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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

> If criminals can get away with constant car break ins, burglaries, and daylight mass raids of stores, why stop there?

This is rich. The rich always get away with crimes: wage theft, labor violations, financial fraud, environmental destruction, opioid crisis... but some people shoplift and society is falling apart? Cry me a river.

Let the market fix their own broken supply chains.

People have been writing songs about retail theft for ages. Think about the term "riding shotgun"! This isn't a new problem.

what happens when the market fixes its supply chains with private police forces that are entirely unaccountable to local governments, and purely protect the rich? That's what's happened to South Africa.

Railway police didn't seem to be doing much there.

This already happened in the US, too, regarding strike-breaking forces. See, for example, the official history of the Pennsylvania State Police.

But there are numerous solutions between the current situation and what you describe. Better locks, housing the homeless, reducing the amount of junk we import, etc.

I remember as a kid trains had cabooses (a sign of more employees). But of course that has all been optimized away. I’m guessing the skeleton crew is completely unable to secure the train if they wanted to.

Edit: downvotes for saying that the US has handled the identified problem in the past? (Which was a slippery-slope comment, anyway.)

>but some people shoplift and society is falling apart?

So you are okay with people stealing from you, as long as they're poor?

>Let the market fix their broken supply chains

There is resistance in this thread to instating armed guards, stating that it's dystopian to enforce property laws.

Shoplifting is the act of stealing from a retailer, not an individual. Yes, I make a very big distinction between the two. I just don’t see why corporations in the US can get away with so much (shoplifting and wage theft are both estimated to cost the economy $40bln per year) and I’m supposed to feel bad someone is stealing from Amazon or Louis Vuitton? Doesn’t mean I’m “ok” with shoplifting, I simply feel it should be a civil matter like wage theft.

Railroads have always had their own police, so I’m not sure the reluctance. Retail/supply chain theft is a cat-and-mouse game… always had been, always will be. Step up enforcement, improve the locks, house the homeless and move on.

>Shoplifting is the act of stealing from a retailer, not an individual

No. You can shoplift from a small business or a family owned convenience store, which is essentially stealing from an individual. Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.

Yes, and mom-and-pops commit wage theft, too. Shoplifting should be a civil matter.

> Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.

And?

Where do you think the term "riding shotgun" comes from?

I think it comes from a stagecoach having a driver and a shotgun guard. That has nothing to do with retail theft; the stagecoach wasn't a store.

Yes, my argument is a little muddled by grouping retail and supply chain theft together. I definitely think supply chain theft is somehow more serious.

But grouping the two together is a result of the recent San Francisco story being mentioned in this thread. People here on HN are usually so critical of the media, but this LA train story and the San Fran shoplifting story were both treated as a symptom of some larger societal problem. And maybe they are! But that is not at all evident from the stories.

In my opinion, both symptoms are the result of a decades long brutal drive for absolute efficiency in both supply chains and retail stores. And of course organized criminals are going to take advantage of the fact that perhaps that "efficiency" went too far in cutting security.

> There’s a straight line that can be drawn from progressive policies like restorative justice or defunding initiatives to these outcomes.

Californians get all bent out of shape when they aren't welcomed with open arms when they move to more center/right-of-center/right states like Nevada, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, etc. The surrounding states are worried (amongst other things), that the progressive voters will come to their states and wreck them with ultra-progressive policies like they wrecked the state they are leaving.

As a Utahn, can confirm. There are some things that bug me about this state (ridiculous weather sometimes, and religious monoculture), but I love it, and it's my home. The ultimate blow would be to see Californians evacuate their cesspit and redo it all over again in this beautiful state.

This particular train incident seems to have gotten a lot of press. I don't think it's a new issue, though. Railroad police have existed for as long as the railroad has existed. The way I see it, the railroad police were napping and as a result, Union Pacific's insurance company is going to make a slightly smaller profit this month. If this becomes widespread, Union Pacific can implement mitigations to reduce the number of trains that are robbed or pay higher insurance premiums. If they raise prices to cover the insurance premiums, then customers can use BNSF instead.

I'm not sure what government measures would be more helpful than the free market here. Let's say the state executes everyone who tresspasses on railroad property. This is extremely costly, which takes resources away from other governmental functions. And, we tried this with murder, and the results don't seem that good. Murder rates in areas with the death penalty are not lower in areas that abolished the death penalty. Criminals plan to not get caught, so the consequences aren't a deterrent. My conclusion is that being tough on crime doesn't really change much. A slightly better lock on the containers would probably be the winning solution here.

I heard it's Kamala(the VP) who started this 'stealing under $950 each time you got it for free' in CA, is it true?

Anyways I guess the voters got what they voted for, only them can change that by next vote. Nobody to blame really as those who made these rules are elected by CA voters.

Law and order are key to modern society, it's not perfect, the alternatives are just much worse.

> Kamala Harris told voters in 2014 that Proposition 14(typo) was "The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act." Among other reductions in penalties, the law "requires misdemeanor sentence instead of felony for the following crimes when amount involved is $950 or less: petty theft, receiving stolen property, and forging/writing bad checks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47

I would say "stealing under $950 each time you got it for free" is inaccurate.

What about Texas or Wisconsin where theft up to $2500 is a misdemeanor?

Texas and Wisconsin are a little bit more willing to put people in jail for misdemeanors.

The numbers don't add up for this explanation either. The clearance rate is higher in the west

It's not just misdemeanor vs felony. If you report a robery to Texas police, they will investigate and prosecute the thief. LA police will tell you to screw off.

Political hysteria aside, CA property crime rates are at their lowest levels since 1960.

Recorded property crimes are at their lowest since 1960. In San Francisco shops have boarded up their windows to stop smash and grabs[1] and shoplifting has become blatant and all pervasive[2]. People don't report crime if they know it won't be prsosecuted

> Crime data is only as good as what gets reported A former property manager of a Walgreens store tweeted the Chronicle article didn’t take into account that police crime data is only as good as the crimes that get reported — and his Walgreens had “stopped reporting” retail theft “since there was no point” with “multiple shoplifting incidents every single day. See [2]

[1]https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-stores-board-amid-wav....

[2]https://engardio.com/blog/shoplifting-walgreens

maybe most people are at home these days? plus you can shoplift in public at daytime for $950, why bothering to break in anyone's property while adults are at home ready to shoot back?

we're not going to make progress until we stop pretending there are only two choices to every issue

If you accept that there's actually 2 valid choices, you're doing better than most people...

So what you're saying is that the reason all the crime statistics are lower than in the past is because people stopped reporting these Incredibly Rampant crimes, and the solution is to bring back the people who presided over high crime rates? Why wouldn't those people suppress the crime statistics to look good if it's so easy to suppress them now? What will make them more effective now than they were before? More violence? More cops? More guns and tear gas grenades?

Rail theft is an incredibly specific crime compared to something like a carjacking or a house burglary. There are only so many trains to rob and only so many rail lines. It doesn't make sense to extrapolate from it to all other crimes.

Crime rates are a huge lie due to under reporting. The police may intentionally "forget" to follow up on reports which coincidentally makes their stats look better than they should. I've filed reports which were promptly lost within four hours when I followed up. One of those was a hit and run.

It's a known problem, yes. Unless that is a new problem, however, lower crime rates are still lower crime rates. If you're arguing that under-reporting is a new or dramatically worse problem, how does switching in 'tough on crime' politicians fix under-reporting? Under-reporting is a police department policy that makes cops look good, so why would they stop doing it? If you want to fix that problem in particular, you should vote someone in who will fix it, not someone who wants to throw more people into the local lock-up.

If cops have been throwing out 50% of reports forever, then 200% of a lower number is still less than 200% of a bigger number from past statistics.

The degree of under reporting can and does change through time. If you have a pro crime pro criminal DA like Chesa Boudin people respond to that. People report less crimes if they know nothing will be done. If they know stopping crime isn't a priority police are less likley to do anything to stop it.

People respond to incentives. Incentives vary over time.

Property crime is lower than it has ever been. And the same has been true every year for 10+ years. Since 93 property crime has dropped ~75%.

Reported crime stats will drop when the cities official policy is to not arrest, investigate, or prosecute crime.

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