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Comment by mtw | Hacker News Reader

Article seems to indicate it's not arrests but patrols that are correlated with theft. Patrols dissuade potential thefts

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The article also says they're in charge of 36,000 miles of track. Presumably the trains are only in smaller segments, but that's still impossible to patrol it all. There is no reasonable amount of officers that could cover all of the parked trains 24/7 anyway.

Without any actual consequences for getting caught, it's basically a minor inconvenience for the thieves. More officers just means slightly more inconvenience.

Seems like a job for a fleet of drones.

Drones that do what? Send video to the prosecutor who doesn't care? Shoot the thieves? I'm not sure the state of California would be down with that.

- Play classical music to annoy robbers - Take pictures to post to twitter - Follow suspects and personally sue - Shooting blinding light or less deadly bullets - Record footage,sell rights to clip brokers

Getting caught means being charged federally and the statue carries a maximum penalty of 20 years.

Half the people commenting on this post don't understand that railway theft is a federal crime which is handled by federal prosecutors in federal court, and has nothing to do with the "liberal governor" or "lazy California prosecutors".

On nearly anything related to societal matters not of a technological sort, HN commenters tend to demonstrate quite a bit of ignorance of the basic facts of the matter at hand.

Also: obviously you don't just patrol 36,000 miles of track: you patrol where the thefts happen (piles of packaging by the tracks), and on the trains. Since you know the schedule of the trains, you even know when people will be trying to do the robberies...

Then why did UP bring up the LA prosecutor?

Consider you may be misinformed.

Easy way to shift the blame, especially given public opinion at the current moment

>Getting caught means being charged federally and the statue carries a maximum penalty of 20 years.

Very few people (you plus one other) have mentioned that messing with interstate transportation is a federal crime. Which makes me think there is more to this that meets the eye.

Why have the news been focusing on local prosecutors if this is a federal matter? Why haven't federal prosecutors pressing charges?

I noticed in one article that the railroad referred to the crime as "vandalism." It could be that they are using charges such as trespassing and vandalism, rather than outright theft, to bring it under the purview of local authorities.

> Presumably the trains are only in smaller segments

The trains are in longer segments than ever before with the move to "precision scheduled railroading":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqdsQ8pFM2s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading

Sixty-eight thousand American railroad jobs were lost between 2015 and today due to PSR, from a local-maximum* of ~210k in April 2015 to ~142k in December 2021:

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES4348200001?amp%25253bdata...

[*] Down from 2.2 million railroad jobs in 1920, but BLS data only goes back as far as 1947.

Good point, I can understand that. I wonder what reasons were given for the layoffs.

well yes, that would be the outcome if arrests don't lead to charges --- they accomplish nothing

It says a lot about your citizens when they regularly steal.

Totes, people should starve to death before resorting to stealing. /s

You are saying the people who steal from trains would be starving otherwise? That's a ridiculous take, imo. As much as some Americans like to pretend that they are actually living in a 3rd world country & deny how privileged it is to even live there, the reality is that they are absolutely not. Even a minimum wage job in the US can get you above "starving" or even close to that point. Being poor in LA doesn't mean you're starving, and it's weird to assume that poor people just have to commit crimes and steal because they are poor.

Regardless, let's assume Los Angeles was such an economically desolate place for the poor. Well, it turns out that train robberies still aren't a common occurrence in even much poorer places so there must be something else going on too.

Because the only people who commit crime are desperate people struggling to survive? That's the level of argument you're on right now

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