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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

• 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.

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> 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).

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.

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.

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

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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