Letter from Union Pacific to LA District Attorney re: train thefts, safety [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Letter from Union Pacific to LA District Attorney re: train thefts, safety [pdf]

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259 pointstomohawk469 comments

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.

> Where I live, people routinely leave bicycles and scooters outside when running errands

Just plainly asking: what's the situation with social welfare where you live?

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.

The weather's nice though :)

So clearly not California?

>It's a blue city in one of the bluest states in the country

>unless you leave your $1k road bike unlocked within view of the street for a long time it's probably not gonna grow legs

In other words, you live and work in the wealthy parts of the city.

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.

What is your point? I didn’t assume they live and work in a “central business district.”

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.

But a lack of crime is exclusive to 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.

An example? I don’t believe you.

Pick any small town where thieves can't hide, and you will see the deterrent influence in effect.

That’s not an example. I still don’t believe you.

In my part of the world, pretty crime is low despite massive income disparity, regardless of neighbourhood wealth.

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.

> 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.)

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

>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?

> 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.

Hunger is probably here a proxy for "basic needs" on the hierarchy of needs. In a modern day it can be for example a cell phone, computer, or car.

So in you mental model, these train thieves have no phone or car, are seeking an honest 9-5 job, and will put their gains towards that end?

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.

> If you think every hungry person is a thief, and the rich don't have a motive to steal

Please don't strawman my posts, especially when I've posted this[1] not more than a day ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29961052

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.

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!

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.

> A starving, homeless resident stealing a sandwich from the corner store might be theft.

They qualify for CaliFresh, it’s not like they’ll starve unless they can figure out how to trade food for drugs.

> maybe one needs cash for insulin and another is fueling a drug addiction.

One you can get with Medicaid (well, Medi-cal), the other you can’t. Diabetics would definitely qualify if they meet the residency requirement.

There is a great Italian movie, "The Bicycle Thief".

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?

> 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.

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-problem-with-claiming-that-po...

That rebuttal straight up concedes the connection between slave patrols and policing in the US South since it's rebutting a fairly different claim.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Citation needed...

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'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.

Why fixing the US bail system is tricky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mhwDSHKEyM

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.

[1] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/10/06/major-san-franc...

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.

> 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

What is that based on?

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."

Where is the evidence that they are "systematically taking advantage bail reform"?

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.

Any data at all?

I'm uncertain.

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.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

[2] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/aziza-graves-sa...

[3] https://abc7news.com/chesa-boudin-recall-brooke-jenkins-san-...

[4] https://abc7news.com/sf-shoplifting-retail-theft-in-san-fran...

[5] http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165

Seems like they didn’t touch the real money laundering: where was all the cash coming from?

Usually the hard part of money laundering is the opposite: how to turn cash into something a bank will accept.

> part of this I think is the end result of cash bail reform initiatives from 3 years ago

So we should continue to jail innocent people based on their income level?

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.

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

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-25/californ...

[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.

> at this point its still correlation only

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.

If I wanted to get that promotion that is.

> 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?

>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.

Minneapolis: Zero bail for 30 felonies including auto theft https://crimewatchmn.medium.com/hennepin-county-lifts-bail-r... Auto theft a year later increases by over 500% https://www.mprnews.org/amp/episode/2021/12/14/why-has-a-wav... 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.

Huh? If you haven’t been to court your innocence/guilt hasn’t been proven, just suspected and custody approved by a judge.

Saying “jailing innocent people” is just playing with words.

You are innocent until proven guilty.

Only in a legal sense - that doesn’t change whether you did or did not commit the act in question.

We are talking about a legal sense, a very important one that takes away people's freedom.

Presumption of innocence when determining guilt.

But you’re not put in jail before trial because you’re guilty, it’s to keep the public safe and/or make sure you don’t flee.

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.

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.

I'm hopeful that they are.

See the other thread for more nuanced commentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990457

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.

Minneapolis:

Zero bail for 30 felonies including auto theft

https://crimewatchmn.medium.com/hennepin-county-lifts-bail-r...

Auto theft a year later increases by over 500%

https://www.mprnews.org/amp/episode/2021/12/14/why-has-a-wav...

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.

$3M - that's a big number for inventory!

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.

Did minors even have cash bail before?

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.

https://medium.com/philadelphia-justice/district-attorney-kr...

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.

https://theappeal.org/the-successes-and-shortcomings-of-larr...

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.

There would be 6 people in Waukesha that would still be alive if bail hadn't been set so low for the perpetrator.

Deterrence is the stick sure, but the carrot is social programs to grow people out of the need to steal in the first place.

Most people don't want to steal, but many more do because they feel they have to.

You can't deter someone from putting food on their family's table, putting a roof over their head, or getting sound sleep.

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.

> turning the other way and not punishing this kind of behavior

Where do we have data that that is happening?

> Where do we have data that that is happening?

It’s in the letter being discussed.

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.

> Why would they?

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.

People also need to pay rent and all kinds of other expenses. Not just eat.

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.

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.

Those are not the people, by and large, ripping open cargo containers on moving trains.

Some are, but your childhood friends aren't the people who are causing this letter to be sent.

The people committing this level of crime do need the income this theft generates to survive.

What a pompous view of what is clearly criminal behaviour. If you don't do the time people will do the crime.

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.

It’s a sad fact of life there will always be injustices. People can still make good choices and have positive outcomes in bad environments.

We need to stop trying to be devoid of personal responsibility as a society.

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.

Is there anybody in the world under your philosophy that bears personal responsibility for anything immoral that they have done?

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.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-probe-...

[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_science_he...

[2] https://www.zmescience.com/science/humans-are-good-in-nature...

[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-animals/20191...

[4] https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/5/23/15516752/science...

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/good-company-why-we-ne...

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/14/selfis...

[7] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130114-are-we-naturally...

Do you have any evidence for your claims?

Anyway, the question under discussion is whether maybe we should change their experiences, so they don’t do this sort of thing anymore.

I know it’s popular to say that we only need positive reinforcement, that we can accomplish everything good just by saying “yes.”

That is false.

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.

[0] https://www.cac.crim.cam.ac.uk/resou/sat

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 were in their situation, you'd do exactly as they would, you just had a better situation in your life.

You don't know my situation or my past. I can say that you clearly don't understand criminals, criminality or even destitution.

| 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.

> 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”.

sorry my bad. I just meant that there are lots of social programs which are generously paid for by tax payers. Didn't mean misquote Marx...

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xsbt3a7K-8

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.

~12k is the federal level for eligibility, but the actual threshold depends on state definition as most states increase the baseline.

>"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.

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.

There are definitely some people who would rather steal.

You need to get out of your bubble man.

I'm confused about why you think I believe otherwise.

You're making a claim without evidence here. I'd like to believe as you do, but "people would rather not steal" is a statement of faith, not fact.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

Kids in minneapolis are carjacking for joyrides.

monoculture is monoculture

Sounds like Singapore.

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.

> 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?

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)

> the crime rate is low

> given strong deterrence

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.

It's not the punishment but the likelihood of being punished.

Even if the punishment is not that severe, a high probability of being caught is a much greater deterrent.

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.

> 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.

So in other words, you don't have any sources.

TFA is the source

Nope

> 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.

More pseudo psychology please!

This is common sense, except to the foolish activists who believe everything Rousseau ever wrote.

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've had 3 of 3 packages go missing in the last two months

Did the packages get replaced?

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.

I see, I guess I figured that the merchant would detect that the package was never delivered and just ship another product on their end.

Maybe I was a bit optimistic.

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.

If they are stealing USPS packages, won’t the feds or federal postal cops get involved?

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.

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.

Wow, it sounds like they did eat the costs, 3 out of 3 for LA again. That does seem rather thorough.

>>Wow, it sounds like they did eat the costs, 3 out of 3 for LA again. That does seem rather thorough.

'they' didn't eat the cost of anything, 'we' are paying the cost thru higher prices on everything we buy.

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.

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.

I'm not sure about free returns.

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.

From the articles previously posted, much of what's being targeted and stolen are shipments destined to wholesalers and retailers, not consumers.

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.

Unless you're ordering something that's essentially some form of manufacturer to consumer drop shipping.

Then it could look more like a retail delivery than a consumer one.

They were clearly consumer. I think the reporting is off, I just don’t know why.

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.

Same here. Especially on a train.

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.

>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.

I think it's hilarious. LA is getting what they voted for.

Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Had a package about 2 weeks ago stuck right outside of LA and actually got an unsolicited email from the company to click for a refund.

Wife has one stuck in LA right now.

We've maybe ordered around 10 packages in the last month. Seems pretty significant, I'd love to see an estimate of the impact.

How exactly do you know your packages were "all traveling via train through L.A."?

They have tracking and were last scanned at a train based depo in LA before going missing.

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.

"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.

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/union-pacific-facing-rising-rai...

I don't see anything there about directing anyone to not prosecute theft.

So are they not catching anyone in the act, or what?

I used to "find" scrap metal in the rail yards. The only real tool the railroads have to prevent theft is to enforce trespassing laws.

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.

And do welded doors become a signal for "valuable contents"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29963125

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970

Think OP is correcting his post from yesterday. Where a commenter suggest he link to the letter instead of the opinion piece.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962006

+ photo gallery attached to the LA Times coverage of the same: the train tracks are just littered with piles of torn-open shipping boxes

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-15/photos-r...

Don't miss these pictures, folks!

Jeez, talk about dystopian: https://archive.fo/32Oxe/100c8558eb486a340a554a583e45f49d291...

"Visible" might be a better word. Far more dollars are stolen from bank accounts, wages, etc. but there are no striking photos of that.

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.

https://archive.fo/32Oxe

Not sure where best to respond so all the people who have seen these see it, but those pictures are actually from a train derailment at the same location https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/california/train-de...

The reason currently isn't known but they are investigating. Those pictures are from after the derailment.

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.

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.

Lots of videos online about this, if you haven't seen them:

https://twitter.com/RonMilnerBoodle/status/14817774032529448...

https://twitter.com/realaustinzone/status/146327930009486950...

https://twitter.com/awgonnerman/status/1483456509950451715

https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384

https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770959673520128

https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481771854465359873

https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481785013880655876

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.

No evidence of this, so I take it as nothing more than a conspiracy theory

You should look into the sheriff gangs of LA county. Most police departments have more than their fair share of criminals.

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.

To be completely clear LAPD/LASD are corrupt criminal gangs outside of this whole train thing.

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.

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.

Are you suggesting people should not defend property because the attackers will just escalate force and continue their crimes?

Then by that logic, I now understand the push to reduce the punishment of so much crime.

Basic criminals don’t like being shot. Large reason why gun free cities are so dangerous.

Are gun free cities more dangerous? Could you provide a source for the claim?

Look at Chicago.

Google suppresses nearly all pro gun or right wing content, so searching on mobile is difficult.

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.

A cursory look at San Francisco and Oakland should be adequate proof.

> Often times these robberies are coordinated by organized crime who control robbery rights over certain sections of track

That doesn't appear to be the case here from all accounts I've read - do you have any citations for that?

Everything I'm reading is pointing the finger addicts, the homeless, and homeless addicts...

The letter mentions they are opportunists and organised. I'm reading that as 2 classifications of criminals.

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.

Imagine if the military had this mindset.

'We should surrender our lawfully owned territory in case force might be used against us in the future'

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.

It could also be a bad idea to be a train robber because the enforcers could start packing guns themselves. Why does the advantage go to the bad guys?

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.

> They would just start packing guns themselves.

what makes you think they aren't already doing just that?

They would be charged with a weapons enhancement instead of just petty theft

> 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.

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.

I recall some documentary I watched about a German/American citizen captured by pirates and both nations refused to help him.

He eventually got free thanks to crowdfunding or something of the sort. What a world we live in.

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.

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.

https://www.reuters.com/world/danish-frigate-kills-four-susp...

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.

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.

> 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?

> 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.

UP police are subject to the same use-of-force rules as any other peace officer in California.

https://calmatters.org/justice/2019/08/newsom-signs-landmark...

Section 28101

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/28101

UP needs to set up a fenced off freight yard in the middle of the desert with armed guards patrolling the perimeter and manning the entrances.

Use Budd cars to bring in the employees. That was done in Toronto when the freight yards were moved from downtown to the boonies.

Alternatively, California could stop speedrunning a Somalia-style collapse of rule of law.

I'm gonna have to say that's just a bit of an exaggeration.

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.

$3,000 a month apartment surrounded by homeless people feels like a serious income distribution problem

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.

> We need state power and willingness to forcibly commit heroin/meth addicts and mentally deranged people to institutions.

No so fast Hitler Jr.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

> So I should pay more than 50% in taxes?

Well, yes.

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.

> > So I should pay more than 50% in taxes?

> Well, yes.

Can you explain why you think he should spend more than four hours a day, every day, working entirely for someone else’s benefit?

Not for someone else's benefit, but for the benefit of their entire city/state/country.

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.

> Any software engineer working more than 40 hours/week in this job market is a chump.

Not sure what to make of that; I work more than 40 hours a week, but my total compensation is also above 500k/year.

There somewhere I can work less, but maintain that level of compensation?

If that's the case then you're madly overpriced for whatever it is that you do.

It's for his own benefit. Funding public goods benefits everyone, including himself.

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.

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.

> Can you explain why you think he should spend more than four hours a day, every day, working entirely for someone else’s benefit?

Taxes go to communities. Profiting for yourself only defeats communities.

If by "communities" you mean "mostly entitlements, military, and porky infrastructure and industrial subsidies", then you might have a point.

>I can't even vote in this country even though I am a permanent resident and pay taxes like every other American

>But more than that, you should stop electing shitacular government officials.

Sounds like you didn't read the whole comment

> > But more than that, you should stop electing shitacular government officials.

> Sounds like you didn't read the whole comment

There's more to an election than just going and voting.

> 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.

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?

>Pete Buttigieg

>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.

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.

Yeah, he's just completely overwhelmed.

Did you ever consider that he's totally incompetent for this job?

This tends not to be a "the president will solve it" but rather "the president appoints the people who are heading agencies to solve the problems."

https://ourpublicservice.org/political-appointee-tracker/

In particular:

> 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.

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.

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.

• On average, over 90 containers compromised per day. • In partnership with Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), and California Highway Patrol (CHP) we estimate over 100 arrests have been made of active criminals vandalizing our trains. UP alone making several dozens of arrests. • With our law enforcement partners we have deterred hundreds of individuals from trespassing and vandalizing our trains. • Of all those arrests, however, UP has not been contacted for any court proceedings.

The damning thing here is the lack of prosecution for the arrests that have happened. It's a clear message to offenders that they can continue what they are doing with no serious consequences.

However, a figure that's missing from Union Pacific's letter is how much (or how little) UP has invested in security measures since the theft wave began, or relative to another time period.

> UP by its own effort and cost enlisted additional and existing Special Agents across the UP system to join our local efforts with LAPD, LASD and CHP to help prevent the ongoing thefts. We have also utilized and are further exploring the use of additional technologies to help us combat these criminals through drones, specialized fencing, trespass detection systems, and other measures.

Seems like you're suggesting that private security should be an expected cost because the state will no longer protect you like they have been for many years...

I certainly did not expect the libertarian ideal of depending for protection wholly on private security, instead of on the state, to be first implemented in Los Angeles, of all places.

UPs police force is not private security in the usual sense. Those in CA are California peace officers, and all of them are also specially federally empowered for interstate operations.

And this isn't new, major railroads have had these publicly-empowered police forces since the late 19th century.

UP already has their own police. Why bother investing in more, if none of the arrests result in charges? It's pointless to spend more.

> Why bother investing in more, if none of the arrests result in charges?

UP is not complaining that none of the arrests result in charges. (They are complaining that the DA is settling for plea deals to lesser charges than they would prefer and not trying to employ cash bail as pre-conviction punishment for disabling [by incarceration of those who can’t afford it] suspects and deterring potential future criminals instead of not using it when it is not necessary to secure appearance of a suspect legally presumed innocent.)

Also, it's well known that sufficiently visible security is a deterrent to crime, which is better than after-the-fact arrests, so an eruption in undeterred crime is evidence of a need for more and more visible security.

Let's be specific about what UP is complaining, then:

"But even with these expanded resources and closer partnerships with local law enforcement, we find ourselves coming back to the same results with the Los Angeles County criminal justice system. Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. 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. In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence."

You are perfectly correct in the pedantic sense, but the spirit of their complaint is much closer to the GP's post than to what you represent.

Private security is an expected cost for any business (or homeowner for that matter). Even if the local police department is fully staffed, they certainly can't be everywhere at all times, respond instantly to a report of crime, or deal with issues that it is not staffed for such as rampant technology-enabled crime.

So, maybe the security is an investment in new cameras. Maybe it's a better lock that can't be bypassed. Maybe it's an investment in network security personnel or systems. Maybe it's a doorman at the apartment building, or a security guard serving as "eyes and ears" for the police.

My question earlier is how much UP - a publicly listed company with $20B in revenue in 2020 - has increased security expenditures to keep up with traffic, theft, and other potential threats to its business.

Insane that this discussion is happening like this. Depending on the state for property protection is a basic facet of a functioning government. Literal organized stage coach robbery is not an issue anywhere else in the US, and it is not UPs responsibility to deal with it, unless we want to return to a period of private armies.

Fun fact — contract work as railway police was one of the original lines of business for the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency.

Camera's not going to do anything by itself if you can't actually stop the person who is on the camera, and it's a lot harder to stop that person if they're never going to jail even when they're caught red-handed and arrested at the scene.

I mean, heck, if it comes down to it, Private Security can also mean that UP just gives up on Los Angeles and its eponymous port entirely.

Cameras provide evidence that is far more reliable and simpler to present than testimony from a railway security guard. This evidence could even be shared publicly to support their case.

Won't do much good if no one's taking them to court, which seems to be an issue at the heart of the complaint.

Cameras don't provide much useful evidence in these cases. The recordings typically show a medium size man wearing a hoodie. Could be anybody.

They can’t be everywhere at once but they should be apprehending repeat offenders it sounds like they are arresting plenty of criminals they just aren’t being prosecuted so they continue to rob and pillage.

> So, maybe the security is an investment in new cameras. Maybe it's a better lock that can't be bypassed. Maybe it's an investment in network security personnel or systems. Maybe it's a doorman at the apartment building, or a security guard serving as "eyes and ears" for the police.

All of the things listed are simply deterrents, that would not stop a criminal knowing that he would not get prosecuted from taking the extra time to bypass them. Cameras can be evaded with masks, locks can be grinded down (see lockpickinglawyer), security is pointless if they know they cannot be detained.

You’re asking a great question, but at the end of the day, if criminals have no fear of repercussion, the “security” investments are almost equal to throwing money away.

UP already has passive monitoring, and active monitoring.

They are in fact arresting people.

Then the DA is not doing shit to charge those arrested.

What more do you want UP to do? They are literally giving criminals bagged and tagged to the police.

> Then the DA is not doing shit to charge those arrested

They are being charged and convicted, and UP explicitly acknowledges this.

UP is complaining that the convictions are based on plea deals to charges less severe than UP would prefer, and that cash bail is not being unconstitutionally abused (I mean this is pretty much black and white in their letter) as pre-conviction punishment of the legally presumed-innocent rather than bail terms being set based on what is necessary to secure appearance at subsequent court hearing.

One of the basis for bail is likelihood to reoffend while on bail.

To make an analogy, my dad worked at a large chemical factory. It had its own full service fire department. This department also participated in mutual aid with the surrounding town. One thing they could do was provide services that would normally not be a consideration for a sleepy suburb, such as a bomb squad.

I think if your business is particularly security intensive, I don't see a reason not to supplement the basic services provided by the government. There have always been railroad police, armored car services, and so forth.

I don't think moving random manufactured products from point A to point B should be considered "particularly security intensive". This is just basic commerce and logistics.

The history of logistics disagrees with this.

It used to be bandits raiding caravans, and now it's criminals raiding trains, front porches, etc.

And then we created civilized society so citizens and corporations could conduct such activities without threat to life or property.

It appears that vigilantism will be making a comeback

Some of the largest battles of World War II involved nothing more substantial than moving goods from point A to point B, or stopping the other country from moving their goods from point A to point B.

Logistics is the lifeblood of society and cannot be taken for granted even in a civilian sphere.

UP has its own police with full law enforcement powers. I would be curious to know if that force has been downsized. They did abandon the police headquarters building at the western edge of the LA yard.

They can arrest but they cannot prosecute. The state needs to try the suspects and enforce any penalties. UP police cannot do the latter -they can only arrest.

Maybe they can seek trial in a different locale if the railroad right of way has different jurisdiction.

That's the same as the normal LA police. The prosecutor is a separate department altogether.

The only other option the UP police have is asking a federal prosecutor to take the case. And that's only if there's some credible evidence of a federal law violation.

I'm not generally one for expanding federal jurisdictional reach, but there's a much clearer federal connection for: internationally imported shipping containers leaving a federal port facility on a (primarily) federally regulated mode of transportation devoted (primarily) to interstate commerce... than there is for 90% of what legally gets classified today as federal jurisdiction.

Is there no theft laws at the federal level?

How much protection of their property can the average American expect from the state? Very little.

The only thing you can expect of the police will do for you if you get burglarized is a signed police report, and if you're lucky, unsolicited advice to move to a better part of town.

My wife's workplace gets stolen from fairly regularly. It's not located in one of those 'liberal' cities that allegedly don't enforce any laws.

Despite that, the police have yet to do anything about it.

The primary function of the police is not, and has never been protecting your property. The primary function of the police is protecting the upper classes from you.

> The primary function of the police is protecting the upper classes from you.

i no longer buy that at all, i use to but not any longer. The whole "make police the bad guy" thing is over and done with. If police are not enforcing the law then how are they protecting anyone from anyone else regardless of class.

But in this case they are enforcing the law. The prosecutors and courts are the ones not putting them in prison.

And to the people saying UP just needs more cops, they wouldn't need more cops if as criminals were caught they were taken off the streets by prosecutors. If someone is successful at stealing from trains, but gets caught every 10th time and has to spend 4 hours in a holding cell, why would they quit stealing from trains?

I would wager, but cannot prove, that if an LA politician's (extra points for being a congresscritter) home was burglarized that it, and the perpetrator, would get more action taken than one of us mere peons.

With all of these train robberies we’re going to need some Pinkertons

On face value that’s pretty fanning of the current prosecutorial office.

It’s a discouraging dereliction of duty to not follow up and prosecute these criminals. These thefts not only hurt the companies but also hurt each buyer who will have to pay indirectly for the added cost of operations.

As I mentioned in the previous thread, we may yet see a Pinkerton service rise to meet this need.

> These thefts not only hurt the companies but also hurt each buyer who will have to pay indirectly for the added cost of operations.

Is this damage more then the cost of prosecuting and punishing the thieves? If not, it's not worth it.

Well, first they need to be caught and brought up on charges. Then they can be prosecuted.

The bigger question is where even is the LAPD?

Per the letter, the question is NOT, "where even is the LAPD." It is, "where are the Los Angeles County prosecutors?" And the answer Union Pacific provides is, "letting these people who are arrested go free with a plea deal for simple trespassing."

They are being caught and arrested. Then the DA lets them go, so they go back and steal more, and spread the word that nothing happens even when you do get caught.

Non-prosecution sends a signal "it's okay, we will not prosecute you". Less scrupulous people learn there is no prosecution and this becomes a routine drag on rail commerce. In Nigeria you get people who hijack petrol transportation --often times they lead to fiery explosions. It's not a path we should want to devolve to. The middle ages had highway men. We want to avoid going backwards.

> Is this damage more then the cost of prosecuting and punishing the thieves? If not, it's not worth it.

This naive first order thinking is why we can’t have nice things. Yes, prosecuting a guy for stealing $100 headphones might cost more than the merchandise, but you cannot think about this in isolation from broader social context. By showing that you will not prosecute crimes under certain monetary value, you’re sending a signal that these can now be done with no consequence, in effect enabling more and more crime to happen. It’s not about a pair of headphones, it’s about the career of crime for the perp you’re enabling, and the crime careers of the imitators.

I don't think this is one guy stealing one box from a huge boxcar or container. It's multiple packages stolen at once. It would be too much work to scatter all that trash along the tracks, if it were many onesy-twosy thefts.

i wonder if the cheapest option is better locks on the containers

Better locks only help until the point where it's easier to mangle the shipping container itself, bypassing the lock entirely, and impenetrable containers are needlessly expensive.

Are there any practical locks that can't be defeated by an angle grinder in 5 minutes or less?

I guess you haven’t heard of a Sawzall. Who even needs a door?

Or a cordless angle grinder.

the same tools that thieves are using to steal catalytic converters all over california too.

Well they said “better lock” meaning, in the limit, “better than your angle grinder,” so I went in a different direction, the wall.

> Is this damage more then the cost of prosecuting and punishing the thieves? If not, it's not worth it.

It's not a question of whether this damage is more, it's a question of whether the prosecution would reduce the total amount of future-damage that occurs as well. People who are in a jail are not stealing. People who expect significant risk of significant jail time are also not stealing, while those who expect minimal risk might be.

These factors easily outweigh the cost of any single theft.

This is completely one sided. You also have to look at the future damage on the other side. The 2nd and 3rd and more order societal cost of jailing someone, etc.

What does a single prosecution and court case cost? A few thousand dollars, at a minimum.

So you are saying any crime that causes less than a few thousand dollars worth of damage is not worth prosecuting?

How would you like it if I were to break in to your house through a window (a $1,000 expense) and steal your $2,500 MacBook Pro? The $3,500 in damages is less than the cost of identifying, arresting, prosecuting and punishing me. Not worth it - just let it go?

This is already how it is. Police rarely do anything in that type of break in.

Pinkertons (or any private security) basically have no authority to use lethal force anymore (unless the criminal is dumb enough to attack them), so their value as a deterrent is minimal.

They can theoretically arrest, but if the prosecutors don't press charges, it's meaningless.

The letter doesn't support that the prosecutors are not following up and prosecuting these criminals, rather it says the exact opposite.

Rather, the complaint seems to be that the government is granting the criminals their constitutional rights to bail and a presumption of innocence before trial, that the prosecution is accepting milder plea deals than the railroad company would like, and that the court system is backed up.

Emphasis added to the below quote to support each of those statements

> Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. 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.

This is the railroads side of the story, and even it doesn't support the idea that the prosecutors are just "not follow[ing] up and prosecut[ing] these criminals".

Moreover the court system being backed up is not prosecutors fault, and not offering mild plea deals would just result in a more backed up court system...

There are probably some valid criticisms of the prosecutors here, but let's at least consider that there are tradeoffs they are making, and that this isn't something that is solely their fault.

Our legal system is expensive, and much of that expense is baked into the constitution.

Most of our justice system is designed to prioritize offenses that make money for the government/police/DA. Which means, focusing on drug offenses. Any crime tangentially-related to drugs can result in civil asset forfeiture. DUIs result in massive fines, so those get attention too. But theft is a cost-center crime and is largely ignored.

> Any crime tangentially-related to drugs

Or lack thereof.

If people are being caught stealing from trains and the same people are walking out of court and going to rob the next train in the same location again the next day, then yes, the government, the prosecution and the court system are failing in their duty here.

Then change the funding of the law enforcement system so that it is supported by tax dollars rather than fines.

Then you can change enforcement priority as the offenders change priority.

Sure, but actively violating those people's constitutional rights would actually be worse. Without enough resources, there are no good options, but there are better and worse ones.

Being held on reasonable bail is not a violation of constitutional rights, is it? I mean I'm sure some people think it is but are there court opinions that have established this as a legal reality?

If someone is let out on bail, and commits another crime, then their bail should be posted higher. A third crime would result in an even higher bail. The constitution only prohibits "excessive" bail. If someone continued to commit crime while out on bail, then clearly the original bail was insufficient to act as a deterrent.

I see where you're going with this, but bail is not supposed to be a deterrent against future crime — it's a refundable payment to ensure defendants will show up for trial. You could try to deter criminals with fines, but this would have little effect on people who do not have significant assets. That's (one of the reasons) why we have prisons.

Scaling bail would make it so that if people are repeat offenders, eventually they won't have the assets to put up bail and will be detained in jail until their trial. Sometimes exceptionally violent offenders don't even get the chance to get bail, for safety. The is precedence for this, and the same approach can be applied to repeat offenders

If committing crimes has no repercussion then things like theft have become de-facto legal. If that happens eventually people are going to take things into their own hands, and that's even worse for society.

> Scaling bail would make it so that if people are repeat offenders, eventually they won't have the assets to put up bail and will be detained in jail until their trial

No, it would make it so that if people are repeat targets of prosecution eventually ”won't have the assets to put up bail and will be detained in jail until their trial”.

It's not until after trial that the legal system determines that a crime has been committed.

That shouldn't be a problem. Bail scales with each arrest, and then scales down once the arrest is resolved.

That doesn't solve the problem - what if e.g. the police harass a person by repeatedly making specious arrests until their bail becomes too high to pay?

Safeguards against police corruption should come in the form of transparency. We need to have safeguards against filing bogus arrests regardless of this whole scaling bail proposal. The same vulnerability to a corrupt police system already exists: police could just fabricate violent charges to justify denying bail on grounds of safety.

The fact that bail should only scale for repeat offenses of lesser crimes is itself an additional safeguard: it would elicit scrutiny if the same set of police repeatedly charged the same person, and it would expand the set of co-conspirators required for corrupt police to pull this off.

> We need to have safeguards against filing bogus arrests regardless of this whole scaling bail proposal. The same vulnerability to a corrupt police system already exists: police could just fabricate violent charges to justify denying bail on grounds of safety.

Violent charges might be taken much more seriously by the system right now; how confident are we that existing safeguards are good enough? Ideally we would have good safeguards, but that doesn't mean it's fine to exacerbate any existing problems.

> it would expand the set of co-conspirators required for corrupt police to pull this off

By how much though? Police have a lot of trust in each other (the job demands it), I think "arrest this dude for suspected littering" wouldn't seem like a huge favour.

In practice, in most states, bail is a system that moves the cost of enforcing failure to appear from the state to private industry. That is, bail serves as a mechanism to give bail bondsmen a significant financial interest, so that they then make their own risk evaluation in setting the price of a bail bond. The cost of locating and detaining those who fail to appear (skip tracing, bounty hunting, etc) is then covered by the pool of bail bond payments. It is essentially an insurance scheme for failure to appear.

Cash bail seldom exists in any meaningful way without the bail bond industry to support it, otherwise no one would ever be able to post bail and pretrial detention would become an unamangeable expense.

One of the arguments for elimination of cash bail and replacement with a risk scoring approach is that it is essentially taking the existing system and moving it from private industry into the state. Currently, when bail is set for someone, what really determines whether or not they go free in most cases is a data-based risk evaluation made by a bail bondsmen to determine whether or not to offer a bond and, if so, whether or not to do so at a manageable price. CA has set a limit on bail bonds (as have many states) at 10% of bail, although they are usually lower, so one way to look at it is that bail bondsmen must make an evaluation of whether the risk-weighted cost of finding the fugitive or losing the bond is less than 10% of the bail amount. In other words, they must compare the expected value of the bond rate to the expected value of the bond owed to the state. This is something that the bail bonds industry has increasingly systematized, and states are hoping to take advantage of that effort to cut out the middleman.

Cash bail is so closely tied to the system of bail bondsmen that it is seldom useful to discuss one without considering the other. There have been cases where states have largely eliminated bail bonds, such as Oregon, but they have tended to pose significant difficulties that made the need for bail reform even more apparent (essentially that not a single person could ever make bail, since it is quite rare for bail to actually be set at an amount that the accused can come up with).

> If someone is let out on bail, and commits another crime, then their bail should be posted higher.

I'd say that if someone gets rearrested after being out on bail, they should get no bail at all. I'm also not willing to count the time spent in prison as a result of this as time served for any later sentence in this circumstance.

But I may be biased. There's a person in prison right now for murder, who was literally caught with blood on his hands, who had grandma's name on his list of people to kill.

So I take the notion that prison disables criminals a bit more seriously than some do (and grandma is still alive).

> If someone is let out on bail, and commits another crime, then their bail should be posted higher.

If someone is out on bail, they are presumed innocent of the first alleged crime, and will still presumed innocent of the second alleged crime if they are charged with another one when bail for the second charge is set.

Bail is not a pre-conviction punishment, and using it as such violates the due process clause of the 14th Amendment (or the 5th, if was the federal government doing it), the confrontation clause, and the right to jury trial.

> The constitution only prohibits "excessive" bail

No, the Constitution prohibits a lot more than that; it's true that the prohibition on excessive bail is the only prohibition specific to bail, but it contains lots of other prohibitions that you can't just use “we’re calling it bail” to evade.

People can be subject to pre-trial detention. Violent offenders are sometimes denied bail, entirely, if they are determined to be a a safety threat to the public. There exists precedence to detain people prior to trial. If the situation gets to the point where crime becomes de-facto legal then this precedent should be used to curb repeat offenses.

Would it hold up to constitutional scrutiny? Who knows. But interpretations of the Constitution change. A hundred years ago people would probably be baffled that the Constitution was used to justify gay marriage and abortion - interpretations change and adapt to new ideals and values. As people say "the Constitution is not a suicide pact."

Many people have argued that the US court system is failing for decades. Now that covid has hit, and the poor management of US courts, jails and prisons has been stressed to the point that continuing normal practices was going to kill a large percentage of people arrested for any reason and the prison guards who work there, the failures have transformed into publicly visible problems.

1. Jail conditions have always been bad. The jails are already crowded for normal conditions - in many jails the only way to isolate/quarantine someone is to literally put them in solitary confinement cells, and aside from that being an actual inhumane practice, it doesn't scale. So covid positive inmates were just kept in the normal population (sometimes they tried to separate them into covid cells and non-covid cells) which made it spread incredibly fast, and quickly overwhelmed any medical facilities inside the facility. Normal transport puts officers into close contact with prisoners, which means it's not easy to transfer them to somewhere else, and nowhere else had space anyway.

So today, in some places people aren't being held in jail until trials for non-violent crimes because the decision has been made that increased low-level crime is an acceptable trade-off when the other option is the government directly causing the deaths of people simply for being arrested. I think that if those are the available choices, they have picked the right one - but obviously those should not be the choices!

2. They aren't walking out of court. They aren't even getting to court for a trial for months and months. Something like 95% of US convictions are arranged in plea deals because the court system is literally not capable of holding trials for everyone with criminal charges - and that was before covid stopped all courts for a few months and slowed them down so that there are massive backlogs even from normal. This partly causes the first problem, because the long wait times builds up the large population of people who haven't had a trial yet. We aren't putting in more and more money, so as this population gets larger (and includes completely innocent people, remember!) we either give them worse and worse conditions in jails, or let more of them out of jail to wait for their trial.

Thank you, this is a very informative post.

The situation with medical care in prisons has long been severe and COVID has only made it very apparent. In state and county systems it is very common for prisons to have not a single doctor and nurses only on part-time contracts.

With the many complexities of COVID, we have a situation in this state where prisoners are now routinely failing to make court appearances because the jail did not have the resources to transport them to the courthouse, and nowadays the even more extreme situation that prisoners are missing court appearances because the jail did not have the resources to get them into a room with a working computer for a Zoom conference.

While defense attorneys are increasingly making the argument that this constitutes a violation of constitutional rights, and judges are clearly fed up with the numerous delays this is causing, there is very little will to actually address the problem because it would be expensive.

Maybe its because the LAPD has such a little budget?

/s.

Even though LAPD's budget is drastically lower per-capita and per-area than other major cities, it sounds like a bigger problem is that even when someone is arrested they can be let out of jail same day with no bail for even repeat offenders.

>The damning thing here is the lack of prosecution for the arrests that have happened. It's a clear message to offenders that they can continue what they are doing with no serious consequences.

Also missing, is the figure of number of arrests that haven't been prosecuted. That data should be out there somewhere. It's interesting that no data to prove the theory has surfaced.

That's what they are saying, the government isn't supplying them with that data.

All prosecutions are public data. So the government may not be serving it up on a plate, but they also must not be trying to find out.

UP implies they believe there have been zero prosecutions. If there were any resulting from the arrests they made they would have had to be involved as witnesses and they say they haven’t been contacted in that capacity.

> UP implies they believe there have been zero prosecutions

Under the California Victim's Bill of Rights they have a right to information on this on request (but they don't have to be provided with it proactively), so if they merely “believe” this but can point to neither concrete information or a failure to respond to inquiries, it means they have chosen not to ask to avoid their belief being proven wrong.

But, anyway, they don't say that, so its immaterial: they specifically acknowledge prosecutions and convictions, they are just upset that the DA is taking plea deals to charges they feel are insufficiently serious rather than expending more resources seeking convictions (and risking acquittals) on more serious charges.

(They also specifically are validating the argument of anti-cash-bail advocates by portraying cash bail as a punitive and disabling measure against unconvicted suspects rather than a means of securing appearance.)

To the contrary if people are repeatedly violating the law in the willful and obvious way that is exactly what bail should be used for. The bottom line is that they are seeing a lot of repeat offenders something is going to have to give.

If there is a plea bargain (which happens most of the time) there is no need for testimony. When my checks were stolen from the mail (1990's, Los Angeles area) an officer just called me to see if I was aware of the suspect. I heard nothing more from him afterwards.

The police were witness to the train thefts you weren’t witness to your stuff being stolen from your mail box.

Interesting they choose the word vandalism here. I hope they’re distinguishing between someone doing graffiti and someone breaking into a container and stealing what’s inside it.

Before anyone jumps to “well broken window” freight graffiti has been a thing for like 40 years and has no correlation to container robberies.

The use of “vandalism” vs theft seems to be perspective. The container was vandalized to access. The actual theft of items within is secondary. Related use. I had a storage space where the company said there was vandalism in the area of my locker and I should come check. Sure enough it was broken into and items had been taken. As far as storage company was concerned, it was vandalism of their property and theft of mine.

It's at best accidental lack of precision. It is inarguable that graffiti is vandalization: it is possible but unlikely that they are using it here only to describe a subset of the activities it means.

Theft before the actual thing is taken would require at minimum a proof of intent, and could still be problematic. So vandalism is the "easiest" charge for those caught in the act.

And gets around one potential argument from prosecutors that charges should be dropped.

They forgot destruction of property. They had to break in to get to the goods.

Am I missing something or is the first bullet point completely orthogonal to the second. They talk about train thefts on the rise but then cite a statistic about "over 100 arrests" for vandalism? How are these related? What are the stats for arrests for theft?

As pointed out on other comments. From the train's POV the train was vandalized but nothing that belongs the the train company was stolen. The stuff that was stolen belong to other entities.

But yes, it would be good to know stats for both

> From the train's POV the train was vandalized but nothing that belongs the the train company was stolen.

Trains are inanimate and don't have a POV, and from the perspective of UP (which has a police force notionally charged with addressing crimes on railway property, not merely crimes against the railway), that’s not correct if an actual theft occurred.

> But even with these expanded resources and closer partnerships with local law enforcement, we find ourselves coming back to the same results with the Los Angeles County criminal justice system. Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours.

From experience inside a major retail chain at the national level, this is the story of retail theft in general. The interface between private security and public law enforcement is... inefficient. (To put it nicely)

"Not caught here" is a real thing. Private security lays a theft case in law enforcement's lap, oftentimes better documented than police cases, and the collective response is a yawn and inaction.

And while I'm a proponent of justice reform, theft is theft. We're not talking about busting someone for personal amounts of marijuana. This is forcefully choosing to break into a secure container, for purposes of stealing items of value for sale. With the resulting costs being borne by everyone who uses the system.

> From experience inside a major retail chain at the national level, this is the story of retail theft in general.

I thought it was common at some places, like Target, to track but not report shoplifting until it qualified for a felony. Then once the shoplifter had stolen enough to be charged for a felony they were prosecuted.

Years ago, I worked for a regional discount retail chain, in the Loss Prevention department (my job was installing cameras and other low-voltage systems). The focus of LP there (and probably at most retail places) was internal theft. They would try to discourage shoplifting, but employees stealing represented much bigger losses.

I remember hearing one of the guys reviewing video tape saying that they were tallying up a bunch of thefts (in this case, the subject was a cashier, and he was pretending to ring up items for his friends and family, but not really scanning it). The kid was 17, going to turn 18 in a couple weeks. The guy reviewing the tape joked about how the tally would be $1000 shortly after his birthday, when he would be an adult: "Happy birthday, you're under arrest for grand larceny".

It was sickening. I enjoyed my job, and I didn't mind if criminals were caught and prosecuted, but the attitude that led to jokes like that didn't sit well with me.

> employees stealing represented much bigger losses

This is why the Walmart "greeters" have their backs to the door and insist on evaluating your property after purchase to sniff out rogue cashiers helping a friend slip by with unpaid goods.

To parent comment and yours, I think it's that the work vs results only merited pursuing it if it were a higher charge. There were enough organized theft rings that it kept loss prevention busy, without doing reams of paperwork for misdemeanor theft.

And yes, internal theft is a huge issue. Because retail salaries usually don't compare favorably with the kickback you could get out of running a return scam, etc.

As to the kid and the joke, I'd like to think it's black humor. You can only wade in the squalor of people repeatedly and constantly making shitty moral decisions for so long before you start seeing all people like that. And at that point, all you can do is joke.

I mean, what, best case you alert the kid you're onto him. And then what? Better than even odds he tries again anyway.

> It was sickening. I enjoyed my job, and I didn't mind if criminals were caught and prosecuted, but the attitude that led to jokes like that didn't sit well with me.

Sounds more like dark humor. If one had a job like that for too long, watching people get off scott free much of the time, I’m sure more than a little bit of dark humor would develop.

In this case the problem is not law enforcement, but the DA's office that refuses to prosecute property crimes for ideological reasons.

Whatever reason the DAs have to not prosecute these crimes, it's not the Special Directive 20-07 [1] called out in the letter [2].

UP is very clear that there is "armed robbery" which would count as a felony while the Special Directive 20-07 only deals with lowering "misdemeanor convictions".

[1]: https://da.lacounty.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/SPECIAL-DIRE...

[2] > UP and our goods movement partners strongly urge you to reconsider the policies detailed in Special Directive 20-07

20-07 includes non prosecution for trespassing, which seems to be the only crime the DA is willing to either charge or plea out in the majority of these cases.

Presumably because of its inclusion in the directive.

It might not even be for DA ideological reasons, but due to court/jail resources being limited. California, in particular, has been sanctioned multiple times for jail and prison overcrowding. The solution that doesn’t involve throwing more money at the problem (prosecute less) then leads to these kinds of problems.

That is California's problem to resolve, not LA County's or its DA's.

Just to note, while I'm sure the relationship may still be strained - it's a different situation to any other one I can think of.

--------

The railroads are a special case as they are legally authorized to have their own police forces, and do. While they're privately employed, they have the same powers as a typical cop (or more).

They can get warrants, run investigations, and can make arrests anywhere in CA if the case involves the railroad.

They are not semi-powerless private security. They do not need "a real cop" to make an arrest or do the police work. (although they certainly do typically work with local authorities).

Neat! And makes sense, given railroad property is by nature multi-jurisdictional.

Among other rail oddities, when looking into a rail industry job, it turns out rail employees have the only federally -administered and -funded private pension system, created by the Railroad Retirement Act (1935, same year as social security). In modern specifics, it's basically Social Security by another name.

https://www.rrb.gov/Resources/LegalInformation/PartitionofRR...

It's easy to forget how central rail was to this country for a century+ (and still today, if more behind the scenes).

I wondered if some of the issue is how people are caught? Are they getting caught with obvious evidence breaking into the containers, or are most getting caught scrounging through packages on the ground?

From someone who has extensive experience in the criminal justice system, I wonder how much of this is because they have no evidence of theft by the persons they arrest? It's one thing to arrest someone who is clearly on your property* and the officer can testify they found Person X where they shouldn't be, but unless the officer sees X pulling a package out of a railcar and can specifically identify them, it gets tricky to find them guilty of the larger crime at trial.

Almost certainly though, multiple misdemeanour convictions for trespassing are eventually going to elevate to a felony. It is possibly still worth it though. Having been locked up I know many people who would commit what most people would consider petty robberies and just suck up the months and years of being locked up. People become inured to incarceration. The first time you're locked up you're scared and you don't know what's going on. The second time: you walk in like a boss and all your friends are already there.

A lot of the people doing this have been programmed by their peers to see regular jobs as something suckers do, and that crime is the "cool" way to make money. Most of them are not doing it because jobs are unavailable, just that they don't want a job. A lot of them would work for themselves though if they could find the right industry and were given appropriate help to see it through and stay on the correct path.

* trespass isn't always a crime the first time you are caught somewhere you should not be - often it requires the property owner to tell you that you are not welcome to return before the statute activates

Remember all the smash and grab retail lootings? The Target store that was burned down? It was all on video. Hundreds participating. How many prosecutions came out of that?

It takes time and money. The idiots that wrecked up the Capitol and tried to kill a sitting Vice President (all while recording thousands of hours of video footage) are just now being prosecuted, a year later.

Before Recent Wave of Train Cargo Thefts, Union Pacific Laid Off Unspecified Number of Its Railroad Police Force https://www.lataco.com/union-pacific-theft-police-laid-off/

"A Union Pacific worker, who asked to remain nameless, [said that] the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies."

What you're reading here is quite literally a joint press release between Pinkertons and the LA and LA County cops, together an axis of vile mendacity. I would read this as dispassionately and skeptically as possible.

“all those arrests, however, UP has not been contacted for any court proceedings.”

They’ve tried to recall gascon already for this, but the voters want him and his policies. If UP doesn’t like it they should bypass LA. It’s a sinking ship anyway, politely asking for “leadership” is laughably naive. California has one party for all intents and purposes and voters are too afraid because the elite tell them it’s too dangerous to vote outside The Party.

Well, I think you also have to recognize that a lot of non-Democrats running for offices in CA are... batshit crazy. Then again, you'd have to be to think you have a chance at winning in this state.

I have to think there will be some point at which the voters will have had enough. Maybe it will be the mandatory 3rd bin for organic waste... maybe it will be single payer health care... Hard to say.

FWIW, I'm not opposed in theory to either separation of organic waste or single payer health care, just the ways in which CA is likely to implement them. That's the thing that has kept me in CA so far. I agree in principle with many things. I'll even admit Chesa Boudin has some fair points about criminal justice reform. That said, there is a gross impracticality to the implementations of many pieces of Progressivism that CA Dems refuse to acknowledge.

> Well, I think you also have to recognize that a lot of non-Democrats running for offices in CA are... batshit crazy.

This is the problem with the US. I get to pick from incompetent idiots or deranged idiots. I’ll continue just to sit out.

Political outsiders are always called crazy and/or incompetent, and since the parties can control reality via their media influence everyone accepts the narrative. Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to destroy the state, Ross Perot was mocked as a crazy incompetent, Ralph Nader etc… Always the same narrative.

But the reality is, the stars of both political parties are, in many cases, crazy or incompetent themselves. Many examples. Some of the top party figures are starting to suffer from dementia and literally have had episodes, clear mental lapses, while speaking publicly. Despite the recorded evidence, the average news watching voter is convinced that political outsiders, even those who have had long successful careers in some competitive field outside politics (say brain surgeon or ceo) cannot perform similar duties because they don’t have the party’s endorsement. Party endorsement is not evidence of sanity or competent leadership.

No, I mean I've gone to a GOP convention in San Diego and met them. A lot of them are literally not sane. I encourage everyone to go actually meet pols sometime. It was frightening.

I don't think Nancy Pelosi is crazy. Self serving and out of touch, yes, but not actually crazy.

When I first read the headline I thought it meant people were stealing trains and using them to threaten public safety. I'm glad it's not about that but certainly a more exciting story.

Seems like they should have re-titled the PDF (or not saved a default title in the client): "PREPARED FOR REVIEW/APPROVAL BY John Venice and Adrian Guerrero 5/14/18"

>5/14/18

it was approved... 3 years ago?

Somebody edited an existing letter to make this, for whatever reason.

Related discussion:

Train burglaries in LA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970

This says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsipYHlah6s

I think this could be fixed easily - no cash bail first time, cash bail if you are caught again.

Kinda expected YC crowd to cheer for more policing. This is a failure of UP to protect their cargo. All the more reason aging slow existing train freight infrastructure is keeping America behind. Invest in new train infrastructure NOT made by Elon Musk.

In the developed world, this seems to be a problem only in the US.

Perhaps the issue is more the rising inequality, forcing some people to commit crimes?

Not true. Flash mobs stealing things is not a US exclusive thing.

At this scale, it looks like it.

I haven’t been able to find any examples that compare to this one, but I admit that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

the pervasive internet attitude that "it's just stuff, who cares? it's insured" certainly isn't helping matters either.

It is just stuff.

I would like to see more approaches like "why are people stealing stuff?", and I lean towards thinking that these people just don't have their basic needs fulfilled and they resort to crime.

It's not just stuff and that is a cavalier dismissal of what is a huge problem.

> I would like to see more approaches like "why are people stealing stuff?", and I lean towards thinking that these people just don't have their basic needs fulfilled and they resort to crime.

They have their basic needs fulfilled. Crime is a way easier means to an end. They can make more selling stolen merchandise than they'd make in a 40 hour work week.

They steal stuff because it's thrilling and it's easy money.

>we estimate over 100 arrests have been made of active criminals vandalizing our trains.

I think the graffiti on trains looks cool. Much nicer looking than the logos on the side.

I can't stand graffiti anywhere because it implies a lack of respect for those around you.

I agree. Advertising has gotten out of hand. It is insulting to the citizens of our society, and often outright dishonest as well. The advertising industry should be illegal.

I think you're trying to be ironic but... yes. Absolutely. Third parties trading money with each other for my attention is insulting and dishonest.

I am being dead serious.

I'd include tagging within a broader term of advertising.

Would you apply this same standard to wearing a mask during a pandemic? How about being vaccinated?

What I see is someone taking ugliness and artlessness and creating beauty.

Sometimes I see street art and I'm more mixed. But 99% of the time it's just tagging and names. If you really believe graffiti is ok then I'll be happy to come over and tag your car, your laptop, your phone, your house. No complaining if you don't like what I write or its style.

That isn't what we are talking about. I don't recall any graffiti on personal, private property. Usually it's on highway overpasses, railcars, etc.

"I think the graffiti on trains looks cool." - thread parent

"Usually it's on highway overpasses, railcars, etc." - your immediate post parent

I think it's fair to consider a railcar to be part of a train.

Buildings too, and those are often privately owned.

That's why I said "personal" property.

I wonder how cool you think it would look when someone breaks into your house and graffitis your walls.

> On average, over 90 containers compromised per day.

> 160% increase in criminal rail theft

Combining these statistics indicates that UP was experiencing over 56 containers compromised per day before the policy change.

Compare that with the almost 50,000 containers daily that flow through the Ports of LA and Long Beach. I don't know what percentage of that UP handles, but I think it's safe to say that even 90 containers is a small fraction. UP has insurance, and, I'm sure treats a small percentage of thefts as the cost of doing business.

UP can increase their investment in securing their trains and property. The alternative is the taxpayer spending a lot of money on police and incarceration. The US's incarceration rate is ridiculously higher that all other advanced economies. We can probably find better things to spend all that money on.

The US justice system is the best in the world and one of the reason's why capitalism has flourished so well here. It is by no means perfect, but a free market only works when the rules are enforced.

Giving up on crime doesn't strike me as a sensible solution for any community. See San Francisco et al.

> The U.S. justice system is the best in the world, and one of the reasons...

I'm sorry, but this is the first time I've heard such a statement, and would like to know more.

The shariah justice system is the best in the world and one of the reason's why Islam has flourished so well there. It is by no means perfect, but a pious society only works when the rules are enforced.

I'd rather live under sharia law than anarchy

Or better, read again and get the sarcasm in that comment.

How does that change the OP’s point?

That's what the Islamic Courts Union were doing in Somalia after the government collapsed into anarchy, and they were reasonably effective at stamping out lawlessness, but they were taken down by Ethiopia and the US and the vacuum was replaced by the Shebab, who are far, far worse.

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

By your math, how many containers per day were being compromised were they to have said only a 100% increase in criminal rail theft?

Personally I'd rather not have big businesses carrying out vigilante justice to secure their property

You only own what you can and will defend.

That's why nobody in any developed country other than the US owns anything.

Technically, no one owns property. True ownership is in allodium (by virtue of you being there and keeping others off) but there are no allodial land titles left except in certain US states (Arizona and Texas?) but the Federal government kind of supersedes them by virtue of having the most and biggest guns and controlling all of the surrounding land.

Some jurisdictions have the concept of "railway police" who are sworn officers protecting the railway land. See the US section for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police

They still work for the railway so there is some conflict but I don't know that they'd by any more vigilante than regular police, and they have a special status with the states compared to security guards

> Personally I'd rather not have big businesses carrying out vigilante justice to secure their property

you mean like a security guard? That is very common everywhere, at least in the US.

When I lived in DC and called around for contractors to do things to my house, I encountered some who would not take jobs in that city. It wasn’t worth it to them, because tools were routinely stolen from their trucks. Of course they could have invested in guards and armored trucks. But it made more sense to only do business in VA and MD, which had more effective law enforcement.

Toward the end of the letter UP warns of the same outcome: unless the government starts doing its job they’ll just avoid LA. The end result of more businesses making this choice will lead to LA becoming another Detroit.

> The end result of more businesses making this choice will lead to LA becoming another Detroit.

That’s not the only possible future. Another is that contractors charge more for working in a high-risk area.

For example urban grocery stores tend to have several security guards, some which might be armed. And they charge higher prices than their suburban counterparts (of course higher rents, taxes, local minimum wages and what not also contribute.)

There are very few chain grocery stores, drug stores, etc. in Detroit. There is a Whole Foods down Woodward avenue, near where the city is being rebuilt. Many of the local small mom and pop grocery stores have large pylons preventing you from taking the shopping carts away. All of the buildings have large iron bars on the windows.

You can always say "the rich company/people have insurance, so what", but that's missing the point. The point is, the economic core of the city largely left when they got fed up with the unrest, the lack of safety, etc. They left for and built up the suburbs around the city.

Now, the city leaders have been working with local investors (Illich and other groups) to turn desolation back into a productive tax base. To attract people to live and work there.

From what my wife (Detroit/Michigan native) tells me (escapee from NY), they moved out after the riots/unrest in 1967.

Cities get hollowed out when you can't guarantee safety. Businesses leave. Families leave. Your economic base flows elsewhere.

The folks at UP (my FIL/BIL worked there for many years) have a reasonable request of LA. Please make it safe for us to do business. The DA of LA appears to be following some other agenda, atypical of what one might expect of a DA. The end result will be (and likely is now), that LA will start slowly bleeding out as businesses and people come to the realization that their interests and concerns are not being addressed by local government.

In the case of Detroit, this hollowing out had another side effect, the effective capture of the political class by corrupt pols and other criminals. It took, arguably, 45 years, before they elected someone who actually worked for the people, and wasn't feathering their own nest. Many city council members leave by going to prison, only recently has that trend changed.

If you want that outcome for your city, have extreme unrest, coupled with lawlessness, an inability to pursue and prosecute criminals. You provide pressure for businesses to give up on you, as they did in Detroit. People leave when their small businesses move. Large companies close up shop and don't return.

I arrived here slightly after the nadir. I love Detroit, the architecture is amazing, the people resilient, the attitude ... one of never giving up. Detroit versus everyone.

But the pain that they went through to get there.

Take them as an object lesson, of the combination of ethical corruption, failed government, and criminal capture. You don't want to experience this. You really, really don't.

Thank your for that eloquent comment.

“They have insurance” is unfortunately a common phrasing in defense of cities not enforcing the law. You do realize insurance cost will increase the more it’s used.

How about the city just doesn’t let criminals run rampant? From what it seems, they are barely trying and they have a DA that refuses to play ball anyways.

yeah isn't insurance costs based on a risk assessment? Insurers aren't in the business of giving away money.

edit: people will only put up with it for so long and then you'll have vigilante squads running around which is a much more dangerous and expensive problem than just enforcing existing law

It’s a 160% INCREASE, not a 60% one (you misread as +60%). But even +60% year over year would be no joke. Your comment assumes it’ll stay constant but if the trend holds the required investment in security could become sizable. Not that I even see the case for not prosecuting crime just because « UP has insurance » (you sure their insurer will be happy to pay for that crime and not raise premiums? Why should UP customers pay for security directly when the rest of the country gets it through actual police?)

> UP has insurance, and, I'm sure treats a small percentage of thefts as the cost of doing business.

And the revenues from shipping — just revenues, let alone the profits — are a fraction of the value of the cargo. If, say, a container full of new MacBooks gets broken into and looted, that is going eat the profits they'd earn from a lot of other containers. While they have insurance, they pay for that insurance, and unless the insurer is (a) stupid or (b) a charity, they pay at least as much as the amount of the losses, and probably more.

UP and their customers seem to be uninterested in simply shrugging, saying "insurance", and eating that cost.

Oh, and then there's the risk to employees who may occasionally be attacked or held at gunpoint. It doesn't take a lot of that before the impact on your personnel becomes a drain, too, and hiring is tight enough in this economy even without asking for people to risk life and limb.

> UP can increase their investment in securing their trains and property. The alternative is the taxpayer spending a lot of money on police and incarceration.

It looks like they propose to secure their trains and property by doing business in places that are not Los Angeles.

Honestly, this "insurance will cover it" rationalision is something I saw directed at the looting that happened in the protests /riots last(?) year. It feels to be that a suitable chunk of people don't understand how insurance works, instead treating it like a magic money bin that pays out when bad things happen.

> UP can increase their investment in securing their trains and property

Not sure what more they can do, considering the fact that they go so far as to weld these container shut now.

This is often the opinion of people who don't see a cost to them. I'm going to guess that

(1) You don't live near one of these tracks where violence may occur and violent individuals are congregating.

(2) You don't know if anything you buy travels along these tracks.

(3) You are wealthy enough that a 0.1% increase in price doesn't bother you.

(4) You don't have kids growing up in that area who notice that it's more profitable and easier to rob trains than to go through school and produce something.

(5) You aren't on a train crew whose lives are being threatened.

How am I doing so far?

> UP can increase their investment in securing their trains and property.

That's exactly what they're proposing/threatening:

> As a result of Los Angeles County’s rail theft crisis, customers like UPS and FedEx that utilize our essential rail service during peak holiday season are now seeking to divert rail business away to other areas in the hope of avoiding the organized and opportunistic criminal theft that has impacted their own business and customers. Like our customers, UP is now contemplating serious changes to our operating plans to avoid Los Angeles County. We do not take this effort lightly, particularly during the supply chain crisis, as this drastic change to our operations will create significant impacts and strains throughout the local, state, and national supply chain systems.

You'd think it would be common sense to not let repeat offenders get off easy, but it looks like that's exactly what the DA is doing here. Pretty simple case of "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" — if you let people rob trains with little to no consequences, they're going to keep doing it.

This blasé attitude toward crime is so infuriating. It's a symbol of the deterioration of trust in modern society where criminals are coddled and law-abiding folks are left to deal with constant nuisance and criminality.

I just find it alarming and depressing how consistently horny y'all are for carceral violence.

You don't ask why we don't trust, only that we act as if we do.

It’s reasonable for people to want those who do harm in their community to be removed from it so they can’t continue to perpetuate that harm, isn’t it?

I don't really think so but I do understand it's the mainstream viewpoint and I'm not trying to have that argument right now.

What freaks me out is the tone of all the comments. Just zero understanding that there is a person being talked about. When you "remove them from your community" they go somewhere. Things happen to them. They are harmed, as well.

If you're going to demand that I think you the language used should be less euphemistic.

"I value these goods and the order their transit represents very highly. I believe a person should be harmed to discourage this behavior" is honest and clear.

Stuff like "remove from the community" or "prosecute" hides those details of what will actually be done to the person.

Man, I'm glad to see someone stepping up to police the language in this thread. It's really concerning that people use a word like "prosecute" without adorning it with its full dictionary definition, just in case someone (other than you of course) might get confused.

yes we do seem to appreciate policing of all sorts don't we

>UP has insurance, and, I'm sure treats a small percentage of thefts as the cost of doing business.

I had a package go missing in LA, how do I go about filing an insurance claim with UP? I haven't found a way, so I think it's more likely that they're just letting recipients (or generous senders) eat the costs.

Depends, but unless you are directly contracting with UP (i.e. paying for an entire container on a carriage) you should file a claim with the shipper, the company that sent it. If they won't or can't help you, then talk to the intermediate shipping service, likely FexEx/UPS.

With shipping stuff, the general rule of thumb is to start with the org closest to the customer, and then move up. Example: my sister had a new Dell latitude porch-pirated off her front steps. We first contacted Dell, and they sent her a new one. If they hadn't accepted it, we would have talked to FedEx next.

Worst-case, you file a small-claims suit.

The whole insurance process is then propagated up the organization stack behind the scenes. In the case of rail theft, its likely you may never know about it, you will just see a shipping delay for an indeterminate reason and be mildly annoyed. Think of how in code, you call methods from a class that may pass your call to a superclass, which passes the code to a super-superclass, etc.

In aggregate, this will end up making insurance rates go up, which will ultimately get passed to the consumer as price increases (or shipping increases, but its more and more common for shipping to be "free" and instead hidden in the base item retail price), as others have mentioned. Not the greatest, but it is the reality of things.

>UP has insurance, and, I'm sure treats a small percentage of thefts as the cost of doing business.

Jerry: So we're gonna make the Post Office pay for my new stereo now?

Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.

Jerry: How is it a write-off?

Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.

Jerry: Write it off what?

Cosmo Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.

Jerry: You don't even know what a write-off is.

Cosmo Kramer: Do you?

Jerry: No, I don't.

Cosmo Kramer: But they do. And they're the ones writing it off.

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