They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.
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.
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?
Also, I guarantee you that if property crime enforcement increased and there were more arrests, they would scram.
Apply a map of retailer container shipping traffic per postal code (where LA would, again, figure in the top 5, due to the ports and their surrounding infrastructure such as warehouses and garment manufacturing).
What other areas of high homeless density also have as high a density of goods throughout as this particular cluster route in LA?
Is the security and prosecution of crimes in those areas as lax as it is in the LA train yard?
If so, then perhaps the only thing preventing thefts there is that no one’s done the math yet and found it. Or that they’re keeping it to themselves and not earning national attention, because no reporter has done a drone flyover of the carnage yet, or because they’re keeping it to such a low volume that no one has noticed.
I would expect this is the work of a small group of people who are spreading word about the security gap left by too few security guards on the ground, and that Southern Pacific has been trying to maximize profits by not hiring more security guards for their LA interchange and having all the insurance companies involved pay for the lost items. I suspect the nationwide news showing these photos is going to antagonize those insurance companies into spiking the rates of all involved shippers, but it’s unclear to me whether Southern Pacific is vulnerable to — or insulated from — insurance company outrage in this regard.
So maybe it’s a bit soon to pass moral judgment upon homeless people, and instead wonder “what group of opportunists are exploiting a logistics weakness and inviting desperate homeless people to join the free money party?”. Hard to imagine desperate people turning down free money at essentially zero risk, but they weren’t doing this on their own before. Find the ringleaders and deal with them instead.
Nor being rich.
What needs to happen in these cities is some auditing of the second hand sellers. Pawn shops are required by law to record all items that they purchase but many of the people advertising and selling online are moving larger volumes of product with zero accountability.
The Kijiji and Craigslist type sites have mostly been allowed to operate in a gray area but there is no doubt they are facilitating the buying and selling of stolen items and as such a percentage of their profit is actually subject to seizure through proceeds of crime legislation.
If you’re stealing things off a train, you’re already in a pretty bad place in life, it’s not like the earlier people were any better off than the later people
Just the amount of discarded items indicates an organized effort on behalf of the thieves and most likely a steal to order game plan.
I have no doubt that the entire scheme was cooked up by some meth head while the rest of us were sleeping. Those guys are always looking for an angle to make a quick buck and yes they are desperate too but that shouldn't be the stick we measure criminality and the punishment required by.
There are waiting periods to buy guns it would be just as easy to require an item for sale to be advertised for a minimum amount of time before the contact details are provided.
No, there aren’t - not outside CA and a few other places.