Union Pacific Addresses LA Cargo Thefts; Problem Requires Collective Effort | Hacker News Reader

Union Pacific Addresses LA Cargo Thefts; Problem Requires Collective Effort

up.com

90 pointssamename166 comments

Here's the problem from the article: "Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine,” said the letter. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than 24 hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended time frame for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to Union Pacific by these same criminals.”

The letter goes on to say criminals are boasting to Union Pacific officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence."

One thing that sounded weird in that sentence, who is doing the arresting? Company employees?

Do railway employees have arresting authority?

They have a police force.

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

Having many Federal Government departments having their own police forces (like "Postal Police") is weird enough to somebody from another country like me, but the idea of a private company being able to have their own police force is a whole another level - incredible and bizarre...

It's from a time when the country was more sparse. A normal citizen can make arrests only with proof of a crime, in some very important situations like theft or trespass you'd like to be able to arrest on suspicion.

If anything these hyper-specific forces tend to be more professional that local police forces.

The railroads in the US are pretty heavily regulated by various US government departments. It makes sense to have specialized police for the needs of the railroad.

> specialized police for the needs of the railroad

It's understandable, but for the most Europeans such police force should be a part of a government or a municipal authority, not a private one.

In Europe the railroad would also be part of a government entity....

Also in Europe the distances are much shorter and have always been well-settled. US railroad police originate from a time when they were some of the only lawmen in the western US.

I don't think it's that weird. Our national railway in The Netherlands also has a security force. I haven't looked at the differences in authority between them and the UP police force, though.

The UP police force is private. Zero accountability to the public, just shareholders. You couldn’t even file a public record request to them.

As others noted, this is an artifact of the time in which railroads were created. Railroads are unusual from a legal perspective because they stretch across many jurisdictions, and it is not always immediately obvious which one should apply (e.g., a train in motion across multiple city/county/state borders - by the time a local force can respond, it's in another jurisdiction). Giving them their own force, with arrest powers limited to railroad property, allows them to keep order on their own territory and figure out afterward what jurisdiction should take the offenders.

They're gonna need more K-9s to join the force.

Seems the law doesn't have enough teeth to cope with the problem any more.

They do; Union Pacific's police force in particular is empowered to make arrests in 21 of the 23 states that UP has trackage in[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Police_Departmen...

Authority is technically not a must for an arrest, just it’s not a casual part of the law you should mess with.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_arrest

In Washington State BNSF is allowed to hire retired law enforcement officers (usually ex-highway patrol) as a "Special Agent", and they are re-sworn and have arrest powers. They cannot book people into a jail without permission from the city/county operating the jail.

The railroad can't just hire Apu from the Quickie-Mart and hand him a gun and badge.

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, though. Maybe the issues with American society aren't ones that can be addressed with more arrests and jail terms?

The causes of crime is a different discussion from the crimes being caused. There should be more a holistic approach towards the causes but simply deciding not to prosecute is not the way out of this.

But, is prosecution truly the way out of this? It doesn't appear to have been effective at preventing plenty of other crimes, in America. Why would it be any more effective in this case?

If it’s the same criminals committing the same crime shortly after being released, keeping them in jail will reduce the opportunity they have to commit the crime again, at least for as long as they remain in jail.

I've absolutely heard this rhetoric about short jail terms before, though, about any number of crimes. Is there data to back this up?

I think the point was that the number of thefts made outside the prison by people who are in the prison is necessarily zero, unless they escaped. Do you need data to be convinced of this?

They're in prison until they aren't and at that point they may steal enough to make up for the stealing the imprisoning prevented.

The point of adding a 10s delay on incorrect password attempts isn’t to make it impossible to brute force passwords, it’s to slow an attacker from 600 tries per minute down to 6/min. This is enough of a deterrence to make brute forcing impractical.

If you have to wait 7 days between train robberies instead of 24 hours, that’s a big hit to the business model. Maybe enough to make it impractical.

Your analogy doesn't really help because they aren't just "delayed". Money is wasted on incarcerating them, they come in close contact with criminals, and it makes their ability to get a job, lower.

You're forgetting the cost of jailing them in the first place. Not only is there an upfront cost of $106k per year(assuming we're talking about CA)[1], that person is also not working(or paying taxes) or gaining any useful skills. What they're doing instead is hanging out in a population of other criminals and participating in a social order that incentivizes if not downright mandates behavior that in itself would be considered criminal in wider society. I don't think it's so far fetched to say that the cost society pays to incarcerate someone with the goal of preventing them from committing more crimes can exceed the cost of the crimes themselves. Deterrence is the only possible way to justify these costs(And prisons do have nonzero use as a deterrent), but the current prison situation makes it clear that prison's RoI growth has some seriously diminishing returns that started at a funding level far lower than the current one.

[1]https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

What is the alternative though? Societal interventions are a slow, months to years long process to an acute problem. I'm sure most criminals can be reformed through years of education, therapy and trauma healing but you can't deny that lax sentencing and lax enforcement contribute to opportunistic crime sprees like organized retail theft mobs and train robberies. Nobody needs to rob trains to eat, in America, as you put it.

> Nobody needs to rob trains to eat, in America, as you put it.

They don't? That's not what I've heard.

https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america

When they have to invent a new term "food insecurity" and your country leads the world in obesity, you know people aren't going hungry in the normal sense of the word.

Do you feel like the obese people are robbing these trains?

Seen photos? Yes, some of them are obese.

What’s your point?

Oh, I guess some of them aren't hungry, then.

My understanding is that most of the people struggling to feed themselves make too much money to qualify for assistance, but too little to reliably feed themselves.

Obviously, those people aren't making too much money (as documented by the IRS and/or banks) by robbing trains.

The leading health problem among the poor in the US is obesity.

Prosecuting crime does not eliminate crime; it minimizes crime.

For the criminal justice system to deter crime, there has to be a reasonable chance of getting caught and punished, and the punishment must significantly exceed the benefit that obtained from the crime.

> punishment

This makes the big assumption that people know or care about the punishment. Most people do, but plenty of people are desperate and just don't give a shit.

I think if you flip that thinking, there'd be people spreading the word that the prevention is minimal and the punishment not a serious deterrent. e.g., no one thinks "I wonder what happens if you're busted grabbing stuff out of a shipping container?" But if there's no punishment, word would spread fast. "Those guys have been doing it for weeks and no one cares. X got busted but they had to let him off light. They don't do anything about it!"

There's also literal evidence from the original article that these criminals know they won't be punished and can do it with impunity.

That seems likely, but that's existing criminals. Doesn't it make logical sense that lowering punishment enough will attract rational people who are not desperate to do crimes?

That's not what I've heard:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/business-law/do-harsher-pu...

Some of this is really just common sense. I believe the following:

- If murder were not prosecuted, or punished by only a day in jail, murder rates would increase. It would effectively be legal.

- Changing the sentence on murder from 10 years to life, however, would be unlikely to have any marginal deterrent effect.

Stated more generally, I think many sentences in this country are horrifically long, and dramatically shortening them would not increase crime. But if you decrease them to a level where they are de minimis compared to the benefit of the crime, or just not prosecuted at all, I don’t need a study to tell me crime will increase. It is human nature.

I've heard incorrect folk wisdom parroted as if it were true, before, so I'll wait for the study.

Plenty of people claim they have a grasp on common sense, and many of them disagree.

Do you eat when you’re hungry and put on a raincoat outside when it’s raining, or do you wait for a study?

Hilarious that you bought up "eating when hungry" as an example of common sense considering all the discussion about that recently. Folk wisdom loses, again :) I think I will wait for the study.

Exactly! Beyond a certain threshold, increasing punishment severity has diminishing returns (or negative, if you count the fiscal and societal costs of incarceration).

Recidivism for most crimes is high. Putting criminals in prison prevents them from committing more crimes.

But does prison also cause significant other issues, leading to that recidivism?

I mean, no, there's lots of crimes you can commit in jail that can lead you to an even worse sentence. But also recidivism isn't simply some moral badness in a person, there's tons of factors that feed into it, including the community around the person being released, their ability to provide with a record, etc.

And not putting criminals in jail allows them to commit more crimes.

Lacking crime data for the counterfactual world where crime wasn't prosecuted, I don't think you can make this assertion. Not to say that you're wrong (and I've seen evidence that you're right), but that you can't just eyeball our crime rate and come to any conclusion.

It is counterintuitive to suggest that punishments have an insignificant effect on crime rates. It doesn't pass the 'me' test- even my idealized version of myself would steal if there were no consequences, though it's tricky to judge whether I'd be more or less inclined with variable consequences. Again, doesn't mean it's not true, just sets the bar for evidence a little higher.

Well, its similarly frustrating to me that the snap response to crime in America still seems to be, more enforcement. Clearly, the crime rate is the result of a multi-faceted set of variables. Why press the "harsher punishment" button?

Also if an idealized version of yourself would still steal, perhaps that is also multi-faceted, and requires some other change to society other than the justice system. What do you think you'd steal? I think I'd steal too - mostly from large corporations, because I don't really care if Disney or Walmart profits go down.

> Clearly, the crime rate is the result of a multi-faceted set of variables. Why press the "harsher punishment" button?

Because people are perceiving a higher rate of visible crimes within a reasonably short time after the "reduce punishment" button was pushed.

Of course, going back to the old ways without any real progress on anything else is going to put us back to the old problems. (Costs of incarceration are high, concerns about fairness, concerns about conditions, etc)

> I think I'd steal too - mostly from large corporations, because I don't really care if Disney or Walmart profits go down.

I don't necessarily care about their profits per se, but if Walmart (or maybe a chain store you dislike less) leaves my community because of theft, that makes my life harder.

> I don't necessarily care about their profits per se, but if Walmart (or maybe a chain store you dislike less) leaves my community because of theft, that makes my life harder.

There's definitely already theft happening at Walmart so they have a non-zero tolerance for it. Frankly, I don't think Walmart leaving a community will necessarily be a bad thing for that community.

I should clarify that when I said 'my idealized version of myself,' I wasn't talking about an enlightened, self-actualized 'me'. I meant 'me' as I perceive myself. As far as I know, it's an accurate version, but my understanding is that that's unlikely.

I don't have a good answer for your first question, but I would steal for fun and profit.

There's a thrill to breaking the rules and getting away with it. Part of it is the Ocean's Eleven cool factor. Part of it is the feeling of being smarter or more competent than security. And part of it is shortcutting the 'I made this' circuits in one's brain and feeling proud. There's probably more to it than that.

And profit is self-explanatory. Maybe it's greed. Maybe it's that I'd rather work on my own projects than have a job. Maybe something else. But I'd appreciate free stuff, absolutely.

> There's a thrill to breaking the rules and getting away with it.

This is interesting, maybe another facet to the usefulness of rules, discussion?

> But I'd appreciate free stuff, absolutely.

But why do you need free stuff? What are you trying to achieve with the stuff?

I think you probably get where I'm going with this questioning...

We need more punishments, but of lesser severity matching the crime. Ideally with a large parole component with GPS tracking. It can be far cheaper than incarceration, have a large deterrent effect, while enabling rehabilitation.

The Norwegian system is capital intensive, but good at preventing recidivism.[0][1][2]

Evidence based policy works. Even starting the transition to evidence based policy in the US would be hard though.

[0] https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48885846

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

A system that works in a country won’t work in another country that is culturally different, more heterogenous, etc.

It might not work as well, but there are certainly useful hints to be taken.

At a bare minimum, it proves that recidivism is not laws-of-physics unavoidable.

As you say, going from what we have to what they have will be no simple matter. It would take decades of reform at the very least. In the meantime, it doesn't make sense to just stop improning people for minor crimes.

how would you feel if something like this personally affected you? say you depended on critical prescription drugs to be mailed to you and thieves were robbing the postal service, stealing your medication. what then?

I'd want to reduce the crime rate. But hey, maybe a way of doing that is to reduce the price of medication and therefore its resale value, somehow. Maybe that's another topic we don't really want to interrogate here, though. :)

Ripping and robbing a freight train is not the same situation at all. Things that aren't found as valuable are being tossed along the tracks.

How do you solve the problem of a subculture which glorifies crime? These people don't care about your rules. They take pride in breaking them. They are not interested in your American Dream or your ideas of educational opportunity. Taking advantage of opportunity (or altruism) is an achievement, a victory over perceived weakness. Altruism is a respectable virtue, but forcing altruisum upon others at the hands of barbarism is tyrrany.

You start by disconfirming your beliefs.

What is the American Dream? Is it a reality? Is it available to. The people in this subculture you're talking about (curious to hear more about this subculture)? Are the educational opportunities?

Is crime glorification the cause, or the effect of a deeper problem?

Why does this happen in the richest country in the world? Is it a bug or is it a feature? If it's a feature, what does it imply about those that are able to reach monumental amounts of wealth in this same society?

Underrated comment. There's simply too many people who don't care at all about the rules or about participating in a functional society.

AFAIK the incarceration rate problems in US have more to do with locking up non violent drug users, the three strikes policy and probably other miguided efforts than with locking up actual thieves, robbers and murderers.

But I am not an American.

I've read some interesting things about this idea: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

> It’s true that police, prosecutors, and judges continue to punish people harshly for nothing more than drug possession. Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of almost half a million people, and nonviolent drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system. Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences. Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.

> Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one. To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our justice system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcerating people for behaviors that are even more benign.

America's incarceration rate is over nine times that of a country like Denmark's. You see the comments here from Americans - even more people need to be incarcerated, the DAs are too soft. People elect these DAs because they are tired of police brazenly murdering people on video and locking everyone up.

US also has, like, heck of a lot more crime than Denmark. We don’t arrest and jail people for the hell of it.

And based on comments here, it seems that many of you guys seriously think that a solution is... arresting and jailing more people? Somehow brings mind the quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

And from my European point of view, the three strikes thing is pretty much a definition of jailing people for the hell of it.

If someone committed the same crime in Europe you would put them in jail too, would you not?

Context was how to reduce crime, not whether a specific crime should yield jail time.

Yes, that’s how the European country I moved to US from deals with crime. US is insanely lenient toward petty criminals compared to Europe.

If someone robbed a train in Denmark would they go to jail? No one is saying we shouldn’t find ways to prevent people from committing crimes in the first place, but this experiment in california with having no consequences isn’t working, that’s pretty obvious.

> If someone robbed a train in Denmark would they go to jail?

In Denmark, would the robbery happen in the first place?

It could. Maybe california should send their criminals over to Denmark to see what happens.

American is large. Some DA's are soft. Some are hard. LA's is definitely way too soft. It's dropping the standard of living for common working class people.

Did you not see the throngs of people stealing from trains? The solution here is not to remove disincentives for antisocial behavior. That would be like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Do these measures actually disincentivize antisocial behavior over the life of the subject?

I mean take the extremes. If there was no penalty, would people be more inclined to steal? What if the penalty was the most extreme? If you look to Singapore, you’ll find a country with very rough penalties by western standards. Yet that translates to almost no crime.

I can also think of plenty of countries that have even more severe punishments for criminals, that do have a lot of crime, though. Which just leads back to the idea that increased punishment isn't necessarily the solution here.

Well, harsh penalties mean nothing if you have a corrupt and/or underfunded police/criminal justice system. But if you combine a highly efficient and regulated justice system with proper funding and harsh penalties, you will soon have no crime. The problem of course, is people who will advocate for “criminal rights” instead of the rights of victims.

> Well, harsh penalties mean nothing if you have a corrupt and/or underfunded police/criminal justice system.

Interesting... This sounds like America, to me.

> The problem of course, is people who will advocate for “criminal rights” instead of the rights of victims.

Unless the justice system is corrupt, right?

I don’t think that describes America at all. America would have among the safest and best police by world standards. I recently visited Bangladesh, and the police there were recently involved in a shooting - however, they weren’t able to respond, as the local police had sold all their bullets.

In a country the size of America, it’s not hard to find examples of when it goes wrong, which the media then inflate in order to incite racial tensions to increase their ratings.

Sounds like you've already decided, since reading BLM as a media ratings frenzy is amazing - but America has the largest prison population in the world, in a mostly for-profit system. From 2014 onwards asset forfeiture has taken more money from American citizens than burglary.

The number of people killed by police annually in the USA is quite low, fewer than 1,000 per year. For a nation with over 300m people and as many guns, don’t you find it surprising that this number isn’t higher? Of course, 50% of this thousand killings per year are of white people, sometimes at the hands of black cops - but this doesn’t cause race riots, and people don’t automatically assume racism - yet if the ethnicities are reversed, it becomes a national issue, rioting etcetera.

I think it's a very good point but you also aren't going to convince a lot of people without offering concrete solutions to the immediate issue. What are they, in your opinion? I personally think if the company kept its trains moving and/or had better fences, it might prevent the thefts in the first place. But if your idea is let's not prosecute theft and focus on reducing economic inequalities, I'm not sure I buy it!

You hit the nail on the head there - lets not smash the "more arrests and harsher punishments UP doesn't have to pay for (what a coincidence)" button, immediately, right?

Stop jailing people for simple possession of drugs. Start jailing people for repeated burglary.

This is exactly what happens in virtually all cities with progressive “restorative justice” policies. Many of these cities have district attorneys (city prosecution office) who effectively excuse crime by removing consequences such as jail time or fines. Many are funded by George Soros’s nonprofits, who are trying to normalize this type of criminal justice policy across the nation [1]. Unfortunately, this removal of deterrents induces additional crime - both in terms of frequency and severity from existing criminals but also in attracting criminals from other areas to these locations.

I’ll dive into Seattle as an example of what happens. There was a great documentary made about Seattle’s chronic issue with repeat offenders cycling through the system without consequence or deterrence, titled “Seattle is Dying” [2]. One of the people featured in this documentary, Travis Berge, racked up over 100 police contacts, dozens of civil infractions, 47 criminal cases, and an attempted rape, just in the five years he lived in Seattle. He was repeatedly released and continued to victimize others. A year after this documentary came out, shortly after CHAZ (the infamous “autonomous zone”) and in the same park that was part of CHAZ, he ended up murdering his girlfriend. Former judges and politicians commented that this entire saga was preventable [3] but neither current politicians, nor the city attorney, nor activists who attacked this documentary admitted their fault. Instead they continued with the same policy of not prosecuting crimes.

Downtown businesses in Seattle have repeatedly mentioned complained about the continued scourge of widespread shoplifting, loitering, trash, and other problems of blight that have made business difficult in Seattle. It got so bad that businesses were simply giving up on reporting crimes, just like private citizens have also given up [4]. Because the city ignored these issues, the business associations did their own work and put out a deeply-research report covering the pattern of prolific repeat offenders, titled “System Failure” [5]. This report was ignored by local politicians and attacked by progressive activists, journalists, and the homeless-industrial complex local to Seattle. The business association put out another similar report titled “System Failure 2” six months later [6], but it too resulted in no action from the city, simply because acknowledging the problem would be an indictment of the political ideology governing Seattle.

Fast forward to 2020 and there was widespread lawlessness spurred on by the George Floyd incident. Extremist activists repeatedly provoked/attacked the police, destroyed businesses, set fires, and engaged in other crimes daily (like blocking highways). There were also notable incidents like CHAZ, which was a display of brazen contempt for law and order. At the end of this year, it came to light that the city attorney had removed all consequences even for the very few that were arrested [7]. The lack of cooperation from the city attorney’s office (in holding arrested suspects accountable), threats of defunding from an activist city council, and general lawlessness led to hundreds of police officers quitting [8], further exacerbating all the issues with crime.

All these things add up slowly over time. It’s hard to notice the deterioration “live” as it is happening, but if you compare Seattle from 10 years ago to what it is today, the change is truly astonishing and depressing. To me, the consequence of not enforcing the law was always obvious, but I am guilty of not putting in an effort to speak up against what was happening. Most people who disagreed with what was happening also laughed it off, and didn’t take it seriously. This issue in LA with the railroads could just as easily happen in SF, Portland, Seattle, or other locations that have adopted a similar approach to managing crime.

1. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/george-soros-criminal...

2. https://komonews.com/news/local/komo-news-special-seattle-is...

3. https://mynorthwest.com/2169605/retired-seattle-judge-berge-...

4. https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-o...

5. https://downtownseattle.org/files/advocacy/system-failure-pr...

6. https://downtownseattle.org/files/advocacy/System-Failure-Pa...

7. https://komonews.com/news/local/city-attorney-charges-brough...

8. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/spd-warns-o...

Well, George Gascón was DA of San Francisco before moving to LA (and he was replaced by an even nuttier DA, Chesa Boudin), and the Mayor of San Francisco went to the remarkable step of warning LA about his dismal record. They can’t say they weren’t warned.

IIRC New York is also going in that direction as their DA recently announced similar policies.

Clearly I do not have the level of understanding to have any idea what is going on, but the fact that this is happening is so many major metro areas in the United States seems completely absurd to me. Is it just a case of the criminal justice system completely buckling under strain?

The US systems are not designed to withstand subversion and sabotage. It costs a couple million [1] to install your DA in a large city such as LA and then you can effectively cancel law enforcement in the area because there is really no recourse against this, nobody thought before that the chief elected jurist will just refuse to do his job.

1. https://californiaglobe.com/articles/soros-dumps-another-2-5...

I'm not at all against these people being released after 24 hours on a misdemeanor. However if it's the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time you've been caught stealing packages from trains the punishment should definitely be increased. Is that not how it works?

This is precisely why "3 strikes you're out" laws were written.

They have their own issues, but now you can properly judge between their need and their issues.

3 strikes doesn't have to end in a life sentence - I think that is what was controversial, 3 felony convictions automatically resulting in a life sentence [1]. 3 train thefts and then you spend a week behind bars, or maybe compulsory rehab if the offender is an addict, is probably a reasonable deterrent. The present situation is drastically overreacting to older laws.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law

I agree that 3 strikes ending in a life sentence is excessive, but a week for 3 train thefts is absurdly short. Most of these cases will go unsolved. The expected reward for stealing from a train (or anything else) needs to be more than a few hours in jail. It's literally a well paying job to steal from a train for living at that rate.

No, unfortunately that’s not how it works at all. See my comment elsewhere in this discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29963965) for examples of how it actually plays out.

Can’t see your comment, it’s been flagged/removed/censored

That’s unfortunate. I did notice my comment had a little notice saying ‘flagged’ almost immediately after I posted it, but I thought that people could still access flagged content with a direct link. I’m not sure how these secret features of the website work.

Your early-on blame towards George Soros (a magnet for conspiracy theorists, and with an article from 2016) does not help your comment. It’s fine to disagree with progressive prosecutors, but support for them has not been growing from a single person’s political campaign contributions.

But that is also why I included a source for that note about Soros in my original comment. Commentary on George Soros is often labeled as conspiracy theory, but the reality is that organizations (PACs) funded by him have made campaign contributions to the very DAs that have implemented restorative justice policies. This isn’t a conspiracy theory - election law requires public disclosure of their campaign contributions. Both left-leaning (https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutor-ca...) and right-learning (https://nypost.com/2021/12/16/how-george-soros-funded-progre...) news outlets have covered Soros’s investments in getting progressive DAs elected.

Basically in LA County the elected DA isn’t prosecuting anything but the most serious crimes and even then is taking an approach of extreme leniency even in particularly heinous cases of violent crime.

https://www.city-journal.org/effort-to-recall-los-angeles-di...

There is no proof that anyone they arrested had their charges plead down. The mayor, govenor, and DA says they're charging criminals for felony crimes. So who do we believe?

>There is no proof that anyone they arrested had their charges plead down.

Yes, the same story exists in San Francisco, and it's difficult to ascertain, at the surface level who is telling the truth. The DA says police isn't bringing them cases, and the police days the DA isn't prosectuting.

Meanwhile the media runs with the story that "billionaire progressives" (the oxymoron that flies over everyone's head) are ruining west coast cities.

> "billionaire progressives" (the oxymoron that flies over everyone's head)

The term accurately conveys the hypocrisy at the heart of US "Progressivism".

While one can appreciate the candid and not at all surprising UP explanation as to the effective abrogation of justice in our coastal la la land, this is also a cop-out: train looting isn't some unexpected phenomena that started earlier this month; here is video of this happening in Chicago at least two years ago[1]. These operators are not taking the necessary measures to protect cargo; they're wallowing in the hope that this is an aberration because any other approach will cost money. Unfortunately our increasingly 'low trust society' has a cost and UP et al. need to figure this out and adapt accordingly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6lIqYoamo

What could they do? They increased the arrests (they have that authority, interestingly enough) and surveillance efforts, but the people they catch are back out on the street within 24 hours, just in time to catch the next train.

Perhaps, alter their schedule to ensure the train never stops in certain areas so there is no chance to hop on and open the locks?

How do they get out so quickly? Also i think in this particular case (since thefts are happening on private, fenced territory) it's easier to fix by a small adjustments in law, essentially allowing guards to shoot to kill on sight - so that thieves are not arrested, just eliminated. Normally that wouldn't be a possibility because of chances of mistakes, but here's there's no way to make a mistake - anyone within the fenced area not wearing a uniform and a service ID can be shot to kill on sight and that will be it. Put appropriate markings on fences.

The local prosecutor is extremely lenient and just lets even obvious serial offenders go under the guise of criminal justice reform.

Does the USA not allow for private prosecutions when the state declines to prosecute crimes?

I don’t think so, a private party can sue someone for money but not to directly pursue criminal charges to jail a person without the government being involved.

Only in a few states.

A militant railroad sounds like a fantastic dystopian backstory

Due to the LA’s “progressive” prosecutorial policies.

It’s seemed to be designed to artificially lower the crime and incarceration stats.

The train company actually runs it’s own police force. So it can arrest these people. Then they turn them over to the local authorities, which often doesn’t even book them. Some just pay a nominal fine like they might for speeding.

Except for the most extreme offenders, the LA DA let's everyone out the same day they're booked, and according to UP a lot of the thiefs aren't even being booked. I'd like to think there's a middle ground between the current situation and "shoot to kill"

I heard that in many cases thieves are able to sue back and sometimes win cases arguing they are victims of racism etc, which makes guards and business they guard, reluctant to push the cases. "Shoot to kill" may be a fix to this.

Also, just plain improvement of physical security may work, like electric fences and better locks.

Prevent the theft, don't just deter it through legal consequences. Increase perimeter security (barbed wire, electrical fence) so that it's harder to get onto the rails in the first place. Keep trains moving - don't park them for hours in dense metro areas with poor perimeter security. Get better locks.

Or, partner with Mark Rober to create a giant train-car-sized glitter bomb that will douse thieves in glitter and fart spray when entered.

Mark Rober solution is the only realistic option for California. Not likely they will incarcerate non-violent criminals.

Waste their time, stink up their homes and cars with fart spray, stick glitter on everything, and put the entirety of it on YouTube for ad revenue to pay for it all. Seems like a real win for society in absence of competent government.

Or just keep trains moving. I'm shocked that US freight trains are left parked for so long in areas known to be theft-prone with poor fencing. I don't think these kinds of thieves would risk their lives going after a train running full speed.

Trains in the US don’t just stay parked for no reason. The route that this article discusses goes to a train yard in LA, due to the logistics of __very long train__ and limited amounts of rail bandwidth, trains move very slow / stop at times when entering these facilities. It would be impossible for the train to be running full speed here.

Right. In other words the amount of vulnerable wait time is a direct consequence of wanting to fit ever increasing amounts of cargo on fixed infrastructure.

How do truck shippers protect their wares? 1 driver per truck with eyes on the load all the way through. If they have to take a nap, it's in the truck...

How do valuables travel? In armored cars with armed personnel.

The train company isn't entitled to its business model of very long trains with loose security.

> Prevent the theft, don't just deter it through legal consequences. Increase perimeter security (barbed wire, electrical fence) [...]

Surprise, surprise, now your novelty "Zinc Alloy Premium Wing Corkscrew Wine Bottle Opener with Multifunctional Bottles Opener" costs $24.99 instead of $13.99

We already all pay for theft via the embedded insurance premiums in shipping costs.

"This is the lockpicking lawyer, and what I have for you today is a padlock."

Possibly something like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVQTt4CgNZs

A $50 cordless angle grinder would defeat it, I would think.

Something like this might slow it down some https://m.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200315235_2003... but still, an angle grinder is pretty effective.

Wasn't there talk of just welding the doors shut and then grinding off the weld when they arrived at where ever?

That might slow them down. Though I doubt they are picking those locks. Pretty sure an angle grinder is a standard tool in arsenal of the criminals. They are not even that expensive. If they are two locks, two people can start cutting in parallel.

You guard your cargo, plain and simple.

If the thieves are back on the street, you're still on guard, what difference does that make? It's not like the guards should expect to go on vacation because they arrested a thief.

It not as easy to guard a 100 car long train. It can be over a mile long. It may make sense if there is only one short stretch where theft happen. Just have guards there every 50 feet perhaps. But that’s a lot guards still.

Who said taking on the burden of hauling so much cargo was going to be easy?

If they're taking on the responsibility, they must pass the security costs on and do the job properly.

We're talking about one of the most mature industries in the nation, having longstanding established legal exceptions to empower their success and stability. The violin appropriate here is so small I seem to have lost it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/us/complaints-rise-agains...

What exactly are you advocating here? That they shoot them?

The vast vast vast majority of the US runs on trust, and lack of crime. If every single business had to protect itself from any possible crime the entire country would grind to a halt.

There are countries like that in the world, and parts of the US. There are derogatory names applied to such places.

I do not wish a world where the only solution is "taking the necessary measures to protect cargo; they're wallowing in the hope that this is an aberration because any other approach will cost money." I wish a world where the rule of law makes such measures unnecessary.

"I wish a world where the rule of law makes such measures unnecessary."

That world is gone; only its vestiges remain and they're fading fast. This "rule of law" you cling to is considered a harm; one of a long list of inequities our Powers That Be are directing all of their effort -- literally every decision or indecision they take -- toward correcting. This is what their virtue demands.

> These operators are not taking the necessary measures to protect cargo; they're wallowing in the hope that this is an aberration because any other approach will cost money.

This might simply be the most cost-effective approach for now. Insure the cargo against theft to protect their customers, and call it a day. They can work on having better security that takes the "problem" into account while minimizing costs, but this would take some time to implement.

> Union Pacific agents have made hundreds of arrests, but less than half are booked

> charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine

So how does that affect statics? If they are not booked, and charges are dropped to a petty offense, it would look like the crime stats are trending down and the area is improving. “Look, burglaries and serious offenses are going, our policy is working so well!”

And when this behavior is being translated to more traditional city crime where residents typically are the ones calling the police for help, it also has the effect of demoralizing the factual reporting of such crimes (because "nothing happens anyways"), further decreasing the statistics which just become fake.

Then fast forward a few years, you end up in a situation like in San Francisco, where crime is clearly up to the roof everywhere you look, but you have local politicians saying - with confidence - that it is down instead.

I always imagine the DA people winking and nodding to each when they discuss the exciting downward trend in serious crimes due to their policy. They’d never put it “on paper”, so to speak, but they know exactly what’s going on.

The LA DA was previously DA of SF, and he was the main proponent of Prop. 47 that essentially decriminalized property crimes under $1000 so yes, he has form.

Wrong. Misdemeanors are crimes

The point is they're being treated as if they weren't, even though they are.

That's not what GP said at all

Gascon is the type of DA that you would see in a Batman movie, that is working for the villains. The decisions he has made on behalf of the criminals is shocking. It's as if he's trying to do as much damage as possible. The one that drew the line for me was the machete attack in Malibu by a homeless person where someone lost an eye and was disfigured. The assailant had months previously attacked someone with a knife, but Gascon only charged him with a misdemeanor so he was out and about.

As far as I'm concerned, Gascon is working with the criminals to maximize their damage on our society. The same is going for Boudin, but it seems that he will lose his job soon.

At first I thought you were confused across time and space, but apparently Gascon packed it up and went south and became the DA of LA County? WTF?

Yup, SF "upgraded" to Chesa Boudin and Gascon went South to LA to make it look more like SF.

I'd love to see how much revenue was lost from these thefts vs the average taxpayer cost of imprisoning all the involved folks for however long Union Pacific wishes they were locked up for. Ignoring the obvious slippery slope / long term effect objection, it'd be wild if it was actually cheaper to just pay the losses back and prosecute no one.

One problem with this approach, even if it's true, is that when you combine overprosecution of victimless crimes with rampant victim-ful crime, everyone loses respect for the system.

My guess is that in most cases it would be cheaper (in the short term) to simply have a train employee stand in from of the train distributing money for the robbers to walk away. Of course, long term that would have an awful ROI. The robbers would return every time, and more robbers would join them.

If you squint and change who is giving out the money this kinda looks like universal basic income

Using this same logic, why on earth should you ever pay for something less than $10? Maybe even $20.

Just having the cop drive to the store to talk to you is going to cost more than that.

Yea I know, this a bit facetious, this is essentially already the case.

The logical conclusion then would be that it is no longer economically viable to produce and sell the products on those trains, including things like EpiPens, so we simply would not have them.

If that's what we want, then that's the direction we're headed. Want to buy something for less than $1000? Too bad, it's not worth producing since it can be stolen with impunity.

What your proposed analysis misses is the cost savings from the deterrent effect of all the crime not committed.

To a large extent this is happening because people believe they will not be punished. If a group of criminals were actually locked up for 10 years, it would discourage others from committing the crimes at all in the future. That’s where the real cost savings - and value to society of punishing criminals - is.

According to the Department of Justice, prison time is not a very effective way to deter crime, and increased punishment severity does not deter crime: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr... (sources at the bottom)

Instead it claims the certainty of being caught is more effective than the actual punishment. And if Union Pacific is doing as well as they claim at catching the people responsible, what does that say about the motivators driving these people?

The page you linked has a large headline halfway through:

"3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished."

"Caught and punished" is the important part here. The problem is that today there is effectively no punishment and no consequence for getting caught. In fact, the people who get caught go right back to the railroad tracks and do it again, and brag to the cops that their charge was reduced to misdemeanor trespassing.

Even if it failed to deter others (which I don't concede), putting these people in jail would stop these same people from committing the same crime again, which at least would be an improvement over the current situation.

*UP, not Up

This is about Union Pacific, the railroad.

Anyone who believes that more severe penalties and a more potent criminal justice system has never been to Singapore. There’s a reason they have almost no crime there.

https://youtu.be/nQrTORBS-co

Terrible looking ghetto, video of the result of train looting.

You’d be amazed how much of our country resembles a third world if you look close enough. This includes virtually any city you can think of.

idk man, having lived in some third world countries for extended periods of time, I don't agree at all. Sure there's some really shitty parts of America, but the kind of living conditions you see everyday in 3rd world countries would be something that would be very unusual to see in America.

I've described the living conditions of the very poor in America to locals in these 3rd world countries and the universal consensus among the locals is that life in America is pretty great in comparison.

There is large variation in the affluence of third world countries. And there are large portions of US and large portions of the more affluent third world countries that are comparable in many ways (e.g. infrastructure) - in my experience, that is.

Social justice (“While we understand the well-intended social justice goals of the policy...”) doesn't seem to be working with the smash and grab thefts and now this seen in California.

Is this same type of crime activities happening in other cities and do they too have the same lax laws?

It is definitely happening in other cities. See my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29963965) for an example.

'The letter urged the District Attorney to reconsider the policy applied to these cases: “While we understand the well-intended social justice goals of the policy, we need our justice system to support our partnership efforts with local law enforcement, hold these criminals accountable, and most important, help protect our employees and the critical local and national rail network.”'

I don't understand the "well-intended social justice goals of the policy". And I don't think Union Pacific does either; they are forced by the prevailing social justice social norms to say that they "understand" these goals.

The longer this problem goes on at this level of severity, the bigger of a shitstorm the UP and DTLA are going to face.

Customers, companies, and the government are going to be pissed if trade and distribution of important supplies gets impacted because UP and DTLA are playing the passive blame-game and not stepping up to put resources to address the problem.

They can lie and say they are doing something, but where’s the effort when there’s videos of this happening and just a ton of garbage all over the place.

This is turning in an environmental disaster at this point as well.

Showing my naivety, but could someone explain to me how these sort of things are becoming partisan left/right issues?

I am based in Britain. I'm presuming London's mayor (Sadiq Khan) and many others comparable figures are significantly more left-leaning -- both economically and socially -- than their US counterparts in these cities. Yet, I can't imagine the London Metropolitan police would not come down on this sort of thing like a ton of bricks. It's not like socialist or communist countries haven't prosecuted or penalised theft historically.

Similarly, I keep reading on Twitter that the left in the US wants to ban calculus. How is this a leftist policy? I am pretty sure Soviet Russia streamed students based on ability.

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