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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

> recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.

This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world. Poor people are neither violent nor thieves. But they can be convinced to become that when inequality is so high.

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Isn't it odd that crime is skyrocketing in places which are governed by people who think in these terms? It is almost as if policies which are based on those ideas lead people into a life of crime where they would otherwise have been given the satisfaction of taking care of themselves. It is not as if it is hard to get a job right now after all?

If you think The Democratic Party gives a damn about poor people, you are the one getting taken for a ride.

And if you think “a job” is all it takes to not be poor, then you are just completely out of touch with reality.

Note how I did not state the people doing the stealing are poor. If you think they are, please explain the many images of people driving up in fairly new and rather shiny cars to fill them with looted goods.

This looting is not done by "the poor" and they are not stealing "to fill their hungry children's mouths". They are looting because it is free season, they'll either use or sell off whatever loot they get and spend the returns on whatever they fancy.

> It is not as if it is hard to get a job right now after all?

What makes you think that poor people does not have jobs? Search the term "the working poor".

> Search the term "the working poor".

Better yet, check out "working homeless" (take [1] for example). That things like this happen in the richest, most powerful country in history is beyond belief.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel...

I have no idea what you mean by "those terms" and "those ideas"

It's hard to make a living wage right now, yes.

Uhm… so we ignore that rail yards in LA are super busy relative to those in “more respectable” towns?

What do you mean by 'skyrocketing?'

Does that mean 'consistently lowering over the last 10-20 years and now significantly lower than it was 20 years ago?' Because that's a pretty odd definition.

Odder still - while CA homicide rates have increased in 2020-2021, they have done so by a percentage LOWER than the national average. So basically, CA is safer and has lower homicide rates than the national average and your suggestion is to change leadership to be more like the rest of the country?

> Isn't it odd that crime is skyrocketing in places which are governed by people who think in these terms?

"Fun" facts: California was the epicenter of the 20th-century American eugenics movement[0] whose ideas became very famous around 1940, was the place that invented single-family zoning[1] (in Berkeley in 1916) immediately after banning land ownership by non-whites in 1913[2], that once passed a state referendum to explicitly nullify a state-level fair-housing act[3] passed a year prior, that passed the first modern firearms-restriction act on explicitly racial grounds[4], and that pioneered regressive segregation-with-extra-steps property tax laws[5]. It is an extremely racially-segregated place, to this day[6], and always has been despite our leaders' constant pandering to the contrary. There are so many things to love about California, but this isn't one of them and I'd urge you to reconsider what you know about it :/

[0] https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/josef-mengele/

[1] https://globalurban.org/Berkeley_Zoning_Origins.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_14

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

[6] http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea

You're conflating two issues: poverty and inequality.

US is one of the richest countries, has less poor people than other rich countries, the "poor" in the US are richer than the "poor" in e.g. UK or Italy, and "average" (mean and median) incomes in UK or Italy would be considered "poor" in the US.

see: https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1469070902813995014

So, inequality is irrelevant, only absolute poverty is relevant.

EDIT: NOTE: the graph in the link above is disposable income (a.k.a. above cost of living)

Personally, I don't think that poverty is the issue here. People aren't looting Apple stores because they're poor. But the lack of social safety net (income, health, mental health) for the poorest probably doesn't help.

> only absolute poverty is relevant.

No it isn't. Cost of living matters.

Impoverished people in richer countries have, to a limited extent, some advantage from increased capital investment in their vicinity (e.g. in theory, on average, better local infrastructure than in absolutely poorer countries). They are still crushed by living expenses.

Okay then let’s hear why they are looting Apple stores.

This doesn’t seem hard to figure out.

A person doesn’t steal 10 iPhones to use them personally.

If you steal 10 iPhones you might end up with thousands of dollars and that keeps the lights on and feeds you for awhile. If you steal a loaf of bread and a pack of lunch meat you eat for a week.

Not many Barnes and Nobles were looted in the summer of 2020.

It takes a very specially cultivated state of mental confusion to genuinely believe people driving in in multiple high-end cars, smash-and-grab robbing a jewelry store and departing in the same cars are doing it because they're so poor they can't find any alternative to feed themselves. And this state of mental confusion seems to be carefully cultivated among Californians.

> US is one of the richest countries, has less poor people than other rich countries, the "poor" in the US are richer than the "poor" in e.g. UK or Italy,

Certain structural factors matter a lot:

How affordable is it to get decent healthcare?

How affordable is it to get decent food?

Is drug use criminalized?

Is there a high rate of violent crime?

Do people own their own homes?

Are there informal social relations that act as social safety nets?

A relatively poor country that nevertheless answers those questions correctly will likely provide a better life even to its poor.

Of course an conservative think tank will say that! That graph does show why you should move to the US to earn big bucks, it says nothing about being poor in those countries. It is a complex subject. Just going aroudn on gapminders site about how much people spend around the world it's easy to understand how complex it is.

https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/

The numbers on the US states I've seen puts them in the lower brackets of the EU countries if you count precentage of the population that are poor, not bad by any means but not good. These numbers are meaningless though, especially on the subject discussed here.

One needs only google "income inequality chart usa" and look at images to see that the present trends are not going to result in anything good in the long run. What we'll end up with is something like wealthy parts of mexico where the richest 1-2% live in fortified enclaves protected by private armed security, and the poor are desperately poor. Not unlike the rich burbclaves predicted in Snow Crash, actually.

So you’re saying they steal not because they are poor and need things, but because other people are rich and have things.

One need only look at a smattering of poor villages around the world to see that this is indeed true. When they are as well off as their neighbors, people rarely complain, or steal to get ahead. One problem is that the internet has given everyone extremely wealthy neighbors.

> This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world.

I find this statement to be misleading. If one person in the entire country lived in extreme poverty than there would be some population that is among “some of the poorest populations in the world.”

However, while the US does have issues which should not be ignored, the US cannot be compared to countries where much of the population lives in extreme poverty and other human rights issues. This comparison hurts the real cause that other countries desperately need help and that entire populations do truly live in extreme poverty.

The United Nations Development Programme puts out the Human Development report which has a great website and iPhone / Android app to access the data. A good indicator is the percentage of the population living below the income poverty line. Explore this site, it’s great. Here is a link to one stat.

http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/167106

App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/human-development-report-app/i...

I think statistically less intelligence correlates to higher violence and poverty. Therefore, those who are poor due to low intelligence are more likely to also be violent.

> less intelligence correlates to higher violence and poverty.

Poverty and violence causes mental and physical health problems. Fix poverty if you want educated and intelligent citizens.

I agree there is room for improvement, however intelligence appears to largely genetic. Studies put it at 40-80%, I’m of the view that it’s at the high end of that. If the mechanism was better understood then it may be possible to induce higher intelligence even in those who don’t have the genetic predisposition.

40% is not largely but the opposite. It means that it's largely not genetic.

40% is not the median of the studies which appear to have it at 70%. I’m of the view that it’s 80%+. I think there are some improvements that can be made to the studies but I have not had a good enough reason to redo their math.

“Japan has some of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, according to a UNICEF report. It ranked Japan 34th out of 41 industrialised countries. According to Japan's Health Ministry statistics, as of May 2017, 16% of Japanese children live below the poverty line.”

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

There's nothing unusual about it though. In every country in the world, when criminals need to recruit people, they generally target the poor.

Why would a wealthy person want to participate? They can just buy the stuff and not be involved in a crime.

Being poor is not an excuse for criminality. These people aren't stealing bread to live or clothing to not freeze. They are stealing valuables ("Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools") because they can, knowing their poor status will cause people like you to express sympathy for them and thus allowing them to get away with it.

They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.

> Being poor is not an excuse for criminality.

Nor being rich.

Never said it was.

The sad part of this situation is the initial people that broke into the containers on the trains are long gone with their loot, now the marginalized people are getting caught digging through the discarded items that were not valuable enough for ones that broke in and most likely they will be the ones prosecuted for political gains even if they get out on no cash bail.

What needs to happen in these cities is some auditing of the second hand sellers. Pawn shops are required by law to record all items that they purchase but many of the people advertising and selling online are moving larger volumes of product with zero accountability.

The Kijiji and Craigslist type sites have mostly been allowed to operate in a gray area but there is no doubt they are facilitating the buying and selling of stolen items and as such a percentage of their profit is actually subject to seizure through proceeds of crime legislation.

You don’t really believe that rich people stormed in and stole all of the good stuff before the poor people got there, do you?

If you’re stealing things off a train, you’re already in a pretty bad place in life, it’s not like the earlier people were any better off than the later people

There is a lot of people that fit between rich and poor, do I think that organized gangs with cell phones and bolt cutters were the ones that initially broke in? I sure do, do I think they are rich? nope.

Just the amount of discarded items indicates an organized effort on behalf of the thieves and most likely a steal to order game plan.

I have no doubt that the entire scheme was cooked up by some meth head while the rest of us were sleeping. Those guys are always looking for an angle to make a quick buck and yes they are desperate too but that shouldn't be the stick we measure criminality and the punishment required by.

In many states a pawn shop is required to hold any items brought in for a minimum amount of time before they are allow to resell them. This may be a solution to prevent online marketplaces from enabling thieves to ply their wares so easily.

There are waiting periods to buy guns it would be just as easy to require an item for sale to be advertised for a minimum amount of time before the contact details are provided.

> There are waiting periods to buy guns

No, there aren’t - not outside CA and a few other places.

Once you have to live in the permanent mindset of "how can I make money?", it quickly becomes "how can I make the most money".

To be honest, stealing off trains knowing you likely won't get caught is way more compelling than dealing with irate customers at McDonalds. That doesn't mean it's OK though.

But making billions by exploiting every single one of your workers ( i.e. Amazon, McDonalds ), or irresponsibly shimming off of every transaction ( Bezos ) is cool. Start by making a list of the most egregious crimes, and put this somewhere around 350~450 on your list.

And when an entire society relentlessly shits on you, you're not exactly left brimming with respect for its norms.

That’s an awfully dismissive broad-brush viewpoint about homeless people, that isn’t supported by studies of — and social support of — homeless people around the world.

There are homeless people in every state, but they aren't stealing off trains, are they?

Also, I guarantee you that if property crime enforcement increased and there were more arrests, they would scram.

Trains may not be available.

There are more major train routes in the midwest than California. And yet homeless stealing from them hasn't made headlines anywhere...

Take a map of homeless population density per postal code (where LA would figure in the top 5, if not top 1).

Apply a map of retailer container shipping traffic per postal code (where LA would, again, figure in the top 5, due to the ports and their surrounding infrastructure such as warehouses and garment manufacturing).

What other areas of high homeless density also have as high a density of goods throughout as this particular cluster route in LA?

Is the security and prosecution of crimes in those areas as lax as it is in the LA train yard?

If so, then perhaps the only thing preventing thefts there is that no one’s done the math yet and found it. Or that they’re keeping it to themselves and not earning national attention, because no reporter has done a drone flyover of the carnage yet, or because they’re keeping it to such a low volume that no one has noticed.

I would expect this is the work of a small group of people who are spreading word about the security gap left by too few security guards on the ground, and that Southern Pacific has been trying to maximize profits by not hiring more security guards for their LA interchange and having all the insurance companies involved pay for the lost items. I suspect the nationwide news showing these photos is going to antagonize those insurance companies into spiking the rates of all involved shippers, but it’s unclear to me whether Southern Pacific is vulnerable to — or insulated from — insurance company outrage in this regard.

So maybe it’s a bit soon to pass moral judgment upon homeless people, and instead wonder “what group of opportunists are exploiting a logistics weakness and inviting desperate homeless people to join the free money party?”. Hard to imagine desperate people turning down free money at essentially zero risk, but they weren’t doing this on their own before. Find the ringleaders and deal with them instead.

If you have a genuine choice of steal or starve, even then you won't necessarily steal food. You might steal whatever is easiest to and sell it to buy food.

Well, if you paid them enough to buy wares, made the wares cheaply enough they could be afforded, and structured the entire thing to be relatively painless, equitable, and easy for everyone involved to participate in constructively, there wouldn't be a problem, now would there?

Society subject to stabilizing optimizations formulated by intelligent free agents acting in a way counter to the desires of system architects who decided to scale beyond what they could actually guarantee the security of.

Who'd'a thunk?

I have some mixed feelings. On one hand I certainly can sympathise with people that feel that they never got a fair chance and they think that the only thing they do is making Jeff Bezos slightly less rich.

Inequality is a big part of it. I know that in the US property rights are considered holy. But many people never even got the chance to go to a good school because they were born by the wrong parents, are working their asses off just to keep their noses above the water, and at the same time are being surrounded by wealthy people that work less than them whose only advantage seems to be that they were lucky enough to be born by the right parents. Some of the unlucky people might think that there are fundamental unfairnesses and that trying to balance those should trump property rights.

It could be that. Or it could be the lax prosecution of property crimes.

Or the difficulty in actually solving them.

The USA has death penalty and the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It's it the safest, thou?

No, because having death penalty for the most heinous of crimes does not help everyday safety, if the lower level crimes are deliberately left without prosecution - which is exactly what is happening now in California.

With 2.2 million people in jail or prison I think it's a bit ridiculous to argue that the US has lax prosecution as an issue relative to any other countries.

I'll be a bit more specific - there are about 400,000 people currently incarcerated in the US for property crimes. That's higher than the per capita rate of incarceration for any crime in Canada. If the US is lax in prosecuting property crimes, then I don't think any other developed country is hard on crime.

You're confusing several different things, which is excusable for a person not living in the US, but still very misleading.

What is overwhelmingly driving US's incarceration rate is War on Drugs. US has some insane policies - depending on the state, but it's a large contributor to the overall figure - regarding drug-related crimes. Legalization of some drugs, like in California, helps a bit - but given an insane amount of regulation and taxation the legal business is beset by, the illegal route is still very attractive and profitable.

The other side is the proliferation of "woke" prosecutors and local managers, refusing to prosecute crimes like petty theft (in SF, theft below $900 is in essence legal), property destruction, simple assault, etc. That is compounded by extremely permissive policies towards public homelessness and establishing homeless camps on any public property, often even burdening the adjacent private property with tolerating and supporting them. All this creates a very fertile ground for certain type of crime - there's a bunch of people that aren't very connected to social norms at the best of times, but also they know they'd never suffer any consequences for robbing a store or breaking into a car, or punching someone on the street. And there's organized crime, which knows these people can be exploited as foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise of stealing high-value items and reselling them in ad-hoc markets, or online - which is never being prosecuted, because people who are supposed to stop this are ideologically bound to address "societal roots of the crime" - which never happens - instead of going for the criminals.

So yes, you can have both high incarceration rates and extremely lax prosecution for certain crimes - at the same time. Worst of the both worlds.

>What is overwhelmingly driving US's incarceration rate is War on Drugs.

Yeah, that's only a part of it. While a significant problem, drug related crimes make up only 20% of the total incarcerated number. (That 1/5 is still on its own more than the incarcerated per capita rates for all crimes in comparable countries like Canada and the UK, so it's definitely a big deal.)

The numbers for non-violent drug crimes are higher as an overall percentage in the Federal system than they are at the State level.

Again, 400,000 is just property crimes. About 1 in 3 people currently held in jail for property crimes are there for larceny/theft or stolen property.

I don't agree about the 'fertile ground' for crime you're talking about in part because I have never seen any evidence for it. It's in movies, but I haven't really seen it in real life, and I've been looking at the data for a little while now. I am completely willing to be schooled on that if you've got some evidence though.

Well, here's any evidence: https://twitter.com/CBSLAKristine/status/1482115852216385538

But I don't need UP to give me evidence - I see it each time I leave home and see ever-growing homeless camps next to my house, and read about robberies in the stores I visited only recently. Over 16 years I've lived in California, I never seen this type of brazenly open criminality around. I wish it were movies, but it's the reality.

This has nothing to do with "inequality". The existence of Elon Musk does not make people rob the trains. The refusal of the law enforcement - openly and clearly proclaimed - to actually enforce the law does. If it has been publicly said that theft won't be prosecuted and in general property crime is not a true crime ("it's all ensured!") then why not do it? There's literally not a single reason not to do it. So people are starting to do it.

If that were true, then it would be reflected in crime stat jumps during periods of recession, but it isn't.

Wait, copper theft did go up around 2007, didn't it?

Copper theft went up with the price of copper, this is a global phenomenon. I live in Sweden where this is a regular news item.

dunno, but lets assume it did: is it more likely that existing thieves switched to a higher returning crime, or that out of work kindergarten teachers started stripping roof AC units?

Wait, if the gap in wealth inequality has been doing nothing but expanding... why does the crime rate do nothing but fall? With very few, and very brief, exceptions - this is the case.

> We find that the average arrest rate for a cohort entering the labour market during a recession is 10.2% higher than for an otherwise similar cohort entering a more buoyant labour market. [1]

…

> Weinberg and his collaborators Eric D. Gould of Hebrew University and David Mustard of the University of Georgia examined young males with no more than a high school education—the demographic group that commits the most crime—they found that average wages and unemployment rates were directly linked to the incidence of property crimes. [2]

…

> Crime has increased during every recession since the late 1950s, sociologists said. [3]

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/03/do-recessions-increas...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-recessions-inc...

[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

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