I think increasingly that people in western societies are misunderstanding (and electing people to positions of power who misunderstand) the big picture purpose that law enforcement and justice system has played throughout civilized history. The primary purpose is to promote economic growth by reducing societal costs by deterring crime and fraud (including 'civil' fraud like breaking contracts) in an orderly manner. The purpose is deterrence and without effective deterrence, costs of "lack of trust" drive economic inefficiency that are felt both at macro level and individual level.
Where I live, people routinely leave bicycles and scooters outside when running errands, routinely take public transport and walk at any time of the day or night without fear and routinely leave delivery packages for collection at the doorstep just to give a few examples because the crime rate is low given strong deterrence. All this translates to lower costs individually, lower pollution, more efficient logistics leading to lower economic overheads and also a healthier than average population (exercise while taking public transport) leading to lower long term health care costs which enables the government to invest in more welfare state like measures wich in turn reduces crime further. Note however that social justice and welfare goals are advanced by other organizations in the Government, not the law enforcement organization.
Without deterrence, you get a negative spiral as we're beginning to see in cases like this where the purpose of justice system is being subverted to goals other than deterrence. These other goals are very important, but they need to be achieved by other independent organizations so you don't get the carrot at the cost of the stick being broken.
I'd also say a part of this I think is the end result of cash bail reform initiatives from 3 years ago. And the moving fast and break things when it comes to removing legacy code/public policy and rewriting from scratch.
This Vox video is probably the type of thought piece that spurned the populist cash bail reform initiatives that California embarked on 3 years ago.
I think the challenging part is that if you just listen to the Vox which provides no rebuttal to itself, it all seems logical?
But that's because it doesn't present the alternate reality that there do exist actual bad actors in real life who can thrive in causing societal level nuisances when there is a revolving door which we are seeing playing out right now.
Also its not always the low level street criminal that we envision that are most in need of being brought to justice.
The true criminals are mostly the people higher up managing the backend distribution who you don't see who are systematically taking advantage bail reform and of the low level actors who may indeed need the money for food - at scale.
The nice thing is that societally there probably isn't much disagreement that these higher ups who are buying second vacation houses with these "earnings" need to be held accountable.
For instance with the San Francisco retail thefts [1]:
"agents seized and recovered approximately $8 million of stolen merchandise from retailers across the San Francisco Bay Area"
"Video from a police stakeout shows Drago unloading trunkloads full of merchandise at one of his warehouses — mouthwash, cleaning supplies, shampoo, foot spray, over-the-counter medicine, and more than $1 million dollars worth of razors. Drago allegedly directs the boosters to steal small, compact items, with long expiration dates, and high resale value."
To add another dimension of irony if there's a similar pattern to the CVS/Walgreens shoplifting distribution mechanisms - the main distribution back into the system is Amazon and E-bay, etc.
"The stolen goods eventually find their way to Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Amazon, where they are sold at a steep discount. Dugan says there’s a big societal cost to saving a few bucks."
So in that case, Amazon stuff is getting pilfered only to back into Amazon to be sold as Amazon marketplace items - no questions asked.
> The true criminals are mostly the people higher up managing the backend distribution who you don't see who are systematically taking advantage bail reform
Well in my mind if one is setting up an LLC for a shell company with $8 million in inventory, that's probably hard to say you are hard pressed for money for feeding the kids.
I admit its probably my own imagination that if one has warehouses, cash counters and shell LLCs for this size of operation that one is also aware and actively figuring out how to exploit bail reform and sub-$1000 theft limits in a way akin to BigCo lawyers reading anti-trust legislation to figure out the loopholes.
"Working with the task force, investigators tracked the stolen goods to 16 different storage lockers, warehouses and homes across the Bay Area. Much of the goods were then sold online through what law enforcement says was a shell company ... they found cash, a high-speed bill counting machine, and multiple vehicles... they found stacks of hundred dollar bills. Drago’s money was laundered through real estate transactions and other businesses."
It seems to me that if an organization's employees are frequently arrested, then released easily and able to go back to work, that organization is benefiting from the easy release. It seems somewhat similar to how Walmart benefits from its employees getting Medicaid.
You don't need a quote from a Walmart executive to know that Walmart is benefiting from its employees getting Medicaid and food stamps. So similarly you don't need a quote from a criminal leader to know that the criminal organization is benefiting from lax law enforcement.
But I'm not finding good data on how lax the law enforcement actually is.
There are certainly a number of places pointing it out, such as a member of the board of supervisors of SF saying Thieves “are obviously choosing locales based on what the consequences are,” Safaí said. “If there are no consequences for their actions, then you invite the behavior. Over and over.”, Walgreens saying the thefts in their SF stores are 4x other cities, and CVS calling SF “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime”[1]. One woman stole 120 times[2]. Former assistant DAs say the DA "selectively enforces laws"[3]. The police say hundreds of repeat offenders are responsible for shoplifting in the city.[4]
On the other hand, the police's actual numbers aren't convincing:
>In 2018, there were 238 repeat offenders, 20% of them were rearrested. In 2019, there were 219 repeat offenders, 29% of them rearrested.
>While in 2020, there were 116 repeat offenders -- 33% rearrested.[4]
So the repeat offender numbers are going down. That seems to indicate no problem caused by bail reform. And why are the percent rearrested low? That seems like it's the police's fault, not directly a bail problem. Also, I'd be more interested in knowing the number of thefts committed by repeat offenders, rather than the number of repeat offenders. And especially what percent of thefts are committed by repeat offenders. Shoplifting has been declining in SF, and SF, while much higher in shoplifting rates than some cities, is also much lower than others.[5]
So I think it's obvious that lenient bail and prosecution will aid shoplifting groups, but it's unclear to me how lenient the bail and prosecution is, or how severe shoplifting is in SF.
Thanks for spurring me to look into this more; it's more complicated than I thought.
Society needs to bring everyone with it, otherwise there will be revolt. Its an ebb and flow. Living in a place where previously white people got police protection vs living in a place where there is more white people having crime committed against them?
This is exactly what the startup unicorns do - they disrupt. The scam world is computer savey, and feeds of information that hackers distribute. It could be said that we are part of the problem. Has your code been used in scam?
>Living in a place where previously white people got police protection vs living in a place where there is more white people having crime committed against them?
I don't think those are the only 2 alternatives. There's also the alternative of everyone getting good protection from crime.
People in the US are innocent until proven guilty. Ending cash bail hasn't seemed to lead to any more crime, and if there was we'd hear about people skipping court dates. In fact, letting people keep their jobs and kids probably contributes to less crime.
The California reform was initiated in March of 2021. This Union Pacific letter suggests UP has collected early data since those reforms have lead to more crime. At this point the reforms appear to be correlated with the issues they are seeing and that it really ramped up in October of 2021.
"In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties move.
These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours... Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals."
Agree - its early data collected and correlation does not equal causation but the bail reform proponents should be investigating if more if/else/case statements need to be added to the underlying bail-reform feature codebase to prevent site outages being reported by power end users.
It suggested that might be an issue, but note there were two prongs - no bail and extended timeframe for trial. Keep in mind, being denied bail won't extend your jailtime (if guilty) it just moves it pretrial.
Meanwhile, that same letter that spent 1/3 of a sentence mentioning bail talked about plea bargains for 2 paragraphs. I agree we have problems, but bail (or lack thereof) isn't the issue.
From reading news stories it’s the same people doing it. Mostly minors. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it’s interesting here in a year period from those jail changes we see over a 5x increase in those crimes.
Agree - and its not that bail reform is necessarily a bad new feature, it's just a feature that needs more A/B testing to get it right for all end users. Bug fixes are needed w.r.t. the existing implementations.
Bail-reform is probably a good feature worthy of keeping, just don't leave a potentially bug ridden implementation in production without a plan to fix it.
Also its for sure the same people running the backend operations. The front end people doing the stealing are somewhat interchange-able.
Its the backend APIs operating at scale that are the issue.
For example, regarding catalytic converter theft:
"This is a very significant step in stopping the widespread stealing of catalytic converters which have affected hundreds and hundreds of people in our county,"... 12 suspects are considered middlemen and thieves and the three other suspects worked at recycle businesses who knowingly purchased the stolen converters to sell... Green Metal Recycle... is suspected of possessing nearly $3,000,000 of stolen converters. "One of the officers said this is like a black market Costco and it really was," Rosen said. These businesses melt down the converters to get the precious metals inside- palladium, platinum and rhodium drive up the value.
Feels like they ran into Chesterton's fence and decided to tear it down. Then rather than rolling back the change, they've instead decided to push ahead with the broken implementation.
The bail requirement was dropped for motor vehicle theft. The article about increased crime is about carjacking. These are not the same crimes, and carjacking is far more severe. The new bail policies did not apply to carjacking.
Further, your article about "mostly teen" offenders explains in great detail that that statistic should not be taken at face value. Since such a small percentage (10-15%) of carjackers are caught, there is a likely skew to younger, less sophisticated criminals.
Far from proving your point, you demonstrate crime is rising in the baseline, unchanged, crimes. Therefore, you raise the amount of crime needed for the cash bailless crimes to be attributable to that factor and not larger social changes.
Repeated lowered cash bail caused this guy to die.
This is only one example from Philadelphia, there are quite a few examples in the past two to three years, coinciding with Larry Krasner. He absolves himself of responsibility in this case, but ran on a platform very explicitly reducing cash bail to reduce incarceration rates on lower level crimes.
Here is an article fairly in favor of Krasner, and he is quoted on delivering these things.
Philadelphia hit a high score of 500+ shootings last year, and over 700 carjackings. We're already over 100 carjackings this month. There is plenty of blame to go around depending on who you ask, police, Biden, Krasner, COVID, the mayor, the economy.
One thing feels more true than others: if you are in jail, you cannot commit crimes. The costs to society and other people in the city looks very high right now. Krasner was just reelected, turnout was very low, and so we have another two years to see how it goes.
The sentiment among my neighbors on my block is: be careful going to your car at any time, don't be out alone late, use rideshare not public transit if you're a late night service worker. At least a quarter of them want to move in the next two years, split evenly between renters and owners. Can't remember that feeling in the past twenty years.
I mean, your article goes into almost no details. What crimes did he get bailed out for? What was his role in the murder?
The problems with analysis like what you're doing is it just doesn't work. Like, suppose we locked up every person. Crime outside prisons would plummet! What if we made people wear GPS units at all time? Executed everyone who sped or worse!
What you have to show is that it made sense to deny him bail at the time.
This is not an either or situation. The point is if you commit a violent crime, you should be removed from society. This has a knock on effect of preventing that person from committing another crime.
Which article? On Josephus Davis? This was massive news in our city, Davis shot a dogwalker after robbing him.
The particulars on Mr. Davis:
He was released on reduced bail (300k->20k) for armed kidnapping the month before. He was also released after carjacking a rideshare driver the year before.
This is not a nice person.
>Like, suppose we locked up every person. Crime outside prisons would plummet! What if we made people wear GPS units at all time? Executed everyone who sped or worse!
Not sure why you're assuming I think this.
The purpose of showing this local story is that if there are not some kind of consequence to bad actors, things repeat themselves. Reform of cash bail appears to have side effects.
The hope is that who ever is proposing a new feature (i.e. bail reform) and then moving fast and breaking to add the new feature on a public facing server is not satisfied that the new feature is released and just leaving the resulting bugs that are causing the site to have outages in production.
Instead they need to put back on their work gloves and figure out how to deliver their promised feature (i.e. bail reform) while actively fixing the failure modes that their new feature introduced until all existing users are happy enough not to be submitting Jira tickets again.
Do you have any data or research connecting problems with bail reform? Beyond a doubt, any change like that will result in reactionaries complaining (and making up stuff about it), so that noise is not a signal of problems. That doesn't mean there aren't any, but let's focus on actual data and research.
Note that the people in the communities vote overwhelmingly for these reforms, and they are the ones living with the outcomes. A large proportion of people who have problems with it are outsiders.
>Note that the people in the communities vote overwhelmingly for these reforms, and they are the ones living with the outcomes. A large proportion of people who have problems with it are outsiders.
Speak for yourself. Boudin and Gascon both are facing recalls, and even Portland and Oakland are reversing changes to policy funding. More likely there's a sizable portion of the said electorate that's sick of bearing the brunt of this failed sociological experiment pushed by progressive gaslighting. Not to mention the survivorship bias of the many of our friends / family who got sick of it and uprooted.
Don't get me wrong - when I first saw the Vox video (and others like it) - I can't say I disagreed with it. However what it didn't do is present any of the rebuttal issues. Its weakness is it treats all people arrested equally in good faith, when at least some of the repeat offenders might need some culling.
And at this point it's still just a highly correlated but not necessarily causation [1][2] - until more underlying data with more context about the crimes/criminals. But the move fast/break nature of the roll out makes the a/b test feedback cycle challenging. Perhaps it should have been tried in one or two counties first.
And don't get me wrong either - I'm more than happy if the move fast and breakers can stick around and perfect the new feature (i.e. bail reform) by adding some additional checks. It's a worthy goal/feature. Perhaps all that's needed is a check like - "if you are arrested a second/third time we are going to have cash bail".
[1] California Supreme Court Nixes Cash Bail Some Defendants - March 25, 2021
[2] Original Post - "In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties move. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours... Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals.
There is no correlation I'm aware of. Two things happening around the same time isn't correlation. Furthermore, changes in crime rates across the country are similar regardless of the local DA policy (per the FBI's crime report), which would indicate a lack of correlation with bail policies.
> In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties mov
Crime for one private business isn't data supporting a correlation with actions that affect the entire city.
To be pedantic - two things happening at the same time are correlated but what is not necessarily proven definitively is that its causation.
And yes - its still early innings and the single data point is end user collected from a "bug report" by a major power end user (i.e Union Pacific).
But at the end of the day - UP is a power enterprise level user (of California as a Service) who happens to provide a useful add on service to a large chunk of the CAaS end user community.
I'd say as a proactive PM/dev responsible (i.e. Newsome, CA District Attorney, etc.) for championing the new feature (i.e. bail reform), I'd be attentively listening to all users of the community about their feedback/UX experiences and very actively thinking about tweaks to improve site uptime even before definitive data existed that pointed to my feature causing outages. Or concretely ensuring/proving its not.
> two things happening at the same time are correlated but what is not necessarily proven definitively is that its causation.
That part is incorrect: Correlation is defined as (A => B) AND (!A => !B). (I.e., that's a logical AND; both terms must be true.) Every morning, the rooster crows and the sun rises; that's not correlation because if the rooster doesn't crow, the sun still rises. (The actual definition of correlation is, IME, a very powerful tool for analysing through assertions.)
As you say, correlation does not mean causation, even using the proper definition. For example, two people completely unknown to each other may, over the course of an hour, laugh, cheer, and cry at the same time, in a highly correlated manner. But there is no causation between them; they are merely watching the same live TV show.
I don’t see how a year of arrests and no charges is even slightly defensible. We aren’t talking about bail reform here. We’re talking about are we going to do anything at all?
it's clearly a false dilemma but the people here saying "they A/B tested it wrong" just won't say that
this requires more inspiration to solve than just pointing at having vs not having cash bail
for now, they ended cash bail without implementing any additional system, and that has undermined a merely familiar balance in our society. there is nothing saying that balance could be restored while also not having a cash bail system, but people are pretending like these two concepts are intrinsically tied.
When I was young I knew people who stole (juvenile delinquents and some not so juvenile). Sometimes it was food sometimes it was other things. It was very rarely because they needed to. They were idle and did it because they could and would not get punished (back then cameras were not as prevalent.) Point is, more people steal because it's "easy" more than because they "have no alternative".
People sometimes think just because they would only steal as a last resort just before death that other people treat theft with the same moral compass. No, they don't. Some people are plain opportunists.
An easy way to verify is to see what is being stolen or looted. It is almost never produce, bags of beans or rice. It is often luxury brands, alcohol, electronics and stuff like that.
I don’t think we need more mandatory sentences or stricter laws, but simply turning the other way and not punishing this kind of behavior is also going to backfire. There has to be a balance.
I suspect it’s all designed to artificially reduce the crime stats (“if we don’t process or book them no crime was committed”) while at the same time getting extra points for social justice. Two birds with one stone.
Of course people aren't stealing fucking bags of rice and beans. Why would they? Stealing a
Louis Vitton bag selling it, then buying food, is far better in every way.
Because one idea is that they have to feed their children. It’s an urgent, desperate need. They are not doing it for fun, they don’t want to be criminals.
Well, it is easy to explain stealing a bag of beans to a judge, and most of all, to the starving children at home, than justifying waiting for a train, cutting the lock, getting the luxury Louis Vuitton sunglasses, bringing them home, putting them up for sale on Craigslist and waiting for offers, so then, they can finally go to the store and buy the bag of beans.
The story of feeding hungry kids doesn’t work as well in the later case.
Do we know these people are participating parents (rather than just of reproductive age)? I’m reminded of the children in India who get mutilated by pimps in order to appear more sympathetic to the people who give beggars money —the pimps only care about the money.
I see people mentioning children the same way people say children when talking about surveillance. It’s usually a tool for sympathy rather than real motive.
I am mainly going with the original narrative that a fundamental reason the people loot and steal is put food on the table —- they hate to have to do it, but they have no other choice when there are hungry mouths to feed. And, how assuming that premise, the actions we see don’t support it well.
I also have my personal experience noticing how a good number of people I knew thoroughly enjoyed the rush and the excitement of it. I couldn’t think of many who ever said they had no choice, had children to feed, but rather they would go on about how they hid from the cops, sold the stuff, such and such was stupid to get caught, etc.
I would like to believe everyone is kind and nice and doesn’t want to do those things, the reality I have been through doesn’t support it at all, sadly.
This was my experience as well. I've been far removed from that crowd. But yes, it was never due to dire need to feed mouths as many like to frame it. It was convenient, it was a rush, it was something to brag about -it was a quick buck. As I mentioned elsewhere, it lead on occasion to these guys ending up in the pen, then getting out and going back to the same thing. Sometimes they'd get hooked up with a real job for some time, but the side thing was always an option. Some people got out of it, some didn't. I've lost track now, so don't know, but some succumbed to addition and didn't end up well.
What's odd is you have people who are very ideological and dogmatic and refuse to believe this is the case. They don't see themselves becoming thieves just because, so therefore no one else would do such a thing.
But look, do people have to be in the mob? Is it risky to be in the mob? Do they not have any other options? Yet, people get in to the mob. It's not lucrative. They could get regular jobs, but no, they like the atmosphere --well, that was years ago before the feds pretty much put a lid on it.
You're right, stealing the food directly is more immediate. But assuming you're planning ahead or are selling to a known buyer, the Vuitton bag is far better.
Pragmatically - You have to steal fewer items with less security, so less risk of getting caught. It's lighter to move. You can use that money for clothing or rent. You can use that money to buy a lot more food.
Meanwhile, it seems as trivial to justify to a judge. You needed food, so you stole something to get food. Certainly, I consider it to be at least as moral as stealing the food directly, so I don't understand why it would be harder to justify. Unless your contending that stealing beans is obviously for feeding kids, but stealing a bag isn't? That is, you're asking for leniency and not debating morals. In which case I would ask you if motive matters to a judge or if that means your kids are more likely to get taken away or can you not get the same effect by just keeping better records? Receipts of how your spent the bag money.
>"The people committing this level of crime do need the income this theft generates to survive."
Later on I knew people who stole electronics --not as juveniles any more. It was just easy money for a night's work. They didn't have to put in 40. Didn't have a foreman. They'd brag about how easy it was...
So, I don't believe they have not alternative but this. It may be an "easier" option compared to other options, but it's not their last option. No. People in the Eastern block had less purchasing power than a poor person in the US. They did not have a culture of thievery. One, they were not a consumerist society and two, they would give no quarter to thieves.
So you think the people you knew growing up represent all people committing crimes?
That's a great way to ignore the problems of people not like you.
I'm sure you'll change your story to further illustrate how evil you think these people are, but the reality is they're not evil, and they don't really have other options, regardless of what went down in your world when you were younger.
Few people are evil. But a lot of people want the easy way out, especially if they are hooked on addictive substances. I knew these kinds of people. when I grew up, our household was in the bottom rung so I had some friends and acquaintances who made poor long term decisions --they may have looked good short term, a nice payday, little work, but then they have little work history or marketable skills when they go looking for a honest job. Occasionally they might get a hookup with a relative who could offer them manual jobs --construction, landscaping, etc. These are the guys who introduce you to fifi bags and other curiosities in life they learn up the river.
We seem to discount their lived experience. Perhaps it might help if you shared your experience? Do you happen to know some of the people involved in these incidents?
If I thought it was relevant I’d share, however it isn’t relevant who I am or what my anecdotes are, so instead I’ll point out your distraction as just that; a distraction from the real problem here, which is inequity.
No matter how many times you say otherwise, people would rather not steal. Fix their circumstances, fix their behavior. If you actually cared about solving the problem, you’d care about helping these people.
But no. For you, this is about petty vindictive retribution. Your inability to empathize with someone not like you creates a cycle of hate that’s self perpetuating, further exacerbating the problem rather than being effective in finding a lasting solution.
Well no, it's not a statement of faith, but it is a statement that presupposes you're familiar with human psychology.
I've got a number of other comments here at this point that cite sources which explain things better than I'll ever be able to, if you're actually curious, I recommend you read those sources (and others, "are people good?" is a fairly well trod area of psychology, and indeed philosophy).
Amazingly, someone on ND had reviewed footage from their drone and saw it had someone pointing a firearm at the drone so alerted people to be cautious around the area. An SJW came out and was like, "is it legal for you to record in public?" They were not concerned about illegal firearm usage, no, their first thought was, were the "rights" of a criminal infringed (no, there is no right to privacy in a public space). Dogma and ideology are amazing.
It's just easier and less risky to not commit crimes, the people who do commit crimes are almost always doing so as a result of some fundamental failure by society to give them tools to earn a living some other way.
If you were in their situation, you'd do exactly as they would, you just had a better situation in your life. We owe it to them to give them that shot.
I know it's easier to blame these people for their choices, but in a lot of cases, there never really was any other choice for them. "Just don't do crime" isn't really a choice you can make when nobody explains to you what else there is to do that gives you any real shot in this world.
I'll repeat, because it's important: you'd do exactly the same thing these people have done, if you had their set of experiences.
The fact that you think this has anything to do with personal responsibility makes it clear you don’t understand the circumstances these people find themselves in.
This has nothing to do with my personal philosophy and everything to do with what motivates people. Some people are bad yes, but the vast majority of people are not, and would not do bad things if they felt they had alternatives.
Why is it important to you to focus on the bad people, when there are many, many more people who aren't bad?
It has everything to do with your personal philosophy. I haven’t met a good person in my life. Here’s your philosophy: “Some people are bad yes, but the vast majority of people are not”
You’re telling me the vast majority of people wouldn’t take advantage of others if they ended up with serious power.
History and personal experience tell me otherwise. People are not basically good.
That's not a philosophy, that's rigorous observational results from a plethora of psychology studies.[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7] (and so on)
This isn't opinion, and these are just easily accessible sources. There are a lot more, and a lot more rigorous sources, if you're actually interested.
The alignment of incentives and the perception (or lack thereof) of choice does a lot more work than you apparently are aware of.
At this point, it seems like I'm trying to reason you out of an opinion you didn't reason yourself into, which is both sad and futile, so I'm going to stop.
| you'd do exactly the same thing these people have done, if you had their set of experiences.
Nonsense! It's possible you learned everything you know about people by reading it from a book.
This is a report from the real world: everyone (at least in the US) these days get a "shot" and while some are lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon, most people who are below middle class get lots of extra attention and resources paid for by everyone else (who work for a living). Opportunity is there and is often just left on the table in favor of anti-social (more entertaining) behaviors. Sorry, but it's true. If you want to "owe" other people something, go ahead, I'm tired of paying the bills for other people's sentimentalism.
What I find interesting is that, even here on HN, someone still confuses an anecdote with a representative study.
It may surprise you to learn how many people in my life have not gotten a "shot", how many have, and how many have gotten vastly more than their fair of a "shot" in life. Those are the circumstances, and when you find yourself in similar circumstances, with a similar set of life experiences as someone else, you tend to make similar choices as they would. Humans, generally, act similarly, all else being equal.
To quote MLK, "It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps." [0]
The people who are stealing from these trains are, by and large, men without boots.
What's curious to me is the absence of women. If it were people in penury and dire straights, you'd see more women doing it. But we don't. It's guys doing it.
> most people who are below middle class get lots of extra attention and resources paid for by everyone else (who work for a living).
Most of those people are working and paying taxes, as many benefits programs are stipulated on first having a job. Those benefits are also laughably terrible to non-existent, as well, and vary heavily from state to state.
Also, many people who are "below middle class" are not eligible for the programs, anyway. The federal poverty level is something like $12k a year for an individual, and benefits are cut off if you earn more than that.
> most people who are below middle class get lots of extra attention and resources paid for by everyone else (who work for a living).
No, the people that work for a living are the people below middle class, hence why the class below the (petit bourgeois) niddle class in capitalism is known as the “working class”.
We have daily examples of white collar crime. These are people with well enough paying jobs.
Most people will not embezzle from their company —but some will despite not needing to and being aware of the risks. They just have the opportunity to. The same behavior happens in other spheres.
Most theft is not due to impending dire straights. It’s opportunity for quick cash of loot without needing to go through the tribulations of getting a paying gig.
If you need a citation to tell you that it's easier and less risky to not commit crimes, you're not engaging honestly in this conversation.
As for the claim that you'd behave as they would, were you in their situation, that's basic Situational Action Theory [0], a well studied theory in criminology that attempts to explain crimes as moral actions.
The irrational focus on the relatively small number of "because I wanted to" type crimes is very popular in conservative circles, but isn't an accurate or helpful view of why crime is committed, and it's not shared by the plurality of experts who study this topic academically.
> Most people don't want to steal, but many more do because they feel they have to.
That’s sort of the problem here. Different fundamental models of human motivation and behavior. I don’t really have an answer one way or another but I would disagree that most people who steal do it reluctantly and don’t enjoy it. Or, they do it to put food on the table. I have lived in places with pervasive crime. Some of my acquaintances growing up were in and out of jail over various things including including burglaries, assault, and all kinds of horrible things I would rather not mention. A good proportion of them enjoyed the rush and the excitement.
I looked up a few videos of looting it’s almost never produce, food or clothing. But big screen TVs, electronics etc.
There has to be balance between lock everyone up for small amounts of drug use and not referring even a single one of the 100+ arrested looters for prosecution and just saying they are so poor so they have to put food on the table, and train companies can afford it anyway.
I'm convinced that none of the people who are stealing from trains in California lack food or a roof under which to sleep. However, I think they are overwhelmed with sights of the rich and glamorous while at the same time underwhelmed with their lives and future prospects. Too many people want to get rich quick, and that's most true in American cities. Trains with valuable cargo that is easy to carry become a sitting duck when they are stranded for a prolonged time in a US city.
This is a theory that doesn't fit the facts. The US has some of the highest prison sentences of any first world country. Where I live, there are some of the shortest and gentlest, and yet, crime is very low. There is no correlation between harsh 'deterrence' and low crime.
Honestly, that sounds plausible, but how would you achieve higher conviction rates?
You're not going to get far with the current US police. If you compare the money put in to the crime stats, the picture is one of an extreme inefficiency. They've failed in their mission to such an extent that a large minority of people simply don't trust them enough for them to do their duty to those people. They've preside over a third-world crime rate with first world tax revenues.
At this point, it would be reasonable to start talking about a wholesale reboot of the whole operation.
However, if that's too radical, or too expensive, it would seem pragmatic to try and target crime through some other mechanism - e.g. welfare.
I could easily steal my neighbor’s packages, and it has nothing to do with deterrence being why I don’t. I don’t steal from them because I am not envious of them and they are more or less my equals, and I have no need to steal from them.
If that ever stops being the case maybe solve that problem first and understand how to go back to when deterrence wasn’t even necessary.
I agree it's not only deterrance (cops cared just as little when my gps was stolen in a good neighborhood versus in a bad one). You still need to ability to compare risk versus reward sanely. People I've known who couldn't hold a job always had emotional/mental issues. They hated authority so much they'd rather be unemployeed than have a boss telling them what to do. If they did have a job they'd sabotoge it one way or another.
If you did lose your livelihood I suspect you would fare better due to the same impulse control and ability to delay gratification that led you to be temporarily wealthy in the first place.
Where I live sounds a lot like where he lives in terms of property crime (this place is no pinnacle of law and order, quite the opposite really). People in my state joke about it being "bad" but unless you leave your $1k road bike unlocked within view of the street for a long time it's probably not gonna grow legs. You don't see people engaging in crime with a victim in broad daylight
It's a blue city in one of the bluest states in the country, if that's what you're asking. The social services are about as good as you're gonna find in the US. The city shares a border with a slightly smaller urban area in one of the lower service red states (they haven't even legalized weed yet, not that that's a service). That side of the river is not noticeably higher or lower in crime.
This rampant petty property crime problem seems to follow specific public policy, not any other variable.
Social services in LA are quite awful and have been since I was a child, from public transportation, to public education, to assistance for the homeless, to access to health care, to water quality, to police services (and corruption), to fire services, to road maintenance, to traffic management.
Much of this is due to the design of the region: the greater Los Angeles area is a sea of concrete in a desert, that extends for 100 miles in every direction. It's impossible to run as a region efficiently and requires a massive amount of effort to provide services for.
Central business district neighborhoods are generally wealthy and they tend to have some of the highest property crime rates outside of low-income neighborhoods. And it’s not because CBD’s are poor. Professional criminals understand it’s most profitable to steal where the money is.
You said they live in the “wealthy” part of the city. The point being, even in wealthy places like Manhattan in NYC or SoMa in SF there’s plenty of petty crime. In other words, crime is not exclusive to non-wealthy neighborhoods.
This isn't true. There are many poor communities where enforcement is effective and theft and crime are low too. It is all about the expectation of consequences and community standards.
Yes, many wealthy communities have lower crime. Criminals have easy access to many of these areas but don't go there to steal because the chances of consequences are higher. In contrast, there are communities where the thieves can steal with essentially no risk.
> The primary purpose is to promote economic growth by reducing societal costs by deterring crime and fraud (including 'civil' fraud like breaking contracts) in an orderly manner.
What is that based on? I can see wealthy property owners thinking that - that the police are there to serve their personal interests, including by enforcing the laws they control to a large degree - but I don't know any basis for it nor do I think other segments of the population would agree.
In fact, it's arguable that law enforcement has been to a great extent about power: The powerful suppressing the weak, such as minorities.
> The purpose is deterrence
If you mean, the primary means of law enforcement is deterrence, it seems plausible but there is a lot of research out there. Again, where does this theory come from?
Also, how is locking up innocent people a form of deterrence? That seems to be a form of oppression.
> Without deterrence, you get a negative spiral as we're beginning to see in cases like this where the purpose of justice system is being subverted
Crime rates are generally very low. Homicides and shootings have increased, but relatively equally across the country, in large and small communities. (source: recent FBI crime report) Where is the evidence that particular policies are causing an increase in crime?
> Where I live, people routinely leave bicycles and scooters outside when running errands, routinely take public transport and walk at any time of the day or night without fear and routinely leave delivery packages for collection at the doorstep just to give a few examples because the crime rate is low given strong deterrence
I've lived in places like this, as well. Except it didn't come down to the existence of the police, but the fact that it was a middle to upper middle class neighborhood where nobody had a reason to commit petty theft. Deterrence wasn't a factor at all with the people that lived there when it came to buying and selling drugs like cocaine, for example.
Truthfully, I think most property crime would be stopped in its tracks if people didn't have economic reasons to commit petty theft.
> I think increasingly that people in western societies are misunderstanding (and electing people to positions of power who misunderstand) the big picture purpose that law enforcement and justice system has played throughout civilized history.
If we look at the history of policing in the US, we didn't have municipal police forces for quite some time. In the North in port cities, merchant owners would hire security at their ports, and decided that it would be cheaper to instead make it a government service that everyone pays for instead of just the merchants[1]:
> In cities, increasing urbanization rendered the night-watch system completely useless as communities got too big. The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the South, policing rose out of gangs of slave patrols[1]:
> In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
Ultimately, the origins of policing in the US from wealthy owners wishing to secure their expensive assets from theft, destruction, or in the case of slaves, escape, and also not wanting to pay for that security themselves. Later those police forces served those same owners by serving as strikebreakers[1]:
> For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests. For example, people who drank at taverns rather than at home were seen as “dangerous” people by others, but they might have pointed out other factors such as how living in a smaller home makes drinking in a tavern more appealing. (The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places.)
> Truthfully, I think most property crime would be stopped in its tracks if people didn't have economic reasons to commit petty theft.
As someone who grew up poor this type of racist/classist argument is insulting. The poor have morales, values and pride too. The people robbing these trains are criminals and do not represent the community they live in. Frankly your hurting poor kids by allowing these criminals to be present and act like role models.
> As someone who grew up poor this type of racist/classist argument is insulting. The poor have morales, values and pride too.
I grew up very poor, as well, around plenty people who sold weed when it was illegal to pay rent because the other option was living on the street. The truth is that if someone is hungry, they aren't going to just curl up, starve and die. Even more so if their kids are hungry. I don't think that makes them bad people at all, and some their choices may even be the most moral actions to take.
I'm not making a moral argument or judgment at all with that statement, I'm just stating the simple fact that theft will happen if people are deprived of the property they need to live. It seems that society has chosen to hire people to beat and imprison others as the solution to theft, instead of choosing to alleviate the deprivation of resources that causes most of it. Truthfully, I think the former option is what's racist and classist.
If you think every hungry person is a thief, and the rich don't have a motive to steal, I'm not sure what to say. Humans in all situations are capable of greed and selfishness.
I would bet dollars to donuts that the proceeds made from these thefts went into drugs, alcohol, and entertainment than proving for any basic needs.
Rich don’t have a need to do petty theft. Most of these laws do target the poor and the problems of the poor, like drug abuse, petty theft, etc. Whether you like to believe it or not incidences of these crimes afflict the poor significantly more than a handful of middle class kleptomaniacs.
Oh, I fully agree that the poor more commonly commit and are victims of petty theft. What I disagree with is that hunger would even be in the top 10 drivers. Greed, addiction, antisocial disposition, lack of opportunity costs, are all far more significant. The idea that your typical thief is usually trying to put bread on the table is some sort of perverted noble savage fantasy.
Not everyone has to be a saint to be part of society. There are plenty of people that wouldn't be in a life of petty crime if they had better options. The fact that we have more train thieves than say any other given country is more to do with our lack of opportunities for these people than the fact that we aren't disincentivizing it enough. Plenty of places that have fewer disincentives for crime yet have less crime. Disincentives can work as a brute force method, but if there is an underlying reason why certain minorities or groups of people are inclined to what we have defined as a crime in society, then brute force methods will just push them toward alternatives, and it may not necessarily be finding a good 9-5 job as you suggest.
Sorry of that came off as a straw man, I was trying to cut to what I saw as the core of your position, i.e. "the deprivation of resources that causes most of it" (theft).
Theft, like all of human behavior has many causes. You can look at what differentiates thieves from the working poor with similar lack of resources to determine some of the causes. Alternatively, you can look at what is in common between rich and poor thieves.
I have known far too many honest and hard-working poor people to believe that a lack of resources constitutes either a necessary or sufficient cause of theft.
If your primary point was that a hungry person will steal to feed themselves, I agree but don't think it is relevant to the social problem at hand.
If you were to ask me, I would say that people steal when they have little to lose, including integrity and empathy for their victims.
Crime is not the same as morality. A starving, homeless resident stealing a sandwich from the corner store might be theft. But I think most people wouldn’t say that that particular theft was immoral.
Of course the people stealing from the railroad aren’t necessarily pilfering items to meet an immediate human need. But according to reporting this weekend from the LA Times, some of the thieves do indeed live in camps near the railroad. And who knows why they’re stealing — maybe one needs cash for insulin and another is fueling a drug addiction.
In either case (and this is a hot take) I’d still argue these acts aren’t necessarily immoral. Addiction is a powerful force, perhaps more so than urges of hunger and thirst. And of course no one wants to die of uncontrolled diabetes!
But why doesn't that hungry homeless person go to one of the many charities, community kitchens, etc. that hand out food for free with no strings attached? Most likely because they are in a place selling food, they know there is no punishment if they just take it, so they do.
Off the top of my head, charities might be closed, they might be banned from a given location (perhaps for stealing from the charity’s other clients) or perhaps they’re ignorant of the available resources.
That sounds like rationalising away bad behaviour.
If there are many good options and the person performs the one with maximal negative effects on society, I'm perfectly happy to hit him with punishment. I'm more amenable to necessity, but that's not what you're talking about here.
He’s Saying we should reduce the wealth gap. Not all criminals are doing it because they were born assholes. Otherwise you’d have to believe America just has some underlying reason why we have a higher asshole per capita ratio?
What about "increased wealth disincentivises petty property crime" is either racist or classist?
> The people robbing these trains are criminals and do not represent the community they live in. Frankly your hurting poor kids by allowing these criminals to be present and act like role models.
No one said anything about criminals being representative, or about them being role models except you.
> The poor have morales, values and pride too.
Lots of rich people don't, they just commit different crimes.
Your reply is what I find insulting. You speak as though poor life is good just as it is, as though all that’s needed is to “respect” the poor just the way they are. Frankly, when I hear people talk this way, it makes me want to commit a crime myself!
> In the South, policing rose out of gangs of slave patrols[1]:
A sort of poetic statement that has some kernels of truth but is incredibly reductive to the point of being untrue save for a handful of municipalities where former slave patrollers actually headed municipal police. The overwhelming majority of police forces have little, if any, connection to slave patrols.
It concedes that there's an indirect connection in some places. But it explains how simplistic this is:
> First, every decent country has police, including the non-white ones. Second, the South lost the Civil War. Under Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans imposed the North’s will on the South. The slave patrols were disbanded. Some patrollers did indeed become police. But so did African-Americans. Meanwhile, the evil energies of the patrols were primarily expressed elsewhere—in the form of vigilante groups like the KKK. When Reconstruction ended, the South imposed tyrannical Jim Crow laws.
The only known case of a former slave patrol organization becoming a municipal police force is in Charleston South Carolina. Slave patrols were a mostly irregular force, tasked with policing a mostly rural agricultural enslaved population. And when the civil war was lost, these patrols were disbanded. Only in a few instances did slave patrols actually become police, like in Charleston.
That's still largely a rebuttal of the broader claim that policing in general has its origin in slave patrols - a claim the original comment didn't make. You can argue the narrower claim is still in some ways inaccurate but your own link just doesn't support the position that it's "incredibly reductive to the point of being untrue". Otherwise why would the author write:
Yes, policing in Southern slave states has some roots in slave patrols.
There's a vast difference between "some roots" in slave patrol and trying to say that southern police "rose out of gangs of slave patrols". Those slave patrols were disbanded, and police forces were formed often decades after the abolition of slavery. Justification of this claim is indeed possible, via pedantic exercise of stretching the meaning of "rose out of" to cover a very wide ground.
Roman tradition still forms the basis for many police institutions across much of Europe. Most of Europe and the Americas didn't abolish slavery until a few decades before the US did. Some actually didn't abolish it until decades after US emancipation. One could make a claim that their police forces are rooted in enforcement of slavery, in the same vein as the South. And even stronger ones for much of the Middle East and North Africa, some of which didn't actually make slaver a crime until the 2000s (I kid you not [1]). If you believe what is going on in Western China, you could argue that slavery is still practiced, under the watchful eye of law enforcement. My point is that pointing to the history of policing in the US as uniquely tied to slavery is pretty disingenuous if you're taking a good faith reading of the history of policing. It's acting like there isn't a country and a half between the police forces of 1860 and 2020.
Sure but you're moving the argument to something else, closer to your linked article and other things entirely. I don't really plan to debate either the history of US policing or chattel slavery - my point is only that if you're going to correct someone in such strong language and cite something as the basis for your correction, the cited thing should support your claim. I don't think it does.
I said from the beginning that it had some kernels of truth, but is reductive and simplistic. I don't think that's particularly strong language, I have since the beginning acknowledged that you can put together the kernels to truth to claim a sort of poetic truth - it's not a total fabrication. But that's all it is: a poetic truth. Actual truth of continuity between slave patrols and municipal police forces only exists in perhaps one southern city. The overwhelming majority of police forces do not have their roots in slave patrols. Slave patrols were disbanded, and police forces formed after abolition.
That's essentially summarizing the article: slave patrols existed in much of the south, but claiming continuity with today's police is a very big stretch, to the point where it's only poetically true.
I think he makes a reasonable point. Even a source that acknowledges some connection makes it clear that saying that policing in the South "rose out" of slave patrols is a far overreach.
>In the North in port cities, merchant owners would hire security at their ports, and decided that it would be cheaper to instead make it a government service that everyone pays for instead of just the merchants[1]
You realize that cost of theft would otherwise be passed on to consumers? It's not exactly a free lunch to get merchants to pay for their own security. Also, I'm sure you can invoke the "it would be cheaper to instead make it a government service that everyone pays for" excuse for any other government service. eg. roads, military, education, etc. Should we look at those services with the same type of cynicism?
Deterrence is one reason to punish people. There is also retribution (or vengeance), rehabilitation (making the person productive) and isolation (murderers aren't free to murder again)
Uh, what? How did making blacks sit at the back of the bus improve economic efficiency? It may be argued that many legal systems, far from being a boon to economic productivity, actually hindered growth in many nations due to their use in oppressing underclasses for the benefit of a ruling "elite," i.e., rapacious predator class.
Reality isn't so nice and theoretically pure. People want power and they develop various systems to gain and secure their power.
> The primary purpose is to promote economic growth by reducing societal costs by deterring crime and fraud (including 'civil' fraud like breaking contracts) in an orderly manner.
Source please. There’s actual studies promoting things like bail reform that use actual data and such. Do you have anything like that, or are you just preaching from your privileged bubble with no idea what it’s like to be on the other side of the justice system?
The data are in, the experiment has been done, and the conclusions are undeniable: it is a complete disaster.
Anyone who thinks criminals are “good people in bad circumstances” and “having to be a criminal is punishment enough for their crimes” is just wilfully ignorant.
One can’t help but wonder if people pushing these policies are victims of “no-consequences positive parenting” 30 years later. Those policies can work fine in a loving home - not so much in the adversarial and violent world of society at large.
> The data are in, the experiment has been done, and the conclusions are undeniable: it is a complete disaster.
This is no experiment. This is a single case in a single city that may have been avoidable with other policy decisions.
> Anyone who thinks criminals are “good people in bad circumstances” and “having to be a criminal is punishment enough for their crimes” is just wilfully ignorant.
Ah, the real bias comes out now.
> One can’t help but wonder if people pushing these policies are victims of “no-consequences positive parenting” 30 years later. Those policies can work fine in a loving home - not so much in the adversarial and violent world of society at large.
> the big picture purpose that law enforcement and justice system has played throughout civilized history. The primary purpose is to promote economic growth by reducing societal costs by deterring crime and fraud (including 'civil' fraud like breaking contracts) in an orderly manner.
Yeah, that's just not true. I'd say it's at least somewhat true of the past 300 years or so, but for most of the history of civilization, economic growth was negligible and generally not an important consideration for governments.
More than 300 years ago it was more like economic survival vs. growth. Adam Smith talks about the supply of labor being limited basically due to human starvation.
I've had 3 of 3 packages go missing in the last two months, all traveling via train through L.A. Either I'm rather unlucky or the thefts are rather thorough. I see some people complaining about their packages being stolen, but if the thefts are that thorough I would expect to see many more. My conspiracy brain can't help but imagine the possibility that discussion of this is being gently suppressed because business don't want people to stop buying things. I've had to stop buying things for now. I hope this is properly resolved soon.
I placed an order just this month from Costco, with UPS sending three separate "Shipment has left LA" notifications repeating every few days, and the "UPS 3-day delivery" ended up taking over two weeks in the end. The 4th delivery attempt then originated from Canada and did arrive. I didn't have to do anything about it, and it didn't show any errors like "oops we lost the package". This makes me think that they did lose the package(s), and either UPS or Costco just ate the cost.
As they should. The simple solution is to raise the costs to make freight delivery profitable through what is now apparently lawless California. Each Californian served by this route should have to pay a California surcharge to pay for insurance and the cost of reshipping when a train robbery occurs.
Or you know, California could just enforce the law. But the people have voted and spoken.
Yea one of the greatest lies in ecommerce is “free shipping” and now that Amazon has a near monopoly: “free returns.” In fact in a competitive market businesses would undercut each other to the point they can’t do free returns, which is why Amazon started introducing it after they gained market share. Both these seemingly pro-consumer policies (along with zero liability on lost shipments) is really just a mandatory upsell (think shipping insurance), but where the costs are opaque and built into what you already paid.
The nice thing about free returns is that the merchant gets WAY better pricing from shipping companies.
I think people would be OK with a fee for returns, if it wasn't high. But asking people to pay retail for returns is not realistic, and I personally won't shop from stores that make me do that.
Free returns aligns incentive structures to where the vendor loses money if they sell me junk I want to return.
I don't do returns hardly ever, because of the hassle factor. I don't buy from vendors who don't support them, because the amount of scammy behavior goes way up.
I do agree that's one of the nicer effects (but it's not the only thing aligning incentives because there are reviews/reputation measures), but it also upsells you on the cost of all the non-legitimate free returns being made (lack of effort in reading product descriptions, "free rentals", general consumer carelessness, "accidental damage", and such). So at the end of the day the consumers still bear negatives of this structure (increased the costs of this), but the retailer benefits from increased sales.
Also what you say works more for unique direct-from-manufacturer sales and applies less to commodity products sold by Amazon.
There's no need for "free" returns on the PS5 you just bought because that product's reputation is well-known. You're just paying for the retailer's costs to reduce all friction from sales while they get all the benefits.
I think the phrase 'eat the cost' is apt, and I agree that we will pay through higher prices. It would still cost them money that they otherwise would have made. Perhaps the major beneficiaries are the freight insurance companies.
If you look at the litter along the tracks in the YouTube videos, you'll see that it's largely small consumer-level packages. I was surprised that there would be containers of those.
Railroads really really hate containers with a passion. Anything that doesn't need to be refrigerated or go on a boat, they will press hard to put it in a boxcar. Or in a 16-foot truck trailer sitting on top of a flatcar (used to see those go by all the time with UPS logos on them).
It's been years since I've seen a boxcar in an actual train. All the trains I see have double-container cars these days but hardly ever an old-school boxcar. They're as rare as a caboose.
I remember helping a local factory tear out all their boxcar lines from their warehouses 25 or 30 years ago to make room for additional racking to fill tractor trailers.
You probably live near one of the few containerized ports.
I used to live out in the middle of nowhere, but 300 feet from the BNSF transcontinental line. It was all boxcars, flatcars, bulk-goods hoppers, and tank cars.
Oh yeah, and the occasional finished airplane minus the wings.
Boxcars are still alive and well, anywhere other than near containerized ocean ports.
Regarding the warehouse, yes, trucking has taken over a massive amount of what used to be rail traffic. No doubt.
You probably live near one of the few containerized ports.
Sorry, I missed your response. I live near the lane between Detroit and Montreal. In the middle there's a very large intermodel yard north of Toronto. So 90% of what I see behind a train is containers, automobiles, lumber, grain, and tankers. From reading up on it, box cars remain popular with moving paper products, which makes sense to me as you can load much more weight than on a truck and time in transit is less of a concern than with other more sensitive products, less dense products.
That's what I heard as well, they also said thousands of packages. If it was thousands of packages then I would have to have been incredibly unlucky to have 3 for 3 out of thousands. That number must be off by at least a few orders of magnitude. I've also separately heard that Amazon, USPS, and FedEx is being targeted.
Interesting. Which shipper provides that level of specificity, and do you have to pay extra for it?
I've only seen the city name and some value description like "Fedex origin city" or "Fedex hub"
Given how large LA is, it would be reasonable to have the port, railhead, airport and local distribution centres as separate locations on the tracking list.
I see things like "Prague Airport FedEx hub" with FedEx in Europe.
Refunds / replacements are in progress. I think customer service is a bit stretched at the moment. I'm not sure about the law but I think you have to receive the item to be considered to have taken delivery.
They are smaller boutique vendors and USPS and FedEx still have the packages as 'in transit'. Only the first package is considered lost by USPS and that was after 6 weeks of no updates and two escalations. At that time I had no idea train thefts were going on. The goods are expensive and low margin. I imagine it's not typically worth insuring though as it would normally be worth playing the odds. I would imagine having so much systemic theft at the same time would be crushing such vendors.
I would imagine they’re overwhelmed atm. I think being a serious crime has kept the theft down for some time. Before this I’ve only had one package go missing in 10 years and I think that’s because the package was super tiny and got lost.
>My conspiracy brain can't help but imagine the possibility that discussion of this is being gently suppressed because business don't want people to stop buying things
who cares? the merchant is shouldering the risk of theft, not me. if the price is good I'll still buy it.
If the word came out that your two/three day delivery is going to now take two weeks people would probably shop differently. There's a lot of stuff I don't buy locally because going to the store that has it on the Bay Area is expensive as I don't have a car. If shipping is going to be between one day or two weeks because logistics are unreliable I'd consider the expense.
"In mid-December 2021, Adrian Guerrero, Union Pacific’s general director for California and Pacific Northwest operations, wrote to Gascón asking him to reconsider his December 2020 Special Directive 20-07, directing county attorneys to decline to prosecute or dismiss before arraignment charges including trespassing; loitering; being in possession or under the influence of drugs, drug paraphernalia, or alcohol; and making criminal threats or resisting arrest."[1]
So, what I would deduce from some googling is that LA prosecutors are essentially declining to prosecute the homeless camping on railroad tracks and UP at least thinks this gives criminals an opportunity to act.
While the idea of "not criminalizing homelessness" is appealing, what is really needed is solving the problem because a permanent gray area of homeless illegally camping somewhere sooner or later will provoke a reaction.
So in other words no matter how much security UP puts in place it is pointless because they same people they turn over to police for prosecution will be right back tomorrow. Other option is then physical barriers which doesn't really seem feasible. So I can see why they are trying to figure out if they can just avoid the area entirely.
In another article it was mentioned that some cars are being welded closed because locks aren't enough to keep thieves out. So now it's a question of if the thieves show up with something to cut through the welds and if that extra time and effort will be deterrent enough.
Simply not true. As you can see in this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQrTORBS-co the tracks are both like that before the derailment and the containers on the derailed train are intact. That massive number of torn open packages is from before the derailment.
I think OP means that the train derailed, then people robbed it while it was stuck and couldn't flee.
I don't think the derailment caused all that crap to fly out of the train. Nor do I think that one train got looted, and the debris derailed the following train.
Exactly. Theft happens every day, orders of magnitude greater values get stolen from people, often by corporations, but when people steal some packages from a train or shoplift from Walgreens, that’s somehow the horrible and shocking news story.
How many “OMG people are stealing from corporations and getting away with it!” news stories have been published in the last 30 days?
I guess it only counts as societal breakdown when there’s viral video of it.
I was moreso thinking the juxtaposition between the scattered boxes in contrast to the soaring cityscape in the background. It was a visible sign of the class divide to me, and an example of how the upper echelons (skyscrapers) are above and unaffected by the mess below.
Right, so humans are opening the boxes and looking inside. Not exactly a quick or efficient way of stealing. As opposed to backing up a truck and carting off the packages by the truckload.
I wonder if the US police in LA is starting to become like the local Mexican police, ie. corrupt and working with the criminals; where the "Federal Police" and then the Army has to step in to reign-in local police corruption. -- I say this because of the statement in the letter, where UP mentioned that they were never contacted in regards with any of the arrests made.
They were never contacted in regards to court proceedings. That’s different and involves a charging decision by a prosecuting attorney, in this case Garcón or his staff. In the US you can be arrested, held, and prosecution declined. It happens routinely and the police have absolutely nothing to do with it (short of what they charge and allege informing the decision by the prosecuting attorney). UP is saying that LAPD/LASD and their own peace officers are making arrests and subsequently step two isn’t happening.
They’re right, too. Declination of prosecution is the remedy specifically prescribed by 20-07 for some offenses, notably trespassing. Whereas before this was a subjective call by a prosecuting attorney (i.e., redirecting troubled folks to get care), Garcón has made it proscriptive with little regard for the circumstances. That’s what UP is fundamentally protesting here. In case it’s not clear, they’re barking at and low-key threatening Garcón with this letter, not the police (but it’s a rather weak threat; UP avoiding LA county doesn’t impact the DA nor county much).
The two halves of American justice are often unclear and blend together. I get that it’s easy to blame the police here, but they honestly have pretty much nothing to do with it. I say that as someone who considers LAPD and LASD hostile entities in the general case, to reinforce for you that this is just a misunderstanding of how arrest and charging works in the US (it’s common).
“Starting to become” implies that they haven’t already been like that for some time.
Look up the shenanigans with the LA County sheriffs department essentially stealing property owned by LADWP to build an illegal helicopter pad near the sheriff’s residence.
Or how the county sheriff just brazenly ignores court summons.
Or look at the crazy manhunt that left several citizens dead because the LA city police didn’t want a former-marine police trainee to spill the beans on how they routinely abused arrestees.
IANL: What is the rules for use of force for railroad police, or railroad authorities protecting cargo? It seems people are breaking into these cars without fear of force, or prosecution. Combined, those are like a powder keg of lawlessness.
> What is the rules for use of force for railroad police, or railroad authorities protecting cargo? It seems people are breaking into these cars without fear of force, or prosecution.
You can use whatever force you want to respond to piracy on the open sea, including killing the pirates. But that hasn't been done even when we had a lot of complaints about active piracy.
It seems possible that Union Pacific worries that municipal authorities wouldn't be any happier with the idea of UP defending itself than they are with the idea of prosecuting the people UP hands over to them.
Denmark recently killed four suspected pirates in Bay of Guinea (actually five as it was later discovered). The Danish forces were fired at while trying to apprehend the suspected pirates so you can argue it was self defense and the intent was not to kill.
Russia is well known to simply release pirates they catch with a bucket of fuel, only for them to end up "disappearing" hours later. Coincidentally, hijackings of Russian vessels basically don't happen anymore.
i could see a market for remote operated, boxcar mountable, high volume pepper spray devices. You'd have to staff operators but at least they'd be sitting in an office instead of wandering up and down the tracks.
maybe even a boxcar escort service via drone with pepper spray paintball guns.
Killing pirates has been done relatively recently. There was even a movie starring Tom Hanks based on one such incident entitled “Captain Phillips”. Also, that was not the only nor last incident when pirates were killed.
You probably mean Michael Scott Moore, and I'm not sure "refused to help him" is entirely accurate. Governments were involved, but also don't just provide and hand over millions of ransom (the US has a very explicit policy to never do so, Moore reported some surprise at the fact that his kidnappers didn't know that), which limits what they can actually do.
> IANL: What is the rules for use of force for railroad police, or railroad authorities protecting cargo?
Also NAL. Force has to be proportional. That means that an unarmed trespasser stealing property can't be shot, only detained.
> It seems people are breaking into these cars without fear of force, or prosecution.
I'm sure they have some fear. I doubt that they want to get caught, since it's at least a few hours or a weekend in jail to get processed. As far as prosecution goes, if I were a criminal, I'd either naively think that I'll never get caught/prosecuted, or just accept that it might happen at any time, but I prefer theft now over avoiding maybe-prosecution in the future.
> Combined, those are like a powder keg of lawlessness.
There's no powderkeg here, so long as we don't escalate. If prosecutions don't start, the likely thing to happen is that the railyards will improve physical security (e.g. razorwire fencing everywhere, reduce trains at rest), improve their security forces and response times, and pass any remaining expense onto the customers.
> It seems people are breaking into these cars without fear of force, or prosecution.
What is that based on? I am aware that's a trendy thing to say about crime, but many trendy things have no basis in reality. What is the factual basis for the criminals' motives and perspectives?
It would be a bad idea to use force against train robbers. They would just start packing guns themselves. Often times these robberies are coordinated by organized crime who control robbery rights over certain sections of track.
It's not the military in this case. It's loss prevention. The protocol of every single major retail corporation for theft is to just step back and not intervene or be a hero, because an employees life is ultimately not worth the $30 in loot from Target or whatever is in that Amazon bubble mailer.
These appear to be two groups, opportunistic, and organized. I imagine some basic security hardening would deter the opportunistic ones but different strategies would be needed for organised groups.
I guarantee you arming random train yard workers or whatever you are envisioning is going to just lead to them being killed before they hear a peep and their guns being stolen, serials stripped, and sold. The bad guys will have the drop and the good guys aren't going to shoot first. The only good guys with guns that are able to stop bad guys with guns are SWAT who come in and can create a controlled environment to conduct a controlled response. Arming security guards and your average grunt cop just does more harm than good. Taking a gun out into the field should be a thoroughly planned affair like how SWAT operates.
Pardon my skepticism, but "Look at Chicago" is not compelling evidence, nor is "all of the real evidence is censored." Surely there's a reputable collection of documents and research you can provide that would back up your claims?
So why don’t you search with something else? And it should be rather trivial to find the most violent cities and towns in the US and look up gun laws there.
Or you just stop watching right wing media that contrary to evidence paint all democratic run cities as violent hellholes.
Perhaps not Somali civil war level failure, but taxes keep going up while government keeps becoming more ineffective. Government concern for personal safety and property keeps going down.
I personally no longer feel safe going outside my $3000/mo apartment after dark despite being a tall man because there are mentally deranged homeless who, quite literally, roam the streets attacking vulnerable people (my wife was assaulted by one and police didn't care), and frequent reports of robbery at gunpoint. Prices in stores in downtown are 2x what they are in nice suburb areas an hour's drive away because of unprosecuted theft. It is literally cheaper for me to _order Instacart and tip a driver_ than it is to purchase from local grocery stores.
And what are my elected politicians doing during this time? Sending out emails to their constituents about "mitigating inequity" in how roads are resurfaced and renaming manhole covers.
So I should pay more than 50% in taxes? If the California+federal tax rate was 35% for me or something I could have already retired. I think I distribute my income fairly and I can't even vote in this country even though I am a permanent resident and pay taxes like every other American.
The problem is the government is an inefficient black hole of money, I also pay around 3k in rent but live in a nice neighborhood but the only way to do that in San Francisco that I'm aware of is by renting a 8k condo with roommates. I have an activist history in Argentina but after about a year of trying to find a group that's doing something I feel identified with in San Francisco to tackle what I believe are the cities problems, the only groups I found have basically been getting a decent salary from the government for them and their friends and whatever is they are doing is clearly not working. I don't want to start naming names and discussing policy because it just doesn't go anywhere. I just really really really don't think this is an income distribution problem, it looks like one, I believed it was that three years ago, I tried to understand it better and do something, and now I think it's not. It's that "the homeless" are the justification for a useless bureaucracy that's in the best case not really changing anything and in the worst is going to make it worse in the long term, all by living off half of every software engineers income that we are already forced to redistribute.
But more than that, you should stop electing shitacular government officials.
Otherwise it's going to be so unprofitable for you to not be in government. Once you're in government then you might as well just fix the problem yourself.
> There's more to an election than just going and voting.
Yeah there is, a lot, most of it illegal if you are not American. You can't contribute money to political organizations including certain type of non-profits and technically you can be deported even for protesting. Volunteering for a campaign is also a big no-no.
I can volunteer and donate to organizations that have a clear political bias even though they are not partisan, and already do.
So what should be my tax rate? 100% and then I get everything from the government?
I am ok with that, but I'd rather work as a clerk on the DMV instead of my current job which is rather stressful but has the benefit that if I don't screw up I'm retiring early.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that California’s taxes, above a reasonable minimum bound, provide any appreciable material benefit to him. Quite the opposite.
I doubt it's "more than four hours a day, every day". Any software engineer working more than 40 hours/week in this job market is a chump.
Beyond that, he lives in a society, is only able to make that money through the support of that society. Note he chose to move to California, so clearly he's gaining a lot from California.
Letting law and order go down in flames is going to make it worse. The rich can easily afford private security, poor people can't. See also: south africa.
San Francisco spends over $50k/year per homeless person and has the worst homeless problem in the nation. More money is not going to help. We need state power and willingness to forcibly commit heroin/meth addicts and mentally deranged people to institutions.
You've got to take the containers to/from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to your magical freight yard. There's not much room for gentle turns, so the trains are gonna go pretty slow.
Or, the DA for LA needs to start actually prosecuting the criminals handed over by UP instead of just letting them walk.
For that matter, why does Pete Buttigieg not do something? Isn't he in charge of federal transportation? Isn't there a big transportation traffic jam? Isn't LA a really important part of that?
For that matter, why hasn't the president replaced the Secretary of Transportation for lack of confidence in his ability to get anything done?
>replaced the Secretary of Transportation for lack of confidence in his ability to get anything done?
Well he announced a 6 month paternity leave pretty much immediately upon being appointed to a cabinet position (where tenure tends to be 1-2 years).
So between that and having roughly zero knowledge of transportation issues to begin with, his lack of "ability to get anything done" should surprise no one.
I believe it was 2 months — do you have a source showing 6? Also, the paternity leave started in August, and he started in January according to wikipedia.
I would agree that Buttigieg didn't come in with much expertise, and he sure hasn't generated great results. But there's no need to exaggerate the length or timing of his paternity leave to make these points.
Honestly, I think the more damning point is that the public was unaware he was on paternity leave until a month or so after he'd left. If he had been taking charge of the supply chain crisis before leaving, his absence would have been noted much sooner.
The 2 months was before he was called out and basically forced to return. After trying to defend his absence for a couple of weeks, which I presume meant he wasn't yet ready to return.
Iirc the 6 months # was from a GMA/Today show interview, but presented more as a hypothetical, before they even announced the adoption, as a comment on the process of trying to adopt and equality.
>Honestly, I think the more damning point is that the public was unaware
Unaware at the political peak of trying to pass the "infrastructure" bill and with the supply chain issue becoming daily national news.
Ironically, said "transportation" bill included a failed provision for a paid paternity mandate.
It was probably something he was forced to do. It was reported Obama and Buttigieg made a deal to drop out just before Super Tuesday and push his followers to back Biden in an effort to pull the rug out of the Bernie campaign. So I guess they gave him this role thinking it wouldn't be too bad. Bad decision. I hate the fact that this guy will be shoved down our throats in 2024.
Obama while retired still has a lot of sway in the party. He had a lot to lose politically if Bernie ended up making Obamacare look like the joke that it is. Furthermore we know from 2016 wikileaks that the donors are very adamant that if they didn't stop Bernie then they might as well not call them ever again for money. I'll never forget the leaked voicemails that had donors literally screaming at Democratic leadership to stop Bernie at whatever cost. Looking back, while Bernie's team did a superb job in 2020, I should have realized that you cannot beat a system in which the other side controls the strings.
You think he's not busy? There are simply more pressing matters. The clogged up ports, the trucking shortage, the fact that everything is understaffed due to omicron. Not to mention administering hundreds of billions in new grants for infrastructure projects.
The United States Secretary of Transportation is not responsible for stopping the looting of trains at the Union Pacific Terminal in Los Angeles. This is a local crime issue.
Buttigeig is simply not relevant in this discussion.
Interstate commerce is being interfered with. The Secretary has a large organization at his disposal. He has subordinates. He has a phone and a pen. There's lots of things he could do without spending a lot of personal time. But, he has priorities, like talk shows, where he avoids discussing topics like these.
> President Biden put forward more nominees in his first year than President Donald Trump and about as many as President George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But it took on average 103 days for the Senate to confirm a Biden nominee, compared with 100 days for Trump, 80 for Obama and just 48 for Bush.
That various departments and agencies are taking longer to get things done shouldn't be surprising when the appointments are either being slow walked or held up.
Where I live, people routinely leave bicycles and scooters outside when running errands, routinely take public transport and walk at any time of the day or night without fear and routinely leave delivery packages for collection at the doorstep just to give a few examples because the crime rate is low given strong deterrence. All this translates to lower costs individually, lower pollution, more efficient logistics leading to lower economic overheads and also a healthier than average population (exercise while taking public transport) leading to lower long term health care costs which enables the government to invest in more welfare state like measures wich in turn reduces crime further. Note however that social justice and welfare goals are advanced by other organizations in the Government, not the law enforcement organization.
Without deterrence, you get a negative spiral as we're beginning to see in cases like this where the purpose of justice system is being subverted to goals other than deterrence. These other goals are very important, but they need to be achieved by other independent organizations so you don't get the carrot at the cost of the stick being broken.