Regardless, let's assume Los Angeles was such an economically desolate place for the poor. Well, it turns out that train robberies still aren't a common occurrence in even much poorer places so there must be something else going on too.
Without any actual consequences for getting caught, it's basically a minor inconvenience for the thieves. More officers just means slightly more inconvenience.
Half the people commenting on this post don't understand that railway theft is a federal crime which is handled by federal prosecutors in federal court, and has nothing to do with the "liberal governor" or "lazy California prosecutors".
On nearly anything related to societal matters not of a technological sort, HN commenters tend to demonstrate quite a bit of ignorance of the basic facts of the matter at hand.
Also: obviously you don't just patrol 36,000 miles of track: you patrol where the thefts happen (piles of packaging by the tracks), and on the trains. Since you know the schedule of the trains, you even know when people will be trying to do the robberies...
Consider you may be misinformed.
Very few people (you plus one other) have mentioned that messing with interstate transportation is a federal crime. Which makes me think there is more to this that meets the eye.
Why have the news been focusing on local prosecutors if this is a federal matter? Why haven't federal prosecutors pressing charges?
The trains are in longer segments than ever before with the move to "precision scheduled railroading":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqdsQ8pFM2s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading
Sixty-eight thousand American railroad jobs were lost between 2015 and today due to PSR, from a local-maximum* of ~210k in April 2015 to ~142k in December 2021:
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES4348200001?amp%25253bdata...
[*] Down from 2.2 million railroad jobs in 1920, but BLS data only goes back as far as 1947.
And they deterred several times more than arrested, imagine how much more effective deterring would be with ~10x more officers.
That's not what their letter actually said, IIRC?
This increasingly smells like a company trying to save money by firing their security force and passing sole responsibility for thefts off on publicly funded law enforcement.
Hypothetically, you could model it off of migratory wildlife enforcement, with dual jurisdiction, where a violation of a relevant state law automatically becomes a federal offense, and vice versa, and agents are typically officers of both the state and federal government.
Then the federal judiciary could fulfill the need where locals fall short. No private prison or judicial system needed.
But it would be much more ideal if the prosecutors would just do their jobs.
Gated communities in some places also have sworn private security.
And of course the cops would have a cop bias, and teachers have a teacher bias, and service works have a service worker bias and on and on. Everyone looks out for their own across all cross sections of their identity.
What’s different is it seems cops get no additional cross sections anymore. Once they are a cop their ven diagram shifts to 100% cop and now they are vilified.
You find it reasonable for people to be paid and not do their jobs? They're not paid to administer justice, they're paid to do what they're told.
I’m honestly not even sure what you are advocating for. J walking is a good example of something I expect them not to bother with 99% of the time but it is a law nearly everywhere. To enforce that in a major metro could use all the cops every day. Huge waste of time.
What happens after people are arrested is not relevant to the police, and they have no training or authority to make decisions about it. We elected different people for that.
Along that same line of thought is that it is not relevant what the DA thinks about the law. The powers that be created the law and the DA should prosecute it every time there is an arrest and let the courts figure it out.
Also in your job you are given priorities and you work on the lowest ones last. And if you always have more priorities than hours in the day then the lower priority ones don’t get done. Based on the laws that are actually on the books there are more law breakers than police officers so they have to pick and choose their priorities. That’s still a reasonable thing to do.
I do not think cops are more or less corrupt than the average, but I do believe a corrupt cop has more impact than average. And because of that I do think they need higher standards and more accountability. I do not think they as a group need to be the “them” in the “us vs them” mentality.
> If the DA openly says they won’t prosecute a certain crime why would I expect the police to arrest for it?
Can you cite which DA said that about what crime, other than marijuana possession?
> Once they are a cop their ven diagram shifts to 100% cop and now they are vilified.
Let's not turn them into powerless victims, act like that is the only response police get, that they are such vulnerable people, or that it is not partly a consequence of their actions. They get all sorts of responses from lots of people, and as public officials, criticism is a part of the job. Arguably, if they did their jobs better, they wouldn't be criticized as much.
But rather than changing the subject, a far more important issue is police abusing civilians: The police have a lot of power, well beyond criticism, which ruins lives. Far more important than protecting the suddenly fragile police officers' self-esteem are justice and freedom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/magazine/george-gascon-lo...
Do not persist in your unbelief, but believe!
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/magazine/george-gascon-lo...
That isn't in the article. Have you ever seen evidence supporting your claim, or are you repeating what others have said (perilous, esp. on the Internet!). Here's what the article says:
He mandated an end to seeking cash bail, the death penalty, the sentence of life without parole and the prosecution of anyone younger than 18 as an adult. And in a rare, if not unprecedented, move by an American prosecutor, Gascón declared his intent to effectively end very long sentences ...
The article also links to a memo from Gascon regarding sentencing enhancements.
Among the crimes Bragg said his office would not prosecute: marijuana misdemeanors, including selling more than three ounces; not paying public transportation fare; trespassing except a fourth degree stalking charge, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration in certain cases, and prostitution.
With that said, as you did change the subject, I do think there should be more accountability and reform and I’m not a fan of immunity. Not because they are all bad and we need to “put them in check,” but because most are good and we should have a system in place we all feel safe having, both “us” and “them.” Why can’t you be pro reform and pro police?
Did someone say you couldn't? I can understand some people, having experienced generations of life-altering brutality and oppression, might distrust police; I'm not going to tell them what they should think.
Also, what exactly does "pro police" mean? Supporting their long-standing practices? Supporting people who abuse civilians, others who cover it up, and yet more who protect the system that enables them? That might be hard to reconcile with reform - you have to recognize the problems to reform them. Not hating all individual police? Sure. Personally, I think any hate is a flaw of humanity.
Maybe unions should stick to the private sector, or at least jobs where there aren't so many highly visible bad actors with obvious political motives.
We are in the midst of a transportation crisis. Any available vehicle should be rolling. Otherwise, inventories run low, prices creep up, and people have to do with less.
A store containing tens of millions of dollars of merchandise and “guarded” by a fewer and fewer underpaid employees eventually becomes a sitting duck.
It’s the same explanation for why our supply chains were so brittle in the face of the pandemic: years and years of streamlining.
Could there be societal or enforcement issues? Sure! But let’s be at least slightly skeptical when images of a few hundred yards of junk-strewn railway are plastered across every headline and trending list out there. The reality is often much more complicated.
Locally politicians run on not prosecuting certain things and there are many news stories about repeat offenders not being prosecuted or getting comically gentle sentences. For example a young man with a history stole a car and then crashed it into a police car before they apprehended him and he got two weeks house arrest. A teenager getting caught smoking a cigarette wouldn’t be surprised to get a worse punishment from their parents.
This feels analogous to leaving a laptop unattended in the back seat of a parked car and blaming the government for not stopping it from being stolen. Union Pacific has responsibility to do at least the bare minimum to secure their own property and news of these layoffs seams to indicate they abdicated that responsibility in the hopes they could put political pressure on the government to do that work for them for free.
We all have property rights, even businesses believe it or not.
Theft is a violation of property rights.
If you don’t believe in property rights then I’ll take the keys to your house- thanks
Prosecution is not the only punishment. Getting arrested or getting in a confrontation with security are still negative outcomes that still occur and people will want to avoid. If you allow people to just walk into the area and walk out with the stolen property more people are going to do it. Making the act of stealing more difficult (or even just appear more difficult) will reduce theft regardless of the punishment.
>We all have property rights, even businesses believe it or not.
>Theft is a violation of property rights.
What did I say that makes you think I would disagree with this.
>If you don’t believe in property rights then I’ll take the keys to your house- thanks
My point is that Union Pacific has a responsibility to lock their house. If I leave my door unlocked and my house gets burgled, I have some responsibility in contributing to that outcome.
To some degree, that's reasonable, but it also illustrates how low a bar Americans set for their society. Everyone is so numb to the existence of petty theft that we immediately blame the victim for leaving something in their car, or locking their bike up outside instead of bringing it inside.
But I live in a major city where I routinely leave my laptop sitting on a table at coffee shops unattended while I run to the restroom, or lean my bike against the wall outside a restaurant while I go in and have lunch. School kids walk or ride the metro home by themselves after dark. People turn in lost and found wallets and cell phones. If you lose something on the metro, there's actually a good chance you'll get it back.
Why do we act like ubiquitous violence and theft is just part and parcel to living in a modern city?
Why would people care about fake cameras, or real cameras for that matter, if they won't get trouble no matter what the image shows?
Fake cameras are only a deterrent because some of the camera looking objects are real. And real cameras are only a deterrent because getting caught doing something bad on them lead to bad consequences.
> This feels analogous to leaving a laptop unattended in the back seat of a parked car and blaming the government for not stopping it from being stolen.
Or the analogy is that someone stopped your car grand theft auto style and took your laptop from your bag.
>Fake cameras are only a deterrent because some of the camera looking objects are real. And real cameras are only a deterrent because getting caught doing something bad on them lead to bad consequences.
As I said elsewhere, jail isn't the only deterrent. Being arrested is also deterrent. Plus not getting the stolen goods is a deterrent. If a guard comes and chases these people off before they can grab the property, there is no reason to try to steal anything.
>Or the analogy is that someone stopped your car grand theft auto style and took your laptop from your bag.
These aren't old west style train robberies where people on horseback are chasing down moving trains and holding people up at gunpoint. These are trains sitting on the track for sometimes hours unattended, someone walks onto the tracks, pops the lock, and has the time to sift through all the property looking for something valuable. The trash in the area should be an obvious indicator that there is no time pressure to these crimes. It isn't a smash a grab. People are taking their time looking for the best stuff to steal and discarding what they don't want.
Many of us do want to leave in a society were you can indeed leave your laptop unattended on the back seat of your car. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.