The most extreme type of modern train theft occurs when thieves cut the air-compression brake hoses that run between train cars, thereby triggering an emergency braking system. When that happens, the engineer stays in the cab and the conductor walks the length of the stopped train, trying to locate the source of the problem. (Thieves can also stop a train by decoupling some of its cars.) Of course, if a train is miles long, that walk takes a while. In the meantime, the pilferers unload.
Way more brazen than I had imagined. I was foolishly just thinking these were people sneaking into train yards at night.
Most of it is much more opportunistic than that example.
> "But over the course of the task force’s existence, which lasted nearly a year, only 34 of the roughly 700 people arrested or cited for stealing from trains were part of these organized crews. Many more were just passers-by or unhoused people living near the tracks in R.V.s or makeshift structures who just happened to pick up fallen boxes."
It's just one datapoint, but under 5% of the thefts this specific taskforce identified were perpretrated by organized groups. Most were essentially opportunistic thefts by individuals on the margins of society.
Careful, there: 5% of the people arrested or cited. That is not the same as 5% of the thefts (one would expect the professionals do more than their share of the thieving) or even 5% of the thieves (one might believe that pros are less likely to get caught).
This is such a great example of lying with statistics. I know that it was not deliberate, which is why the lie is so effective. Even the teller believes it to be true.
Although I never underestimate human stupidity or laziness for misrepresentation of numbers/statistics/etc, it's usually some poor SME that writes the report, and then the Manager sees the "60%", freaks out, asks the SME to rewrite making it softer, and thus the truth is (given a serious effort to be hidden).
I've been writing audit, security, and other reports a big part of my life. I tend to write numbers in the form of "5 out of 100 X (5%) examined, regarding the Y process, failed due to..". It freaks out anyone who reads my reports, but, hey, they pay me for accuracy and truth. Once I send it (and it's 'untouched' on my Sent Items), they can do whatever they want with it, as long as they put THEIR names & signatures in the bottom if they change a single word (sorry for the cynicism but there exists no corporate hill that I want to die on) - also you never know when a regulator will come back 6.5 years later and ask about THAT job scheduler that was transferring £€$5bn per day between X-system and Y-system.
I cannot recount the AMOUNT of times my report has 'softer' writing in the end, and it's their prerogative. But "it's not deliberate"????? No way in hell!!! Manager --> Director --> C-suite --> Audit Committee --> Regulator. EVERYONE will change a couple of words, and instead of a dumpster fire (Red) it will end up being Yellow.
Maybe there should be official guidelines for stats communication that require a certain level of legalise-like specify. No more "there is no evidence for.." of the sci world.
The phrase "who just happened to pick up fallen boxes" suggests the boxes had already left the train at that point? Not the same as entering the train.
I expect members of organize gangs do want to not admit to being members of such gangs. I would expect to hear a slurred version of "I just wanted something and I saw a box. I'm homeless. I don't have a name. They never told me when I was born. I didn't grow up like you did."
Yep, much harder to get caught if you have a team monitoring for police activity and a ready get away car and they know where to hit with the highest response times.
> It's still accurate in the sense of proximate cause
Its not, though.
> Each theft event is a singular event composed of one or possibly multiple items being stolen.
Even if you ignore that the arrest rate likely isn't consistent between the two groups, that doesn't make the arrest proportion “accurate in the sense of oroxinate cause” unless you assume also that the organized vs. disorganized arrested parties are responsible for the same number of theft events per individual.
All the proportion of individuals arrested in the theft ring vs. not actually tells you is the proportion if individuals areested. It doesn't tell you the proportion of “theft events” or the proportion of $ valie of theft or anything else.
They catch the vultures who arrive at the scene when the lions who did the hunting are gone.
Perhaps some of what is happening is truly done by opportunistic amateurs, but the observation voted would also be perfectly consistent with a ground truth where every single case was done by an organized group.
If that box is sealed, it has someone else's address on it and you make no effort to return it to them, then you are inarguably a thief. It's no different to taking a parcel from someone's porch.
Yes. The fact that property is unguarded doesn't render it free to any random person. You can legitimately safeguard something, such as moving it off the road, but once you open the box or take the box home, you are a thief. And if the box is sitting on railroad property, you are likely guilty of attempted theft as soon as you pick it up. Also trespassing.
What you say is not true in the slightest. In a lot of the US jurisdictions you can keep what you found provided you report it to the authorities and nobody claims it in some time frame. In other cases you can take what you found if you found it on your land etc. Lots of various laws apply, depending where you live and what exactly you found. If it was likely to be intentionally left where you found it to be later picked up again, or if it was intentionally abandoned etc.
You can even take legal ownership of land that you and the authorities know is not yours provided you use it long enough (adverse possession) and you think a random box left by the side of the road is somehow untouchable?
You have some nerve to equivocate between an anonymous object bearing no clues as to its ownership and a box with an address label on it signifying exactly to whom the parcel belongs. How do you blame an owner who likely lives hundreds if not thousands of miles away for not contacting every police precinct along the shipping path instead of expecting someone who finds the parcel to simply return it to the shipping company so that they can finish the job?
A more generous quote of GP comment provides the answer:
> provided you report it to the authorities and nobody claims it in some time frame
One would expect that "report it to the authorities" covers that problem. The authorities will take care of either contacting the shipping company and letting them know, instructing you on how to do it yourself, or even take possession of the package to return it themselves.
If you find an object with no obvious owner, you either leave it where it lies, or you report it by turning it in somewhere. To the business where you found it, or the Lost & Found department of the transit authority, or the police if all else fails.
I don't see anyone calling up the police to say, "Hi, I found <item> and I'll keep it until someone comes over here to claim it!" because the only people coming over will be the police themselves.
Every place with a Lost & Found service, and the police, regularly liquidate the unclaimed property. You can find lists and auctions on your civic website if they're selling the stuff. They may also donate it to charity or destroy it.
The police or anyone else are not going to stick a tag on a box with your name and number so you can come to claim it after the grace period elapses. That's not how claiming stuff works.
If a package falls off a truck in front of your house you can pick it up and inform the authorities, who'll in turn inform the owner.
If the police or owner care enough to pick it up they can have it, but presumably there's cases where they can't be bothered, then it becomes abandoned property and you can keep it.
Just because you find abandoned property you don't need to go out of your way to mail it to the owner, just inform them and they can come to you.
The "why not just leave it?" aspect of this is easily defended, if the package e.g. contains electronics they'd be damaged by exposure to the elements.
1. Thieves stop a train somehow, spill containers for distraction, run away with valuables.
2. Idiots see stuff lying on the ground and go pick it up causing chaos and confusion.
3. Police arrest some of the idiots. Win win. Thieves go away free and police can claim they arrested some people. This also pads their numbers. Politicians can pretend they were not asleep at the wheel with organized crime under their nose because look only 5% of arrests were organized crime. All we needed to do is arrest more homeless people.
Not sure if this is same in US, but where I am the railway tracks and a fair bit of land alongside it it the property of the railway and usually appropriately fenced and signposted. A dropped or fallen parcel is highly likely to be located on that land and thus not public.
I'd say an anonymous parcel on private land is the concern of the landowner, even with a right-of-way.
In my moral view, yes you are if you do not make at least a minimal effort to locate the properties true owner. For example, calling the phone number written on the outside of the box.
The difference in the road and a train track is one of public and private property. The train track is not public property and even walking down it can lead to an arrest for trespassing, much less picking up boxes and carrying them off.
That particular distinction doesn't really matter: If I drop my wallet in the street and someone finds it and takes all my cash, that's theft regardless of whether it landed on the public road or a short distance away on a private driveway. (Also, I don't think anyone would consider it "finders keepers" if the thief started using the credit-cards!)
So it's theft either way, but the private-ness of the zone may mean additional crimes are getting committed, such as trespassing and/or burglary. (Or worse variations of the same crime, depending on how the laws are written.)
What is practiced by law enforcement and the judicial system.
So while dropping your wallet in the street may technically be a crime, the idea that law enforcement is going to go about seeking justice for the infraction is pretty much laughable in the vast majority of situations unless there is a large amount of corroborating evidence.
>(Also, I don't think anyone would consider it "finders keepers" if the thief started using the credit-cards!)
I mean, that is its own separate crime, and the only one likely to be punished as there is a direct evidence chain where you're accessing an account without permission and performing the act of theft.
You are wrong. In most jurisdictions theft is defined as taking something away from the legal owner. If what you said was true then taking away your own property from the thief who stole it would also be a theft.
No, that's now the scenario the parent poster gave: They never even suggested that the Wallet-Taker was somehow the true legal owner of the cash!
All they said is that the other person, Wallet-Dropper, is something less than the prima facie legal owner. This permits several possibilities, but in every case Wallet-Taker still seems to be doing something wrong:
1. If Wallet-Dropper is a thief, then Wallet-Taker is just a thief stealing from a thief.
2. If Wallet-Dropper is the well-meaning temporary custodian of unclaimed property that they cannot (yet) claim as their own, then Wallet-Taker is a thief, taking to deprive the legal owner (wherever they are) of their property.
3. If Wallet-Dropper is the new legal owner of the discovered cash, that's theft by Wallet-Taker no matter how much you think Wallet-Dropper "didn't really earn it."
Anybody who believes this is being foolish. Packages don't just "fall off" of boxcars. Those cars aren't open topped, the cardboard packages would be ruined by the weather if they were. The only way for a package to fall off a train is if somebody deliberately breaks into the train cars with those packages, and probably starts throwing the packages off the train.
The fact that they couldn't charge most people with that only highlights the inadequacy of their enforcement.
I could also see that people performing the crime might be unhoused, what are they going to do with 20 blenders they just stole? They will go to some organized group and sell the loot for some cash.
So on paper it doesn’t appear organized in practice it’s sort of is. If there is no one buying the 20 blenders, it’s not worth bothering jumping on a train for them.
Wrong interpretation. Others already pointed out the volume of items stolen but it I don't think that statistic points out who perpetrated the original crime. It makes sense, only a handful of individuals would be the ones break the train, anyone else around would certainly jump in the action.
Train robberies were mostly stopped via private security (the Pinkertons, as one notorious example) well before the post-WWII boom that you're referencing. It was violent and bloody, but alas the train robberies did stop.
Many porch pirates have decent jobs and plenty of money. They do it because they're greedy, it's easy and the penalties for getting caught are light. We need to revise our criminal code to apply harsher penalties to this kind of behavior. Porch piracy isn't a crime of 'passion', the people who do it presently think that the rewards are worth the risks and this can be fixed by escalating the risks.
> We need to revise our criminal code to apply harsher penalties to this kind of behavior.
We'd have to be careful about that since research shows that past a certain point harsher penalties do not act as a deterrent. It might be that being a little bit harsher improves the situation, but the tendency is the US is to go way overboard to the point that the US locks up more of its citizens than any other nation on Earth, and even an arrest is enough to cause someone to lose their job while a conviction can cause someone to because virtually unemployable for the rest of their lives.
It might be better to focus on making it more likely that people are caught at all for stealing packages than increasing punishments for the ones that do get caught.
Being caught is the problem. If there's a 100% chance of getting caught, like grabbing the box while the owner is right there talking to a police officer, that deters this kind of crime
Seems like something reasonable like a few months in jail would very quickly solve this. It would not be too harsh punishment to stop this sort of theft.
Wage theft is the largest theft category by value (withheld wages, illegally docked wages, etc.) - and from studies it is carried out pretty universally across the country. Why might that be? Why is it when people think of theft, their first thought it's the business person or manager that come to mind as the people we should be going after for theft?
Quote: Workers in the US have an estimated $50bn-plus stolen from them every year
Because it's more ambiguous, being based on estimations. The situation in the article sounds like a breach of contract rather than criminal, who should be "going after" them?
Says a lot that we treat theft from a workers wages as 'just contractual' - let's not get the police involved. If that same worker stole from the till?
You're looking at the wrong statistic. Inequality is the issue. There are plenty of people living hand to mouth who don't fall in the definition of poverty.
Ah yeah, wealth inequality. E.g. lots of rich bastards own megayachts and I don't, therefore this justifies me stealing packages from other common people who also don't own megayachts.
These people aren't Robin Hood, stop excusing their criminal behavior.
People can reasonably be excused for theft when they are trying to meet their needs. Somebody who steals because they're at the poverty line and are trying to keep a roof over their head and food on their children's plate deserves sympathy.
But when people have their needs met, are above the poverty line with a decent job that pays the bills, and they still steal because "inequality" makes them jealous and greedy, they don't deserve sympathy. Most people in such a condition don't become theives, they either content themselves with what they have or they try to better their condition through some honest means, like seeking better job training or political advocacy for social change. The ones who respond by turning to crime (usually targetting other common people living in similar conditions as themselves) are antisocials who need to have the book thrown at them. The reason they're stealing packages instead of robbing banks or spending their time looking for a better job is because porch theft is easy and low risk. If penalties and enforcement were increased, theft rates would drop.
So, are people like animals that start going feral when they see someone in a way better status than they are? If that's the case, and this article suggests there is psychological evidence to support it, it poses a serious problem for the whole society. Are we really going to assign a maximum value to people's wealth?
It's an issue because humans are humans. E.g. "The link between economic inequality and both property crime and violent crime is well established" https://equalitytrust.org.uk/crime
That's a nice theory, except most people don't turn petty thief just because billionaires exist. These thieves aren't class warfare warriors, no matter how much you wish it. They're greedy degenerates who don't care about others. Being an asshole isn't the exclusive domain of the rich.
I don't, and who ever does raises the poverty threshold over time.
Today's first world borderline poor can enjoy things (hot water, variety of food, healthcare, transportation) that only nobles could afford mere 150 years ago.
Are you suggesting that the crime in question is driven by the fact that some 5000km away there are now fewer poor? Yes, there are countries with less poverty than the US. You might want to check out what else they have less of.
I'm suggesting the standard of poverty even when raised over time should still pay heed to worldwide economic levels. Hence, I ask you how you define (or pedantically, whose definition you take) when you talk about poverty.
US Census Bureau. Worldwide economic levels are such that the entire US population are filthy rich. Basically you're arguing as per above in this thread, that the fact that there are billionaires with private planes is somehow the reason for people to steal more.
Crime rates like that measure convictions, don't they? If police stop convicting for certain things (which has been a decades long trend), crime rates will go down.
IMO the only clear window into this are victim surveys.
>Crime rates like that measure convictions, don't they?
A look at the link[0] provided by GP provides the source[1] of the data, and AFAICT, both UCR and NIBRS statistics reflect reported crimes, not convictions.
So, no they don't. But feel free to ignore the actual data sources if they don't fit with your beliefs. Lots of people seem to do that. It makes life so much simpler, no?
A fair point. And thank you for your observation.[0]
However, GP made an assumption that wasn't supported by, well, anything in anyone's posts or any of the supporting data in an (apparent) attempt to justify their point of view.
I just said the quiet part out loud and gave GP license to continue using unsupported assumptions to justify their views.
If pointing that out is considered inappropriate by some, then so be it.
[0] I want to clarify that I really do appreciate your comment and am absolutely not being snarky or sarcastic when I say so.
Reported crime suffers from the same issue. Have you lived in a place where you need to report crimes, perhaps happening to you, and the police straight up tell you they probably won't response? I have, and you basically don't bother reporting them anymore. So again, officially, the crime did not happen.
>Have you lived in a place where you need to report crimes, perhaps happening to you, and the police straight up tell you they probably won't response?
Sorry to be a bit disjointed in my replies here, but I'm flabbergasted.
Especially since WRT property crime (which is what we're discussing here), filing an insurance claim requires providing access to an actual police report that can be provided (by the police) to the insurance company in order to get your claim processed.
Again, please let us know which jurisdiction(s) (and please, be specific) it is that refuses to take reports of property crime. Thanks!
Has it changed form at the same time, i.e kids used to shoplift loads of merchandise from the mall which is invisible to me outside of the estimated markup for loss on the product.
Now we have more brazen smash and grabs with big hauls, idiots with trash bags an calculators being posted on social media, and porch pirates for which we see countless Ring videos?
People love to imagine that chaos and socipathy are our natural state, and compassion and enlightened organization are fantasies, but that was never true:
We evolved, beginning seven million years ago, from species that were already highly sociable and live naturally, gregariously, and peacefully in groups of dozens or even hundreds. Chaos and sociopathy are illnesses.
On top of that, we have the intelligence to reason about what works better (let's use it).
> species that were already highly sociable and live naturally, gregariously, and peacefully in groups of dozens or even hundreds.
I live in a village of hundreds. We live gregariously and peacefully. But how about those people living in cities whose populations exceed the entire protohuman population?
And if you have a source stating authoritatively how society functioned seven million years ago, as we parted evolutionary ways with the baboons and chimpanzees, I would love to read it.
>I live in a village of hundreds. We live gregariously and peacefully. But how about those people living in cities whose populations exceed the entire protohuman population?
I live in a city of almost nine million. Which far exceeds such a population, and not of proto-humans, but of fully modern ones (assuming the Toba Catastrophe Theory[0] is correct). As such, it's a pretty good bet that those few thousand who survived such a bottleneck 50-75k years ago lived similar lives (albeit with less technology) as we do today.
And while we do have some issues with anti-social behavior (which, I'm sure, is present in your village on a much smaller scale -- and only because it's a much smaller population) in my city of almost nine million, on the whole people are cooperative, supportive and pro-social.
If you don't like cities, that's fine -- don't live in one. But while Dunbar's Number[1] isn't applicable in my city, for the most part, we live pretty good lives.
> how about those people living in cities whose populations exceed the entire protohuman population?
How about it? I spend lots of time in cities; they are generally peaceful, gregarious and friendly.
> if you have a source stating authoritatively how society functioned seven million years ago, as we parted evolutionary ways with the baboons and chimpanzees, I would love to read it.
Many of those that the right-wing news likes to promote as dangerous, chaotic, etc. They are wonderful; it's a great time to be in cities. Crime is very low, they are buzzing with energy. People are really missing out because of all the politicization.
> We evolved, beginning seven million years ago, from species that were already highly sociable and live naturally, gregariously, and peacefully in groups of dozens or even hundreds.
I take issue with "peacefully".
Hunter gatherer adult violent death rates are often estimated at 2% to 10% (googling seems to confirm my memory here). While people in developed countries have around 0.01% violent death rates.
My favorite Wild West movie scenes are the ones where the cowboys meet back to back at high noon, take 10 paces, turn around, and yell "Bang" then one passes out.
It is worth saying that Dodge City, Kansas, was a no-gun zone at one time. Cowboys arriving checked their weapons with the town police, and retrieved them when they left.
You missed the point. He is saying the application of state violence against the outlaws of the wild west using firearms is what caused the decline of outlaws in the wild west.
Although Australia has social welfare, minimum living wage, medicare for those that can't afford private health cover, and lacks large roving gangs of package thieves, etc.
"I don't have what I want so imma throw a tantrum and take it" is how we expect toddlers to behave. When it comes to grown men we should have higher standards in society. Most are perfectly capable of not committing armed robbery even if they aren't rich.
"I have everything I need and more, but despite you asking you can't have it" is how we expect people who never learned how to share to act. When it comes to grown men we should have higher standards in society!
Well, since this is the US, what would be the incremental cost of package delivery if every train car would have an armed person shooting at anything that comes close to the tracks? A semi-automatic rifle and lots of ammo would deter a lot of people from atracking trains.
Not doing avout it anything hurts all the business that either have to refund customers or resend another item at their own expense.
The train companies already know this. They’ve been fighting train robbers since the days of the Wild West.
I don’t know what other train companies are doing but Union Pacific cut a lot of its police force 3 years ago.
If they aren’t trying to hire more police, presumably they did the math and they must be making more money now than before regardless of any business they may now be losing.
There are cases where it is considered justified, although it wouldn't apply to train heists, at least in California [1]. Some have claimed the justification to shoot someone for stealing at night in Texas has a biblical origin [2].
This is people climbing into the cargo cars of incredibly slow moving trains and rummaging through some packages, not putting dynamite on a bridge and blowing it up to force the thing to stop.
I vote for M61s on automatic turrets with movement detection, on every carriage, alternating left-right. Pedestrians shot at railroad crossings is but a small, yet acceptable, price to pay for the safe transport of packages.
As the system will be expensive, it will have to be state-subsidized, of course. At the end of the day, the parcels services are providing an essential service of first necessity, and it would only make sense that everything is done at a national level to ensure they are functioning correctly.
And why stop there? We could also ask defense contractors to design specialized trains. On top of absolute safety, it will have the added benefit of creating good job opportunities!
Or burglary. My understanding is robbery is theft that involves violence or the threat of violence. Burglary is theft that does not involved violence or the threat of violence.
Burglary is entering a property with the intend to commit a crime. Theft is intentionally depriving someone permanently of their property. Robbery is doing so through violence or intimidation.
It would be interesting to see train conductors on electric mountain bikes, with drones scanning each side of the stopped train for damaged or cut air hoses, hotbox bearings, etc. Could save a lot of walking, if the railroad and the union agree.
Some cars are 89 feet long, so every 50 meters is every third car. That's a lot of overhead. Theft would have to be huge for that to be anywhere near realistic.
The reason it’s bad in LA is that Union Pacific “saved” money by firing the defense:
> The Union Pacific Police department has jurisdiction over the 32,000 miles of track Union Pacific owns. Many of these "special agents" used to patrol this now infamous stretch of track. According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
You don’t need the same level of coverage on the thousands of miles of track in deserted rural areas as you do where the trains are frequently stopped in urban areas where millions of people live. As trains have been getting longer to reduce staffing costs they have been leaving them on the tracks rather than in fenced in yards, so those specific areas are where they need security guards.
Or maybe stop having miles long trains (which current crossings and side-rails weren’t really designed for anyway), or stop having only two people operate miles long trains, or… lots of other possible solutions.
So this should be under Offenses Against the Public Safety, Unlawful impairment of operation of railroads, not even telling about thousands of losses for the railroad itself.
> Later, the detectives would look up all the recovered loot on Amazon and tally up its total value, which exceeded the $950 minimum required for a charge of felony grand theft in California. (The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file a felony charge and referred the case to the city attorney’s office, which filed a misdemeanor instead.)
This is something I don't understand. I thought the $950 limit was the limit by which a felony charge had to be filed. But apparently, there's prosecutorial discretion in filing these felony charges even when above the limit? This felt like the biggest demotivators for cops and detectives: they could respond to 911 calls and take someone into custody, and then calculate the value of the stolen goods to make sure it reaches $950, and then just no felony charges afterwards?
The Three Strikes law is one reason. How many people can we actually have in jail/prison for 25 plus years? If someone steals Amazon packages 3 times, should they get 25+ years?
At some point, yes. They are aren't playing by society's rules (committing three felonies) and should be removed. If you have two felonies, perhaps don't rob trains?
Most three strike laws have to do with violent crime though.
> Who gets hurt? Would you consider this train robber a danger to society?
By unjustly appropriating the fruits of other people's labor, thieves make it harder for all honest citizens to support themselves and their families financially. Of course they are a danger to society, and only someone in a position of extreme financial privilege could possibly think otherwise.
Sure, theft is bad. The question is how do we disincentivize it. Risk = punishment * probably of being caught. If the probability of being caught is low then the risk can be justified. If the probability of being caught (and successfully prosecuted) is 1 then even short sentences become effective.
Great, lets starting by jailing everyone who commits wage and hour theft, which exceeds the cost of all theft and robberies combined, but which gets little news coverage because it doesn't have dramatic video footage. IT's logical to start with the biggest thieves, no?
Because prosecutors don't find it sexy, pundits whine about federal enforcement as government overreach, and corporate lawyers often make allegations go away by offering a settlement without an admission of liability.
If you're running numbers you do have to account for the costs of incarceration, too. If 25 year sentences don't actually deter more than 10 year sentences then you're just paying for more prisons for no reason.
I'm saying that the punishment needs to fit the crime. People need rehabilitation and opportunities. Check recidivism rates and ask yourself if the system is working.
> Ruining someone's life over a few Amazon packages makes no sense, ethically or financially.
Heh really? Have you read Les Miserables? If one is hungry, go ask and SOMEONE will give you a loaf of bread (I cannot count the amount of times someone approach me/the queue in a food court of a mall asking for money and I've bought them some nice soup - and they actually sat down and ate it).
Who gives anyone the right to steal something I purchased, and I am expecting it for personal or business purpose? How would you feel if I come to your house every day and steal something - whatever I want and sell it on eBay?
Yes, really. It is not even a point of someone stealing because they are hungry, even if they did it just for the sake of stealing or some shit, it still would not be ethical to kill them because of that.
Essentially, the life of a robber is immeasurably more valuable than your amazon box, so unless they are a threat to human lives, you do not kill them to defend property. Arresting them is fine, but killing because of stealing is a nono.
Other thing would been if the robbers were armed and thus dangerous to the conductor and the like, in those cases, lethal action may be justifiable as a form of self defense.
>At some point, yes. They are aren't playing by society's rules (committing three felonies) and should be removed. If you have two felonies, perhaps don't rob trains?
It's been argued[0] that most of us don't commit three felonies in a lifetime, but three felonies a day.
While that may be somewhat hyperbolic, it also points up something important about our society. If I were you, I wouldn't be so excited about sticking "three time losers" in prison for decades. It could be you -- for what you did yesterday.
People don’t typically get “three strikes” sentences for committing obscure white collar federal felonies. They get them for felonies that people are generally aware of, like armed robbery and domestic violence.
Don’t get caught* committing violent felonies. Harsh consequences don’t actually prevent the offense. There’s an equally important chance of being caught.
Consequences are not harsh if criminals are not caught. The issue is in the lack of enforcement. Punishment for any crime should be inevitable. But proportional to the type of the crime.
Do they? There’s an overwhelming amount of unprosecuted petty crime in my city perpetrated a handful of known individuals. Harsh penalties protect the public from people who get caught. But that’s no consolation when my gas tank gets drained or a window gets busted out to search an empty backpack.
They don't even necessarily protect folks from those that get caught.
We sit there and put folks in jail or prison for an offense, where we might hold them in solitary for months - and if they aren't, they are in a system where people *assume' they are going to get raped by another inmate (it is a common joke, after all).
And then we let them out, put them on probation with a bunch of fees that need paid, a record that makes it difficult to find legal work - especially the sort that will pay bills plus probation - and might exclude them from public housing. And when I say exclude, I mean they might not be able to stay with family for a week if their family lives in public housing.
Harsh penalties do not protect the public. Harsh penalties are the result of a system meant to extract misery, sometimes for fairly minor expenses. If we (Americans) cared about protecting the public, we'd house people, feed them, make it so crimes of desperation are fewer. We'd treat folks well in prison, treat pre-trial folks like they are innocent, and focus on integrating folks into society in ways that few would mind a felon for a neighbor.
Property crime is predominantly driven by poverty / wealth inequality.
I'd like to see you, with a conviction for a nonviolent drug crime and no college degree or tech experience, try to get a job and provide for a family.
The "rules" of the US are intensely stacked against poor people while allowing the wealthy to almost fail upward.
Do you have a solution for this? And consider tyat being poor that does make it ok to steal.
It wouldn’t be that hard to stop emoloyers from asking if you served time and do background checks for this. In theory, you did your time, you’ve paid your debt to society.
I feel like, at leastbin the US, you’re pretty much screwed if you were ever convicted of anything.
I would re-up my forklift cert and go do construction. This would be difficult work, but would keep you gainfully employed with a roof over your head almost anywhere in the United States.
It would not be hard to find a job in construction even with a drug offense and no degree.
It is kind of arbitrary, there's nothing so magical about it. Two or four would be just as good or at least not a whole lot worse; one seems overly harsh, and five seems overly lenient. Social policy is not an exact science, and we make these decisions democratically; most people seem to have a sense that people should get a few chances, but there should be a point at which they get the book thrown at them. Better to try and draw the line in a place that makes sense, and tweak it if necessary, than to be paralysed by indecision because you can't decide exactly where the line should be.
> I am asking by which reasoning we decided on three. If it is just “baseball” then I think we can do better.
If you think we can do better then what's your concrete proposal for doing better. 2? 4? Paying a philosophy department to crank out papers until we spot one we like?
Three seems like a reasonable number. Not too high and not too low. Like a more relaxed version of "fool me once, shame on you...".
I'm surprised by your second line because it seems like you're the one philosophizing. I bet nobody has ever written down a "reason" for three strike policies for criminals/sentencing/etc. It just seems like a reasonable number, and we have the baseball metaphor to back it up.
How are we supposed to answer your question if you're not interested in philosophizing?
> Do you think recidivism should ever result in harsher punishments?
They don’t seem to work so… no?
If you are convicted of a crime the individual offense and circumstances should be considered. Adding more punishment because someone failed to be persuaded by punishment seems ineffective at rehabilitation. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”
Maybe it makes sense to give up on a person and lock them up forever but if we are going to do that we should be honest and thoughtful about it.
“Well baseball” doesn’t seem sophisticated enough to address what should be an exceptional action in a nuanced situation.
> If so, do you think this should be codified in sentencing policy?
This is a good question. I guess my real objection to three strikes is that it seems both arbitrary (still willing to be wrong here but so far it’s just “baseball”) and mandatory. Similarly I’m also not a huge fan of minimum sentences. Let the judges… judge.
You said "If it is just “baseball” then I think we can do better." So suppose for the moment there is no fancy philosophy and the number is just some vague, messy human sense of how many chances someone ought to get before we throw the book at them. What, concretely, is your better proposal?
> In other words do we have a framework for deciding on additional punishment for repeat offense?
Yes, and you should be able to find how it's handled in your state fairly easily. The fact that you don't know that, and that you're generally focusing on the rhetoric rather than ideas, makes me wonder if you're interested in the subject or just arguing...
Go directly to jail. Like… Monopoly? It still feels arbitrary to me. If two is recidivism then so is three right? So is three be life? That doesn’t seem right. Shouldn’t we be trying to minimize recidivism?
I think the idea is that a "good" person can still have a (small) rate of criminality. If you kill after one crime you'll kill many good people, if you do so after 2 you'll still kill good people. But the odds of a good person committing 3 crimes are low enough to go for it.
how could one ever reach a number? because let's say after 7 issues there's a 80% chance they won't reform. so then why 80%?
it's a good chance, don't worry too much about where the line in the sand is drawn. I've seen multiple teams at work also bogged down by this. if there were a name for this phenomenon, I'd love to know
Well 7 and 80 are both mare up numbers. I think details matter and that reality is messy. So I don’t think an arbitrary number that feels good is the right way to go.
I agree with you but I’m honestly curious why you say 5 years. It seems like overkill for what is basically a reset on life. Anything over a few weeks means you lose your job. Anything over a few months means you lose your residence. So what’s the difference between one year and five? What do you lose in those four years other than opportunity?
I’d prefer exponential backoff. Double the sentence each time. But given the choice of three strikes or a slap on the wrist, I’d take three strikes enforcement.
That gut feeling resonates with so many that few care to question it. It just feels right. Problem is, it feels right to the kind of person that habitually weighs the benefits and drawbacks of their actions, is able to reason about consequences and has a good grip on their impulses. Those people would be unlikely to steal Amazon packages even if the sentence was a fine and 30 days of social work because they are usually in a different place in society anyway. (Don't get hung up on exceptions)
Those that decide to steal anyway are often those that think they won't get caught. It doesn't matter if they don't sit in prison for 2 years or for 25. I'm sure there are other dynamics at play as well. Unfortunately I can't cite research to support my claims but then neither can you. So I just invite you to consider them.
But those people are the kinds that we don't want anywhere near the good kind, nor anywhere close to our children. Hence why a lot of us feel like they should be, within reason, separated from the rest of us.
At $50K/yr, that's 1.25MM that society gets to pay to punish the theft of $950*3 worth of Amazon packages.
The insignificant fear of losing an Amazon package makes unbelievably comfortable people absolutely hysterical. It's got to be performative, it can't be real.
Do you at least understand the opposite position, that not spending this money to deter antisocial behavior will result in it becoming widespread, and a greater net loss than this?
Yeah, but the post I'm replying to suggests that police are demoralized when the original charge is not what prosecutors actually bring in court. Ultimately, the prosecutor needs a charge that they can prosecute (get a plea bargain, or convince 12 peers of the defendant) and I think the cops understand that.
In the case of Capone, it was just easier to prosecute tax evasion; "here's his bank balance, here's the tax we think is due, here's the tax he paid". In the case of shoplifting, plea-ing out a misdemeanor is probably easier than convincing a jury of a felony charge.
Like, all they probably have is a grainy video of the suspect. Are you convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that that's the person sitting in the defendant's chair? If one juror thinks "no, I'm not sure", then everyone who commited the crime goes free.
Also, realistically, $950 shouldn't be the threshold between a felony and a misdemeanor. That can't be a number that was adjusted for inflation. $950 isn't much money these days.
Which is kind of weird, because it’s used as a “crime doesn’t pay, the good guys win” and on one hand, sure, Al Capone is a bad guy. On the other hand it highlights the power of the government to harass someone they don’t like, suspect of crime, and can’t prove via unrelated arms of the government. That they’ll just lawfully harass you on all possible ways until they either bankrupt you or find something you’ve done.
Does it really matter? The idea is that if you’re stealing because you are starving or need a pair of socks or something, it won’t be anywhere near $950. In other words nobody steals $950 on accident.
The pictures of the pollution and mess the thieves leave behind is really heartbreaking.
The article meanders around the point without getting to it. But our society just really has no effective way stop nonviolent crime. The police have bigger problems. The train and shipping companies would rather just pay for the insurance. The only people who care are the insurance companies but they have no authority.
If you ask the question - how much crime could the average person get away if they wanted to, the answer is a lot. In a way it's almost reassuring how little crime there is right now.
Depends on where you live. In my city in the Midwest, some people tried to push three shopping carts of merchandise out of a TJ Maxx, drove into a cop car that was trying to stop them, then drove down the highway toward the police HQ (I’m guessing on accident), and as they tried to escape crashed into another car and flipped their vehicle. This feels like a lot for shoplifting.
At the same time, as a law abiding citizen this coming down hard on crime sure makes my life easier. My TJ Maxx doesn’t have boards on the windows and they don’t have off duty cops posted at the door, unlike the Target I visited on my trip last year to the SF Bay Area. So the question is which society do we want to live in, or is there an optimal middle ground?
Speaking for myself, I would rather have the scenario you live in and it isn't even close. I'm not without sympathy for people who are less fortunate in life, and I do think we should help them. But I'm not willing to tolerate crime as the cost of doing so.
> The only people who care are the insurance companies but they have no authority.
That's not strictly true. Usually there are terms attached to insurance agreements, and there's a lot of flexibility there in terms of discounts you can provide to insurees who employ useful mitigations.
I found this to be a fascinating article, and the problem is illustrative of problems in our society on a number of levels.
The biggest problem is of course, societal. One anecdote from an anti-theft taskforce in the article showed that less than 5% of the thefts were prepretrated by organized groups, and the other 95% were from "passers-by or unhoused people living near the tracks in R.V.s or makeshift structures".
People on the margins of society, who see an opportunity to make some money.
Ideally, we'd fix the problem of unhoused people on the margins of society and we'd eliminate the vast majority of thefts like this.
But of course, that's a much harder problem to solve.
Much easier, then, to respond with bigger locks, and more security cameras, and GPS trackers and more security guards in vulnerable hotspots.
While those measures might work (to an extent) to solve the immediate problem, they don't work to make the society that I'd like to live in. I'd much rather live in a more equitable society that works to eliminate homelessness, and the conditions that lead to this type of theft, then one that just prevents it with punatitive measures and thorough enforcement.
> Ideally, we'd fix the problem of unhoused people on the margins of society and we'd eliminate the vast majority of thefts like this.
I don't see any evidence of this.
The article did point out that only 5% of the arrests were organized criminals, but I would expect the organized ones to do more than their fair share of total thefts. I'd also expect them to get arrested less often than their amateur counterparts.
But more importantly, your proposal assumes that eliminating poverty would eliminate crime. That makes intuitive sense, but I don't think it's true. I've heard that many of the package thieves in my neighborhood are middle class people who just steal opportunistically.
This kinda sums the whole discussion really. We have an article that doesn't really go deep into the issue, and let's everyone come up with their own "all my homies say that XXXX" version of the root causes.
The best answer is probably that it's complicated, poverty plays a role, but so do many other critical factors (e.g. a decent summary of the studies in the field: https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PA00XGJN.pdf )
> This kinda sums the whole discussion really. We have an article that doesn't really go deep into the issue, and let's everyone come up with their own "all my homies say that XXXX" version of the root causes.
It's definitely anecdotal. But I think it justifies my skepticism of the claim that eliminating poverty would "eliminate the vast majority of thefts..." The parent comment didn't provide any data to support that thesis, and it doesn't align with my experiences.
> The best answer is probably that it's complicated, poverty plays a role, but so do many other critical factors
Yes, exactly. But that's what I'm arguing: poverty isn't the only factor in property crime. And while it's nice to imagine a world in which poverty doesn't exist, I think that cultural factor combined with inequality and opportunism will cause theft to remain.
I mean I don't steal because I don't have to, not because of some moral drive to care one iota about the profits of corporations. No one is asking poverty reduction to eliminate crime but it's on the theory that for most people above a certain life comfort you have more to lose than gain by petty theft and you don't need to bother.
I think "give people something to lose" is an underused and underrated crime deterrent.
Not necessarily. There are places where crime is low and so is police presence, like Taipei or Tokyo. It's part of culture which is actually adhered to by most.
If you go through Roppongi you'll see them, largely standing around. And in most shopping streets you'll see them patrolling on bicycles or in cars. They don't tend to stand around at malls or train stations, agreed, is that normal where you come from? (It wasn't the norm when I lived in the UK).
It is genuinely ludicrous to believe that you can outright eliminate criminality just because you can reduce criminality. Am I misunderstanding something?
Someone else said it was 5% of arrests, not thefts. If so, I would expect organized groups to be less likely to get caught, and to steal much more in each robbery.
Folks living in a tent aren’t typically the ones getting caught with a warehouse and 18m or 30M in stolen goods, which has happened in LA and Chicago respectively. These are organized crime rings running fencing operations at heart.
The same thing is happening in agriculture, though it’s really under reported.
A more equitable society is a society in which people in precarious financial and social situations are free to work to improve their lot, without fear that lawbreakers will destroy all they have built. Enforcing the law and holding criminals accountable is a prerequisite to creating economic and social opportunity. El Salvador's recent rebirth is a perfect demonstration of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KU-Tkh4yoQ
The problem is that your theory assumes that people are always at their 100% and thus can work to improve their lot. That is simply not true,if you hold that view, you are honestly just wrong and I can't do anything about it.
> your theory assumes that people are always at their 100% and thus can work to improve their lot
It's not obvious to me at all that a person needs to be at "100%" to improve their lot (and avoid criminality). I would never get out of bed if that was the case.
Yes, people don't understand that the increase in homelessness will certainly also increase dramatically the amount of theft. Middle class people with jobs and homes don't want to jeopardize their lifestyle by committing petty theft. People at the margins of society, especially homeless, don't have much more to lose, so this kind of behavior becomes the norm.
...you really think the low crime rates in Japan are due to aggressive punishment?
From what I hear, it might have a little bit to do with societal expectations (NOT resulting from fear of imprisonment, btw), underreporting, it being easier to keep things under control than get them under control, and near full employment, among other things.
We have systematically underfunded social programs and evaluated their costs and benefits based on everything but their actual holistic effectiveness. Rehabilitation? Do you have any idea how quaint the idea of real rehabilitation is, at an actual prison?
Sorry, but removing all the bad guys and thus leaving behind only good guys doesn't work. Never has, never will, not least because it's based on incorrect assumptions. (And I don't even disagree that time and effort get wasted on trying to change people who aren't going to change. Especially not with the situation we leave them in.)
> Do you have any idea how quaint the idea of real rehabilitation is, at an actual prison?
This seems pretty easily and cheaply fixable. Information access is nearly free, and all that's required is sufficient discipline and structure provided by prison staff.
> removing all the bad guys and thus leaving behind only good guys doesn't work
Isn't that the entire idea of the penal model? The primary purpose of imprisoning people is to keep the rest of us safe from them (incapacitation). A tiny minority of people commit most crime (especially violent crime), and imprisoning them for long terms does in fact reduce the crime rate[1]. As we seem to agree (and research supports), other interventions are ineffective on many of these people.
Per my other comment[2], I think we can do this much more cheaply than we do, and with much better (or at least equivalent) outcomes. I also recommend this documentary[3], for a deeper look at the Japanese penal system. It tries to take a critical perspective, but my neck is just about sore from nodding along in agreement with Japanese practices.
1. F E Zimring, G Hawkins (1995). Incapacitation: Penal Confinement and the Restraint of Crime.
Causation is not correlation. Prison in the US is pretty awful, so I wouldn't expect "harsh treatment" to be a reason that crime is low. Additionally, Japanese recidivism isn't particularly low (50%). Japan also has more programs to alleviate extreme poverty as well as an aging population. I would expect those have a stronger effect.
Japan has been a peaceful place throughout its demographic changes. It's not about being "awful" (inflicting maximum misery) but about effectively correcting problem behaviours. This actually requires a high degree of discipline and order among prison staff, not unlike raising children.
Life in Japanese prison is highly regimented, expectations of correct behaviour are high, and inmates are not allowed to freely interact and form a prison culture. This is in contrast to the US, where prison is effectively crime university. There are also effective post-correctional structures, eg. hiring discrimination against convicts isn't legal.
I'm arguing that Japan is a model of penal efficiency, getting a lot more bang for penal system buck, not that their system is most effective in absolute terms.
Edit: Japan spends ~14 USD per prisoner per day[1] and the US spends ~110 USD[2].
If they arent going to pay for bulls, the railroads can pay the extra insurance premiums. Private railroad police (bulls) were once common. We can bring them back. Public, sworn, railroad police are common in some cities and could also be expanded to police cargo trains.
>> Through his detective business, Allan Pinkerton met George B. McClellan, the president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad and Illinois Central Railroad, as well as its attorney, Abraham Lincoln. With Lincoln's encouragement, Pinkerton began supplying detectives for the railroad.
What does unhoused mean? Is that just homeless but more offensive or something? I'd be pissed if someone called me unhoused, it's like implying I'm incapable of taking care of myself or something.
It just means homeless, and it's just the newest entry on the "euphemism treadmill".
"Homeless" has a kind of stigma to it (maybe you picture a dirty bum on the street), while "unhoused" doesn't because it's so new. It simply sounds like a category of analysis devoid of emotional judgment. (Like maybe they're unhoused because a hurricane just blew down their house, not because they don't have a job.)
If "unhoused" comes to replace "homeless", I'm sure we'll get another term to replace it, once "unhoused" has acquired the same stigma that "homeless" does now.
Though I've got to say that "unhoused" is a particularly uncreative term! Essentially a literal synonym of "homeless". It's like they didn't try at all this time...
While "people experiencing homelessness" or "unhoused person" is more cumbersome, it does help emphasize that it is a person, a human being, being discussed. Like the switch to saying "enslaved people/person", that kind of language puts the humanity of the individual first, not something they are experiencing (being enslaved or lacking a house). Which I think could help with empathy around the subject.
It's not just uncreative, I find it offensively patronizing. If I had no home, and someone told me "no, you're just unhoused!" I'd tell them to F off. A street corner (or car or whatever) is not my home (and if it really was my desired home then I'd not be in need of attention then). It's just trying to verbally paper over a problem and then claim you're in fact helping somehow
I have a similar internal experience to 'land acknowledgements'. Saying thank you for this great land your group of people stole from this other group of people, with zero intention to give it back let alone backpay the years/decades/centuries of rent and reparations you must have accepted, is beyond repugnant. It would be better to say nothing at all.
> It's just trying to verbally paper over a problem and then claim you're in fact helping somehow
Yup, plenty of people say that's the entire reason for the euphemism treadmill. You look good using the new terminology but nobody is helped.
And the people actually affected by the problem generally aren't consulted, and don't care at all about the terminology because it's the least of their problems.
People who are unhoused are not necessarily homeless. Their home could be their vehicle, a tent, a warehouse, or some other place. A home is a place you can come back to, where you can feel some modicum of security, belonging, or safety. A house is a structure, designed to be a home, but not always effectively so.
So I would argue that being unhoused is a more accurate description of many people's experiences and feelings than being homeless.
But the whole problem with homelessness is that these people don't have an adequate home. Few people actually feel safe and want to live in a tent in a park. And if someone really does, well then they're not in need of assistance so not really part of the relevant category then
It is for exactly that reason (the expectation that one can or should take care of themself) that people use this word. They believe it's not only inoffensive and compassionate, but actually a way to solve the problem through activism: shift readers' perception of blame from away from individuals and private solutions, and demand more government bureaucracy that can placate everyone's desire to "do something about it."
> "Un–" is used to indicate negation, as Newspeak has no non-political antonyms. For example, the standard English words warm and hot are replaced by uncold, and the moral concept communicated with the word bad is expressed as ungood.
Because it shifts the burden (or at least appearance) of responsibility from those experiencing homelessness to the government orgs tasked with housing them.
Uh... how does "unhoused" do that? Or, I don't see how unhoused is synonymous with "the government has not provided these people with a house". The opposite of unhoused would be housed. Is everyone that is housed in that position because the government provided a house for them?
Wrongly so I’d argue. It’s your own responsibility to secure a place for yourself (to live, and in society generally). Failure to do this is personal, not collective.
To be fair, that is exactly what's the case with most homeless. Their mental health is in too much of a bad state that they could take care of renting a flat etc.
You can't just solve the problem by sticking them into flats; that might technically make them not homeless anymore, but at the same time fixes basically none of their problems.
In my experience this kind of story should be treated with extreme skepticism. Not that the specific thefts it describes didn't take place, just that they are likely to be blown out of proportion. Not unusual for this to be a story pushed behind the scenes by the entities that stand to profit from the attention, such as the railroads and shippers that would benefit from society devoting more resources to solving their problems for them. Would not be surprised if the (anonymous) "expert on supply chain risks" (who offers an estimate of the size of the problem that is much higher than those of the relevant law enforcement agencies) specifically has the job of making a fuss about this in the media. See e.g. the widespread credulous reporting of "organized retail theft" numbers last year that turned out to be basically made up based on misinterpreting previous (baseless) numbers from earlier reports from the same retail lobbying organization.
Totally agree. Some quick math shows how much of a non-issue this really is. The article says that 20,000,000 containers are shipped to LA every year, which comes to 54,794 containers a day. The article follows that by saying that 90 containers are opened every day to steal from. Even if we assume that every one of these containers were opened on a train, that's only 0.16% of all containers. You're only going to be able to steal a small portion of the container as well, since they're too big to load onto a car. Amazon probably loses more packages to mishandling than these Butch Cassidy wannabes.
> Piracy is an age-old occupation, particularly prevalent in places and times when large gaps have separated the rich and the poor.
The NY Times says it's not the fault of criminality, but of income inequity!
> But filched cargo can be hard to get a handle on; it shape-shifts, in effect. If you’re buying brand-new speakers from someone’s trunk in a parking lot, you can probably deduce that there’s a good chance they were ripped off. But the anonymity of the internet essentially launders stuff.
What a bad example! The "Speakers from the van" scam usually involved cheap "AliExpress" Speakers that the seller makes the buyer _think_ are expensive, misappropriated speakers.
Theft will always happen, it'll happen more when it's made easy.
The actual issue here is train companies have cut staff down to almost nothing while simultaneously increasing train length to miles and miles. (And they are trying to cut staff even further).
A train with 2 miles worth of cargo and 2 people to defend it ends up being SUPER easy for a thief to target and rob. It takes an hour just for someone to figure out what's happening to the train.
What's the solution? How about the train companies employ more people, install more cameras, or shorten their trains? Or they can use their insurance to cover the cost of lost goods (as they are almost certainly already doing).
Train companies are trying to operate like the dollar general and are putting on surprised pikachu faces when they get robbed like a dollar general store. Almost certainly what they want to happen is the offloading of their security problems onto the public. We the public should not be subsidizing private monopolies because their bad business decisions make them particularly vulnerable to crime.
A company that earns 25 billion dollars of revenue a year can afford moving back to older business practices to avoid theft.
> ” Almost certainly what they want to happen is the offloading of their security problems onto the public. We the public should not be subsidizing private monopolies because their bad business decisions make them particularly vulnerable to crime.”
Law enforcement is the state’s job, and companies do pay taxes. Blithely ignoring train robberies on the premise that if it gets bad enough, the company will hire private armed forces won’t lead to the kinds of societal changes you’re hoping for.
The kinds of theft happening in LA on a regular basis are essentially unheard of in places like Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Any such occurrence would be shocking news and police would be all over it.
According to [1] there's fewer than 2,300 railroad police officers in North America now (under 1,000 in the US) compared to 9,000 in the mid-1940s. How much of that is the switch to cars and how much is reduction in work force is unclear but today's number does include the East coast Amtrak security which sees a ton of ridership and there is much more freight these days.
Let's say the railroad hired the right people - the cost of litigation from injuries and death means that the people they hire have little incentive to intervene. I see this as akin to store shrinkage and security that can't touch a perpetrator - it's accepted by rail shippers as a cost of doing business.
> The kinds of theft happening in LA on a regular basis are essentially unheard of in places like Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Any such occurrence would be shocking news and police would be all over it.
That's more likely because these places (as does Europe, by the way - we also don't have people burglarizing trains!) have robust social security networks for their population. The homeless get at least basic assistance, the mentally ill get taken care of.
The US does neither. People who have fallen through the cracks simply don't get any help at all (except from some charities), and mentally ill people don't get any care.
With the exception of Japan, every one of the places I listed spends less on social security and welfare in general as percentage of GDP than the US does. In most cases, dramatically less.
Spending != to benefits actually received. LA, for example, spends billions on affordable housing schemes that are little more than fronts for lining the pockets of the allies of local politicians. Vienna, by contrast, spends far less and has a massive, well-maintained social housing scheme, in which something like a third of the population lives.
> Vienna, by contrast, spends far less and has a massive, well-maintained social housing scheme, in which something like a third of the population lives.
And on top of that, it creates a very effective price cap on rents in the non-social housing sector, because people could just go and live into marginally lower-quality housing instead.
You're not wrong about the inefficiency of LA (or really California) welfare spending. IMO, too little of the budget is on payroll. It's largely outsourced to non-profits with poor outcomes.
What are more trains and staff going to do? Conductors and engineers aren't going to start tackling thieves on moving trains.
The train companies already have their own police forces, but if they can't get convictions in court, all they can do is scare away the least coordinated thieves. So it's hard to understand what security investments are supposed to achieve.
Nah, another piece of this is that rail companies have eliminated rail yards and park those super-long trains on just random tracks (at least in the LA area). They then complain about the homeless who camp on the sides of the tracks and demand that LA county do something about the camps. The homeless may provide cover for the professional thieves but the homeless aren't the thieves (and the county should indeed eliminate the homeless camps by finding them housing but given a population of people can't legally or pleasantly sleep anywhere, that population is going gravitate to area least protected and that's railroad tracks and freeways, where problem things happen - notice recent freeway fire, etc).
Rail companies go in, apprehend the homeless for trespassing and then complain that county won't prosecute them. And no, the county sensibly doesn't want to fill it's jails with vagrants just 'cause the rail companies don't park their trains where they're safe.
All this is part of the "supply chain problems" of the last few years but the thing with those is the large carriers (shippers and railroads) actually made profits by a legal situation wound-up as "our losses are your losses, our gains are ours". They cried all the way to the bank.
There is only a tiny fraction of the housing required. There is single digit percentages of the actual housing required and low to mid double digits percentages of shelters where some of the time if you get their in time you can sleep in a communal space where you can't bring your belongings, your pets, cohabitate, where you might get raped, or acquire new 6 legged friends, or more recently covid before being turned out in the morning.
It's not like most people are being offered a job and an apartment. They are being asked if they would like to be warm for 10 hours and even worse off than before.
To expand on the above a bit, retail (and presumably freight rail?) security still has to refer cases through public law enforcement for prosecution.
Given limited resources and varying priorities, public law enforcement follow-through can range from helpful to apathetic to non-existent.
Even major, national retail chains with clear video evidence of organized theft rings can have issues getting local PD to pursue prosecution.
Edit: Courtesy of dwater's note up-thread, railroad police can indeed be empowered by states as law enforcement. Though I expect at some point prosecution still reverts to state/federal authority. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police#Jurisdiction...
Sorry but the railroads don't get to hide behind the "we need the cops to fix this" crap. In the US many railroads have their own police force with full arrest and police powers[0]. They can literally throw their own money and bodies at this problem if they really wanted to fix it.
A big part of this is those mile-long trains have to park "somewhere" and that can't be rail yards 'cause they're too big to fit.
So this wind-up being as if Fedex, to save money, eliminated their own parking lots and parked their trucks in the sketchy parts of town - and then demanded the cities eliminate the homeless 'cause their truck kept getting broken into.
1. Trains run through very long multi jurisdictional route often with no meaningful police along the routes and no access due to lack of roads along the route. This was especially true historically but still remains true today. Train robberies have been a real thing for a long time with the robbers not being stupid and attacking the train far from police presence. Further rail facilities require 24x7 protection that local police can’t afford to offer.
2. They often have specific laws at a federal level and as I understand it wouldn’t depend on general local courts and prosecutors, particularly on interstate lines. For spur lines it’ll usually be state prosecutors.
The crux of it is the rail companies probably don’t WANT to hire police if they absolutely can avoid it. That’s very expensive and I’m sure they would rather just eat losses, pay insurance premiums, and whine to local and state police for more coverage at the tax payers expense.
Sure they want their own police. Nothing better than being able to investigate yourself and find you did nothing wrong.
And when you call your local PD, good luck getting anywhere when another police force discontinued the investigation and local PD knows little/nothing about railways.
I think the better question is why are they investigating accidents in the first place instead of limiting jurisdiction exclusively to essentially loss prevention.
Item 1 is likely related to the spread of the railroads and how important they were so early on. I knew about railroad cops, and the no Social Security eligibility, but it wasn't until the recent strike threats that I learned how railroad employment is so different from most other employment because there are specifically different laws. The importance of the railroads is why there is so much checkerboarded land in the western US, it was given away in grants to the railroads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)
The railroads using shorter trains would allow them to keep the trains in the railyards, where they have more physical control. But that would involve more employees and seems to be something the rail companies are specifically avoiding for various reasons.
Presumably if it dovetails back into the existing public court system at the prosecution level (i.e. there are railroad lawyers empowered to bring cases similar to DAs), that's still a reasonable separation of powers.
But the slope towards the government (with democratic checks and balances) ceding enforcement authority to a private party (without democratic checks and balances) seems worrisome.
In this case: yes, because it puts undue burden on taxpayers given the unique nature of the rail system. Does every jurisdiction with rail freight traffic need a fully staffed, taxpayer-funded task force to cover these things? You'd bankrupt a ton of smaller counties.
The whole world is not New York City or the Bay Area where you have several billions of taxpayer revenues sloshing around you can throw at crime problems.
The "tough on crime" crowd needs to be less ideological and think deeply about the fiscal implications of taxpayers of their policies.
The state does not have a monopoly on violence in the United States. Private citizens can and have used lethal force to stop and/or prevent certain crimes (and I’m not talking about kooky stand your ground laws either).
It all makes sense given that we are, after all, a former British colony. Great Britain’s whole thing with its colonial empire was to outsource its territorial defense to its colonial citizens.
Sure, but I think the issue is that even when they are empowered as law enforcement, there's not much they can do if the DA isn't going to prosecute these cases.
My understanding is that they can pursue drug crime or break up organized fencing operations. But at the low level most of these train robberies are happening they probably don't waste their time.
And why do you think they cannot get convictions? If they get video evidence of someone damaging a train car and get that person in custody they will get an easy conviction.
Train companies do have police forces but since the advent of "precision railroading" they have been cutting all staff to the bone.
Shortening the time it takes for an employee to know what's going on means you can reach out and get authorities involved. Securing high value containers can slow down theft.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point but this reads a bit like victim blaming. "Those sexy trains were manned so skimpily, and going down those long routes all alone at night, they were just asking for it!"
Certainly, because it is. I don't think it's wrong to view companies responsibilities as being different from those of an individual.
For example, if a company chooses to ignore a RCE vulnerability in their software for years, are they to blame when that vulnerability is exploited? I'd say absolutely they are.
At the same time, banks and other business take responsibility and pay for armored cars to do pick-ups. They don't just wing it and hope for the best.
One question though, what are the laws like surrounding security for trains in the US? In Canada, security employed by rail companies actually have actually been granted all the powers of a police officer by the government.
The cost of the losses are likely less than the cost of increased security. If it was more profitable to use “armoured cars” they would be doing it. No company willingly chooses the less profitable option.
1. we do expect people to take preventative measures. I think this is more like someone being blamed for a burglary because they left their house unlocked. I have had car insurance policies that excluded theft resulting from leaving the key in the car.
This is exactly like shoplifting at Target — thieves now know the employees are not allowed to violently engage them, so there's absolutely no deterrent. If you think 4 unarmed railway employees are going to take it upon themselves to defend train cargo against cartel thugs or mentally ill and drugged out looters, you are insane.
My understanding is that Target’s loss prevention forensics team makes some police departments look amateur. Also, the aggregate shoplifting for an individual is “allowed” until the dollar amount crosses the line for it to be considered a felony. At that point, the fat stack of evidence is handed to local DA/PD. The same tech used for tracking your browsing and purchase behaviors also works pretty well for identifying and tracking known shoplifters. I’d wager that going after every instance of misdemeanor theft would be an ineffective use of resources at their scale.
With that said, it makes less than zero sense for Target to ask retail employees to risk their lives in order to stop someone stealing a cart full of Tide or pockets full of sonicare replacement heads. Not to mention, the potential for interventions to quickly escalate and become a danger to other shoppers.
Cameras, shorter trains, more personnel. They all make it more likely that certain details about the thieves' operation are documented; how many people are involved, in what direction they traveled, etc.
Maybe you want to live in the world where “theft happens and it is your fault for not providing enough guards” but some of us would much prefer a high trust society. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This is a problem in other areas too. I believe a lot of the current theft on big box stores comes to very few workers on each store. Once people realize it is very easy to pick anything without any worker even seeing it, part of society starts to think of theft as an easy possibility.
At the scale these corporations operate, does it even make sense to insure against theft? The overhead must be significant and on other side premiums should pretty much always be more than claimed.
I would expect that insurance carriers get involved because the load passes through so many hands. Each "hand" needs their own insurance so that they won't just walk off with the load.
However, if it gets expensive enough, I would expect that the parent companies will start to self-insure.
This reminds me of patio11’s assertion that the optimal amount of fraud in a system is not 0 because the marginal price of reducing fraud to 0 is far higher than the amount lost to the hardest to eliminate fraud.
The key is to make sure that the costs of eliminating theft are internalized. So as long as the train company reimburses everyone fully then I would imagine they will quickly figure out what the correct level of security is.
Yeah it's crazy. The John Oliver segment was eye opening about the myriad of issues. At 3 miles long with 1 engineer, they sometimes have to walk miles to the end and then of course back in order to fix something. They frequently block roads and emergency responders for hours sometimes and people die. The trains are essentially ticking time bombs as they commonly carry flammable/toxic/explosive materials with no tracking and they go through towns where the tracks weren't designed for trains of that length. The end of the John Oliver skit has them do their own very dark episode of Thomas the Train that satirizes these issues.
Edit: I think there may be 2 staff, but they're trying to change it to 1 and you basically aren't allowed to ever call in sick or else you're fired.
Trains shouldn't have any crew at all. They can't do anything useful when the train is moving now that we have modern automatic train control. (they cannot hit the brakes fast enough to stop if someone is on the tracks). Unlike cars, self driving trains is an easy problem that was solved 20 years ago. If a train brakes down send a mechanic to the train - they only need a couple in every state.
They train companies should still have crew, but they should be for use on secondary lines and the crew lives near that line and just works 1 week a month (most of that time doing mandatory training). With a little work on scheduling they can find local farmers looking for a side job when there isn't farming to do.
> and just works 1 week a month (most of that time doing mandatory training)
This is so out of left field. In what sort of dystopia do we confront the end of scarcity with... more mandatory training? Also, why do you assert 1 week a month? Wouldn't you need four crews to work this section then?
There are a lot of short sections of track that go to something like a grain elevator. They are still worth minimal maintenance to keep operational, but you wouldn't build those tracks today or rebuild if something major happens. They often go more than a month without any trains, then other weeks where they have several. These sections are not worth upgrading to modern switches or computer controls, so you have a trained crew that section, but once the train hits the mainline the crew leaves to go home. Since this crew doesn't get much practice in the real world you need to give them training so that they haven't forgotten how to run a train when the next time comes.
Be present? Having someone capable to do most basic troubleshooting and mechanic can do being there when it breaks seems quite efficient and much faster response. No travel or alert time. Notify more skilled personnel if found issue not repairable on spot or can't find it.
At the cost of two humans on the train all the time. If that cost isn't greatly higher than the cost of mechanics to go to the train when there is a problem then you have a basic train maintenance issue to solve - or maybe you are running worn out trains that should have been replaced long ago.
Trains are not ticking time bombs any more than a car is. Do you imagine trains are just exploding left and right around the country? I think there's a lot of hyperbole in your position.
I think a good first step would be to repeal the law that allows the federal government to deem a strike by rail workers "illegal" so that those workers can fight for better conditions.
Train-delivered inventory is an interesting topic in general. Where I used to live there was a railroad salvage that essentially sold re-possessed freight from train cars. The owners of the freight either failed to pay the freight charges, never picked up the inventory or it was taken as abandoned for some other reason. I'm not sure how well this made sense as a business model, but they seemed to make it work.
From time to time an Amazon delivery is canceled a couple days after it was scheduled to be delivered. It never occurred to me that the cause might be train robbery. I think I would get a kick out of knowing if it been reported lost due to land pirates.
I feel there have been plenty of stories about smash and grab stuff in apple stores but surely the trucks carrying shipping container of new apple products must be valuable targets
I thought smash and grab at apple had almost vanished because the valuable stuff won't operate if stolen. I know the display units won't work, and ones already set up have varying (but generally pretty high) levels of resuse security (which has made them less likely to be stolen on the street). I assume apple can prevent an uninitialized phone stolen in its box from being initialized.
You can walk into an apple store and walk out with a $100 power supply. I assume that happens so infrequently that they just don't care.
Smash and grabbers that work apple stores simply aren't very smart, since Apple locks down their hardware from thievery pretty well at the software level (to the chagrin of the OSS community). The smash and grabs that can make money and catch attention these days happen at luxury bag shops.
My original comment was thinking of the things that have high resale value - e.g. the actual computers, phones, etc but from other comments it sounds like they've got sufficient methods in place to make such devices worthless (I guess they could treat them like gift cards are nowadays where until the sale is registered the initial activation fails but if were in charge of such a system I'd be incredibly worried about accidentally screwing up for paying customers)
The $100 charger and $150 docks are way easier to sell.
At the local flea market, you can see people selling stolen stuff from the local pharmacy. There are obvious 4 or 8 packs of razor blades that are stolen (with the sticker that says "For sale at Shoppers Drug Mart only" on them).
I know this is way too common in the LA area. I would be curious how much of these happen in different parts of the country. I would assume LA is more than half of these thefts.
I don't know about currently, but this used to happen in southeast California. Thieves would get on the train at Yermo (just east of Barstow), and wait until it got to Cima Hill (quite a steep grade, and in the middle of nowhere). While climbing the hill, the train would slow down to maybe 8 MPH. They would break into containers while the train was moving, and just throw stuff overboard. People driving on the parallel road would pick up the stuff and drive off.
The western worlds tolerance for crime is insanely high. I know a lot of people like to romanticise it (perhaps political extremists seeing it as "direct action"), or excuse it, or gaslight people into thinking it's not an issue. But it effects everyone. Prices go up, criminal violence is incentivized, and it has a knock on effect in the communities it happens in - I can guarantee you violent feuds stem from control of stolen railway cargo.
If there are now have literal railway bandits - does that not make you take a step back? Like is this acceptable to you? And if it is - how can those of us who don't find it acceptable separate from them physically, and as fast as possible? Because I will never accept this. I'm not a pig, and I do not relish rolling around in the mud.
Speaking academically, of course, I would think you'd station some dudes with binoculars at the loading dock and ID which car has the good stuff. Then send (quadruple-encrypted, on dark web, etc, etc) that info to the guys breaking in, so you can get out fast with as much valuable stuff as possible. Risking that kind of crime for a couple hundred bucks doesn't seem too worth it. In fact, I could see the spotters for these sorts of operations making out like gangbusters, since they can sell the info to lots of ne'er-do-wells.
I can guarantee that NONE of these crime rings understand what encryption is. Generally people intelligent enough to know OPSEC are intelligent enough to know how reckless and risky this type of crime is. The smarter move is setting up a fence with plausible deniability. eBay must profit more from retail and supply chain theft than any other single entity in existence.
If anyone from the New York Times is reading, I'm about to cancel my subscription. Despite being a paying subscriber the site insists on serving me a cookie banner and a 'read in the app' overlay after I started reading. Don't interrupt my tiny amount of Fxxking reading time. You ruin the whole experience
To be fair, you can blame the cookie banner on the EU and California. If the laws were actually grounded in reality maybe they could skip the banner for paying customers who are logged-in (and therefore have already accepted cookies). However, because the laws are dumb, the website has to worry that someone is letting their friend read the website on their PC, in which case they had better show a banner! Every time! Just in case!
At least in the EU, the cookie banners aren't mandatory. They're required only if you want to set cookies that aren't necessary, or collect data that isn't necessary.
Technically, the only required data is 'GET / HTTP/1.0', so if you don't throw away all of the bytes after that, perhaps the law applies to you. I don't know, I'm not a lawyer.
Ok on the cookie banner, although that is not my reading of the law. The 'read in app' thing is ultra annoying because it pops up after you have read a sentence or two.
If anyone from the New York Times is reading, the last bit was "Don't interrupt my tiny amount of Fucking reading time. You ruin the whole experience."
"Fucking", in case you're not fucking literate.
>I left the encampment discombobulated by the mismatch between the perpetrators (down-and-out men living in tents stealing goods someone else had already nabbed and discarded), and the victim (a multinational company valued at more than $1.5 trillion). The stuff had been taken unlawfully, yes, but part of the reason these companies manufacture items for so much less in Asia and then transport them thousands of miles in ships and trains and trucks is so they don’t have to pay the costs associated with adhering to environmental and labor laws here. Also, I was flummoxed trying to imagine how a man living in a tent would go about selling a stolen pet-grooming vacuum cleaner. What even is a pet-grooming vacuum cleaner?
Amazon is an economic parasite. It has destroyed the small business economy so thoroughly that you are forced to use it (I wonder if Gen Z realizes that you used to be able to buy things in places other than Amazon), flooded the market with fakes and fraudulent listings, and provides only exploitative sweatshop jobs where you will be stack ranked on how long it takes for you to urinate.
Good to see them reaping what they sow, even if it’s only a pinprick.
its a vacuum cleaner with an attachment you run through your pets hair so it can suck up loose fur that would otherwise end up in your carpet and everywhere else.
If they have a phone I presume they could list it on ebay or facebook market for some portion of its new cost and take it in a shopping cart to a pack and ship place or haul shit to an unscrupulous pawn shop.
There was a pawn shop owner in WA who was actually sending out homeless folks with shopping lists of things to steal.
The packages are insured, Amazon/DHL/UPS/etc are billion eurodollar corporations... Victimless crime? Except for the poor bastard security guards I suppose.
"paying more in one way or other " I think is the key here. You can pay more for the gadget because it has more insurance, or because you bought it at a local retailer, or because there is more tax to keep more people in prisons, or to keep fewer people living in tents by railroads.
