white-collar-crime-statistics/

In 2021:

$56 billion were lost to white-collar crimes.
Only 3% of federal prosecutions annually are for white-collar crimes.
California lost $400.9 million to fraud.
Cybercrime damage cost is said to reach $6 trillion annually in 2021.

Add to that the government corruption or wasteful spending of your choice.

Imagine if these white collar criminals broke a window or littered packages during their crimes.

While it’s easy to have a visceral reaction to photos of crimes, let’s not forget the unseen crimes that also affect us.

And for those that are worried these crimes are going unpunished, 100 people have been arrested to date per the article.

tempnow9872• 5 years ago

It's interesting watching to DOJ chase facebook and basically ignore cybercrime. I include all the tech support and other scams that hit the elderly etc. Money mules, no enforcement there either.

ywain• 5 years ago

A lot of these scams originate from outside the US though, so presumably it's a lot more difficult for the DOJ to go after them.

bryanlarsen• 5 years ago

It's mostly the FTC chasing Facebook.

heavyset_go4• 5 years ago

DOJ doesn't have jurisdiction outside of the US, but scammers are routinely extradited to the US to face criminal prosecution for their cybercrimes, and the US works in tandem with foreign governments to catch those criminals.

flyinglizard4• 5 years ago

There's no violence to be seen in white collar crime. There's no single image that says "this is a society in decay, next they're coming for you" like those images from the train tracks. Obviously the problem is not an objective one (I'm sure USPS loses more mail a day than lost to train robbery in a year), it's one of trust in law and order.

gfdgfdgfdgf2• 5 years ago

The losses may not be a lot to the company but theft in general is having an effect on inflation which affects all of us.

gruez4• 5 years ago

But to put it in context, the rail company is reporting $5M in losses from theft last year, on $5.56B in revenue, or 0.1% of revenue. Not ideal but not massive either.

No, that's what they said. The exact quote was "the increase in crime cost the company at least $5 million last year" (emphasis mine)

> Cybercrime damage cost is said to reach $6 trillion annually in 2021.

But US GDP is only 20.94 trillion. You're saying that the US is losing more than a quarter of its GDP to "Cybercrime damage"? I feel like the numbers you presented might be a bit inflated.

awb5• 5 years ago

$6T is globally I believe

scarab92• 5 years ago

Often carriers aren't responsible for lost goods. It's the shippers responsibility to purchase insurance for the items they send. It's a massive conflict if interest because the carrier has little incentive to improve security because they are not directly bearing the cost of lost or damages goods.

heavyset_go4• 5 years ago

Largest type of theft in the US is wage theft[1]. Workers lose billions every year to wage theft[2].

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3916088

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

Civil asset forfeiture also ranks quite high, and above most property theft.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/s...

(I'm trying to recall / find a story which showed both the increase in seizures and a comparison with larceny / theft / burglary / robbery, which I recall being dwarfe by CAF.)

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

Pictures show.

Words explain.

Both are useful for those purposes.

Note that the railroad may have insurance on losses. If that $5m is post-insurance payouts, then it would understate property losses. There's also the losses due to missed deliveries, disrupted schedules, etc. (UP notes this itself in the letter shared here: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/CBSLAKristine/status/148211585221...)

Your points on white collar crime are well made. That's activity that performs poorly on camera.

azinman2• 5 years ago

Why the whataboutism?

awb5• 5 years ago

All crime is bad, just commenting on how the imagery gets our attention more than the dollar amount does.

dev360• 5 years ago

I would venture to term it apologism

dallashoxton• 5 years ago

This seems like whataboutism to me. It's possible to enforce the law against more than one type of crime, actually.

asdff8• 5 years ago

They really are going unpunished though even if they are being arrested:

"Union Pacific said last month in a letter to the Los Angeles District Attorney that it saw a 160% year-over-year increase in theft in LA county. The company claims that a December 2020 special directive issued by District Attorney George Gascón that changed how low-level offenses are prosecuted has contributed to the uptick.

Union Pacific said in its letter that in the last three months of the year it made over 100 arrests of "active criminals vandalizing our trains" in partnership with the LA police department and Los Angeles Sherriff department. But Union Pacific, which has its own police department with jurisdiction over the 32,000 miles of tracks it owns, said that even as it has expanded its security resources and partnered more closely with local law enforcement, the problem isn't going away. After being arrested individuals are released from custody within 24 hours, it said."

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-t...

dreen• 5 years ago

The title made me think this is about theft of actual rail tracks, which is a practice not unheard of in many parts of the world.

selimthegrim2• 5 years ago

e.g. Johannesburg commuter rail in SA

jijji2• 5 years ago

Railroad theft sounds like a federal crime, the district attorney is partly to blame if they are charging these people under state trespassing laws instead of federal railroad laws [0]

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1991

72736379• 5 years ago

I'm no lawyer but wouldn't the Federal District Attorney need to charge them, not the City District Attorney? In other words, I don't think the City DA has the power to charge people under federal statutes, I imagine only federal DA's do.

jijji2• 5 years ago

true

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

Things like these are omens of what is to come if inequality continues to grow. It starts as high value items and ends with things like clothing, food, and other necessities. The rich get angry at the unreliable shipping so it's all done with armed guards. The transformation is complete (it arguably already is) when people are routinely killed over necessities for survival.

The future looks bleak and this will spill over and affect everyone. Or maybe I just have a pessimistic and wild imagination.

monkeybutton2• 5 years ago

The optimist in me says that the elite have learned from the past and is consciously trying to avoid a "Let them eat cake" moment. The pessimist in me says that if your constantly trying to maximize share of wealth, you will inevitably go too far, even unintentionally, and trigger upheaval.

Rail Theft Soars in California

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