Cargo theft, led by food and beverage, is surging across the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Cargo theft, led by food and beverage, is surging across the U.S.

cnbc.com

116 pointscwwc177 comments

The question is, where is the food and beverage going to? Containers don't have $214k of a balanced variety of foods, they have thousands of boxes of cereal. No thief is eating their way through a shipping container's worth of cereal.

Prior articles (e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro... ) have written about how Amazon is turning into a semi-legitimate fence for stolen goods; the seller-thief can list the stolen goods, ship to an Amazon warehouse, where Amazon provides the marketplace for a cut of the proceeds. The FTC may not care enough about Amazon turning into a front for counterfeit goods; will the FTC finally wake up and target Amazon for dealing in stolen goods?

It doesn’t work much if you’re selling individual stolen items but if you steal a truckload of something the FTC or whoever would be reasonable in requesting that lot codes/serial numbers/whatever identifying information be checked against a list of stolen items.

Some countries (eg. Thailand) have a centralised government system for managing this.

On every receipt, by law, is a unique barcode encoding the shop and purchase value. That barcode, when scanned, leads to a government webpage (and doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything deductible, so many of the receipts get scanned).

On that webpage, occasionally they ask for a photo of the best before label of the goods. The best before date usually includes the lot number.

Now, the government has a list of lots of serial numbers and associated retailers. They can now easily punish those who regularly sell stolen goods.

Is cash still the dominant means of exchange in Thailand? If the discounted price of the good covered the potential deductible amount then no receipt would be needed.

Lots of people still want the receipt.

I suspect there are both undercover sellers and buyers to find buyers willing to buy without a receipt, or sellers willing to sell without a receipt.

> doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything

So a dystopian police surveillance-state?

Thanks but no thanks. The socially optimal amount of theft is not zero.

I think you already live in that... Credit card networks already know everything you buy, and will happily hand that info over to government.

At least this way you get the benefits of it.

Not quite, card networks only know transaction level information if the merchant processing the card transaction passes back level 3 data. Merchants only pass level 3 data to secure a processing % discount on network fees. This data can be used to mine user behavior by the card companies, and unless you opt-out of Visa/Mastercard's data mining program at the card level, they do this.

I was under the impression that the vast majority of merchants do this though...

And any that don't still need to keep records for tax purposes, and the authorities could still request that anytime and without your knowledge.

It is frequent that news reports say "attacked with a hammer purchased by the defendants credit card earlier the same day". So it appears the facility to search card payments is fairly widely used.

Most merchants do _not_ send level 3 data. For the most part it’s only sent on travel related transactions or for government vendors.

>It is frequent that news reports say "attacked with a hammer purchased by the defendants credit card earlier the same day". So it appears the facility to search card payments is fairly widely used.

Not really, because the search could have happened in the opposite direction (eg. they ask the store for a list of transactions that were made with the suspect's card). I doubt they're asking visa/mastercard to give them a list of all hammers sold in the past month.

> Credit card networks already know everything you buy

I didn’t know this.

Let’s say I buy advil, condoms, and dish soap with my capital one Visa card at Walgreens. What information does Walgreens share with visa and/or capital one? I just assumed the name of merchant and the total amount charged was all they needed?

I remember back when I was younger, I’d often see adults requesting the cashier to charge this much on one card, this much on another, bringing out four or five cards. Do all these banks/ card processors get a full list of items sold?

Somehow I doubt it - I would honestly consider it a feature if I could look on my credit card statement and have an explanation around why I spent $22 at 7/11 on the 12th.

There are 3 levels of data shared from the merchant to the card networks. Level 3 is the highest which does contain item level detail.

That tends to only be sent on hotel or airline transactions or when working with government accounts.

Generally speaking the merchants and card networks have very antagonistic relationships. The big merchants know that their sales data is valuable and won’t share it without incentives. The credit card networks do offer lower interchange rates for sending level 3 data but it still hasn’t seen a lot of uptake.

If the retailer keeps a record of the receipts, the government can ask for them since they have the payment reference from the credit card company.

Until its your store that goes under because of theft. And you can't pay for your kids' education or medical bills or food or rent. And then you turn around and you beg for a dystopian UBI government where everybody gets free everything and we all eventually become government-subsidized vegetables on life-support, useful only as fertile incubation vessels to pop out the next round of vegetables.

> “And then you turn around and you beg for a dystopian UBI government”

You seem to have mixed dystopian and utopian.

It is only utopian if everything you happen to be into is what the current power is into.

We don't really have receipts anymore here in the USA. I mean, we're supposed to, but it's on thermal paper, but everyone's printer is broken, and they'll try to send it in email, but oh the images are broken too, and the link expired after 29.25 days anyway. Proof of purchase is necessary for refunds. No refunds.

We don’t have national business registration either.

This already happens and its called LeadsOnline. When someone reports something stolen the serial number gets added to it. Pawn shops in most states are required to use it or something similar before they buy an item. eCommerce marketplaces do not have that requirement in most places. LeadsOnline does partner with eBay however.

The thieves sell to local independent stores that don't care that their wholesale price is too good to be true. That allows you to move low margin and short self life consumables without having to deal with Amazon.

There's an entire world of stores that sell "expired," discontinued, and massively discounted stuff. It's the stage after things have made their way through the Walmarts and Dollar Generals of the world.

edit: DavidPeiffer correctly notes the air quotes. Packaging uses all kinds of phrasing to indicate when the manufacturer moves all responsibility to the store and the consumer.

Wow, it's legal to sell expired food in the US?

Most food items have "sell by" dates that has very little to do with expiration. In fact a lot of food doesn't really expire at all if properly stored.

>In fact a lot of food doesn't really expire at all if properly stored.

I would have to argue with the use of the word food here. We have been convinced items available in grocery stores is food, when it is really highly processed ingredients with loads of preservatives presented as food. I consider food the items sold along the exterior walls of the stores (at least in typical US store layouts).

It depends on the state and how the date is worded. You may have noticed some products list a 'best by' date, which really isn't the same as 'this will have gone bad by this date'. I think 'use by' is the magical phrase which implies something has expired.

There's one of those stores near me, and as far as I've seen, they typically sell stuff near the expired date, not past it. Most consumers are turned off by buying truly expired foods.

Note the parent said "expired". We don't have the best labeling standards. Rather than saying "Expires 3/25/2023", food could say any of:

* "Consume or freeze by 3/25/2023"

* "Do not use after 3/25/2023"

* "Packed on 3/25/2023"

* "Best by 3/25/2023"

* "Sell by 3/25/2023"

* "Use by 3/25/2023"

My understanding is anything consumed inside a restaurant or factory preparing food must use food that is not expired, and that's something inspectors check for.

PDF with more detail on Page 3: https://foodbankiowa.org/app/uploads/2022/03/Shelf-Life-of-F...

It's not technically `expired`, it's `best before date`.

Yes, absolutely legal. For example, you can get an MSRP $1.89 can of Progresso Chicken Noodle at a store in Chattanooga Called "Discovery Outlet" for $0.25.

And it’s perfectly fine to eat well after that date.

It’s in the interest of the manufacturer to keep that “expiration” date as short as possible. Unlike with medication, there is no actual rule for when food expires.

It depends a lot on the food.

Typically, canned food is practically immortal. If there's no bulge, it's good and modern canning has done a lot to avoid the bulge.

Dried foods are somewhat similar, though they go rancid more readily. If you are in a super dry climate they last longer.

Foods that need refrigeration, in my experience, tend to be super close to the use by/best by dates when it comes to going bad. Exceptions are things with a lot of vinegar in them (ketchup or pickles for example). Milk, though, seems to curdle right on the the date.

An example of an exception to your last point is eggs. In the US* the eggs could have been in a refrigerator for a week or up to a year before being sent to the supermarket.

* I don’t know if this is still the case with the current 2023 high price of eggs. There has been a lot of monopoly/consolidation in eggs and it’s unclear what’s really going on.

FYI, ketchup does not require refrigeration. (How do you think restaurants keep bottles of ketchup on the tables all day otherwise?)

Seems reasonable to assume it'll last longer in the fridge though.

Also ketchup at restaurants probably has to be refilled daily, at worst weekly, merely from customers using it.

I've seen this similarly when I accidentally put a can of something in my pantry rather than the fridge, but it still keeps for a long time.

The point of canning is that refrigeration it not required. In fact it preceded refrigeration by about a century.

I meant an open can.

If you have an open can then all bets are off - if out for more than a few hours (or definitely if overnight) safest to toss it. Canning only preserves as long as the can is sealed!

You can keep butter for a long time in room temperature if it is submerged in water (e.g. in a pot). It also spreads really well, but your bread may get wet if you are not careful.

Something that I learnt in post-1989 Czechoslovakia when we cut down on our electricity bill by turning the fridge off for weeks :) Ancient knowledge of my grandma who grew up in eastern Slovakia without any electricity served us well.

From memory, does butter not float in water?

Also, according to my circuit monitor: using three fridges full-time accounts for about 4% of my total monthly usage [FYI, Gramms].

You can "glue" it to the bottom, it is sticky enough to catch and stay.

Fridges made behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s were a lot more power-hungry than today and our specimen had some non-tight seals on top of it. Buying a new one was out of question, our budget back then wouldn't support it.

Or just put something heavier on top

On the other hand, who doesn't have an Amazon account these days? Selling to a local independent store (especially these days when Safeway/Albertsons/Ralphs /Whole Foods dominates the landscape) means actually finding unscrupulous market owners and convincing them to take your product. And it's not like they have a warehouse to hold $200k worth of cereal either. Meanwhile, all you need to participate in FBA is an identity that hasn't been banned yet.

The other thing is though, this isn't jewelry and cocaine, it's cereal and baby formula. They could just, y'know, give it away. It isn't always about the money, especially if you're poor, and if you're poor, you know other poor people, and everyone can use a little bit of help. With food prices up, giving away a lot of free cereal makes you a lot of friends. Not as much as free cocaine does, maybe, but people still appreciate what you can give them.

Thieves aren't some cartoon villains, they exist among us other humans.

> . No thief is eating their way through a shipping container's worth of cereal.

Resell online or even on street.

They are selling it online

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro...

>Amazon , eBay and Facebook are the places where these stolen goods are being sold, and critics say they’re not doing enough to put an end to the racket. The companies disagree.

Seems like valuable food cargo is gonna be stuff like liquor.

Booze probably has better grey market value than most perishable items.

Which analysts or industries consider liquor to be a foodstuff?

If it makes you happy find and replace everything ”food” in the comments with “Food and beverage.”

Could stores that are fronts for money laundering buy at inflated prices?

This obviously doesn't answer your question at scale, but lots of stolen "common" goods like cereal and deodorant are sold at places like this: http://www.northpointfleamarket.com/

Cargo theft accounts for $15-30 billion dollars lost each year, my quick search says shoplifting accounts for $15-20 billion dollars per year.

Why do we hear so much more about shoplifting? Sure it's more public, but I've seen dozens of stories about how shoplifting is destroying retail and this is the first one about cargo theft I can recall.

Article says the average cargo theft is $214K, which I'll guess is more than average shoplifting, meaning cargo theft is less frequent. Logistics companies are less relatable than physical stores where people have been.

Cargo theft is just less relatable in every way.

Also the criminals end up rich and in capitalism having money increases your self worth and you are rewarded for having money no matter where it came from.

>in capitalism having money increases your self worth and you are rewarded for having money no matter where it came from.

I can't imagine what type of economic system where this isn't true. Even in communism you're rewarded for having money because it allows you to obtain more resources.

Cynically? Because people understand shoplifting more, and the media can blame it on the poor/homeless and use it as fuel to increase police budgets. Wage theft is also in the same order of magnitude (the infographic on Wikipedia says >$19 billion in 2012), and similarly doesn't get the same kind of coverage. Capital and the police scratch each other's backs.

I have met several people who stole things for fun and talked openly about it. Not to make money or to fulfill some fundamental need, but just for the thrill and to get something they couldn’t afford or didn’t want to pay for.

Ok? Do you think they're regularly doing this and account for a meaningful portion of shoplifting or do you think they're basically telling you their story about how one time they broke the law?

Can you prove the other way around?

Aren't diapers known as one of the most frequently shoplifted items? I guess they could be some kind of challenge for kleptomaniacs, but it seems more likely they're expensive essential items.

… diapers, laundry detergent, etc. are stolen because they’re as good as currency. Anyone who lives in a poor area can tell you there is someone reselling these for a bit cheaper.

Baby formula as well. That's the reason it's typically locked up in stores, drug dealers will exchange formula for drugs.

https://www.phillyburbs.com/story/opinion/columns/2017/08/08...

According to this [0] page, the most commonly shoplifted items are "apparel followed by cosmetics, alcohol and electronics," so if true, then it's not primarily a matter of essential items. It goes on to say that "incidents peak during December," which I think would tend to imply that people were taking advantage of product placement during Christmas season as opposed to stocking up on food and staples for the winter. (Of course it's possible people in distress are stealing luxury goods to sell at a discount to then acquire necessities.)

Purely speculating but I think that to some extent advertising has been a victim of its own success in convincing people that their self-worth hinges upon their ability to consume goods and services. If you can afford it, buy. If you can't afford to buy, borrow. If you can't borrow, steal. Just don't be poor and get caught. (Being rich and getting caught usually isn't a problem.)

[0] https://blog.gitnux.com/shoplifting-statistics/

A friend of mine has shoplifted all kinds of random-ass shit. I'm talking like, oh, an entire dinette set, on one occasion; a canoe, and (unfortunately) only one paddle on another. And, oh, yeah, that $300 Dutch oven in their kitchen cabinet? Yeah, that's stolen.

So, I suppose, you may never know, huh? Because it could be.

How did he/she get it out the door - just run out with it? A dinette set isn’t easily concealed :)

I don’t know if they were bragging about a fake story but I remember an ex Walmart store employee saying they scanned the bar code for a smaller tv and bought a bigger more expensive tv. This was before 9/11 though iirc just to give you a reference of time and technology so don’t try it anymore.

Long ago I worked at Home Depot and we were explicitly told to let people walk if they were stealing. It wouldn’t be concealed, just walked out the door.

"No Chase" policy.

https://youtu.be/h_BT7vNhjCo

Off-topic: how much time has this friend spent in your home alone?

No these people had a years long habit of it, usually starting as kids or teenagers. Not every day but regularly still.

Some even end up going big and steal from banks/investors but that is a bigger no-no. ( FTX, Theranos, WireCard, Frank, WeWork, etc )

Committing fraud to attempt to hide your failings is different than intentionally stealing things. Madoff is a better example of intentionally stealing.

Capital and the police scratch each other's backs.

Why wouldn’t capital be all over the police to crack down on cargo theft?

If it's anything like the situation with the LA train thefts in the past couple years, it's because the security to guard things enroute would cost more than just eating the losses.

Well it’s one thing to guard and try to prevent thefts. It’s quite another to investigate them and arrest the perpetrators. If there’s some gang stealing trains or truckloads of goods then police could presumably find them and arrest them.

>the media can blame it on the poor/homeless and use it as fuel to increase police budgets

Why would "the media" care about police budgets?

It drives engagement which means greater impact.

You could argue the same about wage theft, arguably even more so considering the viewers likely has a personal stake. Why don't we see this happening with wage theft?

Because wage theft is committed by the ownership class. Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch don't want people upset about wage theft because they benefit from it.

>Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos

Clearly they missed the memo

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awashingtonpost.com+wa...

https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/18/news/economy/wage-theft-wor...

Keeping people scared keeps them watching. Most media would lead you to believe crime is way up (it blipped up slightly, but has declined considerably in the last 30 years).

Also, there's very little in the way of mainstream media that isn't owned by wealthy people. The media is one major arm through which capital acts.

And all pale in comparison next to tax evasion (the IRS estimates this at one trillion dollars per year for the US, and even more conservative estimates are in the hundreds of billions).

The same reason the media doesn't focus on the biggest theft category: wage theft.

It is easier to vilify individuals than to reduce the need for food theft (depressed wages and lack of economic opportunities for most people)

The media also doesn't focus on the inverse of wage theft: time theft, which is probably an order of magnitude larger than wage theft, if not more.

edit: CBS reports wage theft at $50 billion a year while a 2007 study in the Kentucky CPA Journal puts time theft in the US at $400 billion per year.

Haha, is "time theft" when you post on HackerNews while you're compiling instead of checking Slack and email?

Don't "@" me. I swear my HN shitposting is marketing, or something.

Yeah I’m out here _evangelizing_ or some shit. For what I don’t know.

Lying on time sheets is usually what's meant by time theft, not checking HN while youre compiling.

In Barbara Ehrenrich's book Nickled and Dimed she got a job at a big box store (i think it was Walmart) and orientation included telling the workers that time theft was doing anything other than work while on the clock.

"But Wattabout ... Wage Theft" is just a standard trope-response on Hacker News whenever there's anything about "theft".

The same people who complain about "time theft" are the ones that try to skip on paying overtime, funnily enough

Some people do slack off but 99% of the time "time theft" is the boss being unreasonable (I'll keep it polite for HN)

Exactly. I am at the bottom of the totem pole as it goes. I am definitely not management. How am I “exempt”?

Federal minimum exempt pay should be at least $150k if not $200k.

Because cargo theft is not something an average person has any involvement with.

People know what shoplifting is and they might encounter it in their day to day life.

If some cargo container goes missing, what does that even have to do with me? It’s just some minutiae of an inefficient system as far as an average person is aware

Between the two, on the low end, that looks like a per capita donation of around $100/year to criminals, not including all of the other associated costs related to theft prevention, enforcement, incarceration and so on.

Wait until you find out how much wage theft occurs.

Visibility and customer impact would be my answer.

I've never seen a car go with theft but I've seen masked Bandits robbing a store several times. It is very uncomfortable and frankly scary to watch people come in with balaclavas and start grabbing power tools or whatever they want.

It is also very frustrating to shop in stores where many items are under lock and key

The news companies hardly have reporters anymore, and are often more than happy to pick up press releases companies create for them. It frequently seems to be a way to lobby for more police protection.

I am surprised that logistics security is lax enough to allow for (what sounds like) simple impersonation scams to work. Even before food prices went up, these containers must have been worth at least $50k, I honestly would have expected fairly thorough identity checks before handing it over. Perhaps the impersonation is not as simple as the article leads one to believe, though.

Living in a high trust society is nice, and results in lower costs, money-wise and mentally. Too bad it is a fragile sentiment that is difficult to repair.

> Too bad it is a fragile sentiment that is difficult to repair.

Too many people have a hard time meeting their material needs which creates demand for crimes like this.

A prerequisite for a high trust society is that it must be one in which very few (if any!) of its members are in a position in which they don't know where their next meal is coming from.

Look at Jack London's struggle to find a meal in "On The Road" for an emblematic example and know now that US citizens are far less trusting of one another now than they were then.

I drive a truck.

Most of the time all you need is the pickup number and they’ll either fill up the trailer or give you the paperwork for a preloaded one. Certain shippers just have loaded trailers sitting in a lot and you go grab the bills out of a dropbox and take off with a trailer without dealing with anyone — had someone take my load out of one of those once but, luckily, it was someone from the same company and both loads had the same second stop so it got straightened out before they made it hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. Still a stupid thing to do because they took the wrong bills too and they specifically ask you to read the destination address off the bills when you do a loaded call.

Some places ask to see your drivers license, kind of rare though.

Does anyone remember the news from several years ago regarding the massive theft at a Canadian maple syrup reserve? Apparently the barrels were drained and refilled with water.

That I actually don't mind because the government controls the production and distribution of maple syrup in Canada and unfairly harms independent growers in favor of its own cartel.

This made me chuckle because of the analogy to bearer bonds.

“They’re insured by the government! Don’t be a hero, everyone gets to go to their family.” But maple syrup.

I tap my own trees. Don’t tell the government, I guess?

I haven’t actually heard of this before. Are you talking about how they regulate quality and grade in order to prevent low-quality knock-offs from hurting farmers? I’ll have to ask the local syrup farmers in town next time I’m at the market what they think.

Wasn’t the issue that they put a cap on production to keep prices higher?

Oh. I’m not aware of that. That would be a contentious thing to do for sure.

A reserve to stabilize prices not unlike what many oil-dependent and oil-producing countries do. (Oil-producing countries reduce sales if prices drop, oil-dependent use their reserves if prices rise)

It's also cartel behavior and detrimental to the wider economy. Just because "many oil-dependent and oil-producing countries" does this doesn't justify it.

Please tell us more! I watched a documentary, but here's an article I found.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-19/world-s-m...

Edit. Another article and I found the documentary, it was Dirty Money on Netflix

https://capx.co/an-unsavoury-business-the-story-of-canadas-s...

There's a lot more to this than I thought would be. One of those things that is simple in theory but complex in practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJvMQTQB-BI

Not sure if you're tapping maple trees in Canada, but this is about Quebec, specifically the "Strategic Reserve" of the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers [1].

In general, Canada allows for controls on the supply-side in agriculture, including limiting imports. The alternative is to take the approach used in the U.S. of allowing prices to fall to unsustainable levels but then providing cash subsidies to producers. There has been a decades-long conversation about this between the two countries, of course.

[1] "The World's Only Reserve of Maple Syrup" https://ppaq.ca/en/sale-purchase-maple-syrup/worlds-only-res...

Which is ridiculous because every Canadian knows what a full cask of Grade A Amber feels like in the hands. If you’re going to pull this heist, don’t get sloppy. Use Clamato.

>adding further pressure to the high prices faced by consumers during an elevated inflation environment.

Food price increases are being led by effective grocery monopolies. If cargo is being stolen and then sold, it is adding a competitor to the effetive monopolies, and one which is extremely motivated to sell quickly. That force should drive prices down, although perhaps negligibly.

Nope. Every non boutique grocer makes very little margin and is all about efficiency.

Seriously look at Walmart, Kroger, etc.

There aren’t monopolies in commodity industries but I find it quaint you seem to someone think there are based on hallucinated first principles.

"It’s a sign of the economic times... "

Right, people are so hungry they are teaming up and putting together elaborated plans to steal containers of (likely) booze.

Great excuse to ignore the warnings and use AI to police the populace!

How would ai stop brazen container theft? unless it's powering an ED-209

Maybe have an AI analyze the large network of license plate readers on major roads, and make predictions about suspicious activity? Or do the same with cell location data?

Most highway traffic speeds run at least 15mph over the posted speed limit in the US. You could have the AI choose who to pull over based on other factors.

There's plenty of precedent for that kind of thing. Parallel construction, out-of-state plate speed traps, etc.

If it slows the American descent into a low trust society without functional goods and spaces not destroyed by anti social freaks, then great

When rich rob poors, it's called business. When poors rob rich, it's theft. /capitalism

Everyone deserves to eat. If state fails to feed the masses this is what happens.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with all the "defund the police" bullshit from a while ago.

Why would it?

Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. Often risking their reputation to do so, and being accused of racism, heresy, deviation-ism, and so on.

Now that crime has risen in the past couple years, it's amazing how many people never said "defund the police" and when confronted with the evidence that they did say that "din't mean it that way."

I remember defund the police narratives. However despite these defund the police talks the majority of police budgets in the US continue to rise the last few years.

The performance of police, like of most professions, is highly impacted by morale. The defund narrative painted police work as inherently racist and oppressive, which obviously effected morale.

I don’t have any specific data, but it seems intuitive and cops themselves are talking about it. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009578809/cops-say-low-moral... and a bit here https://www.manhattan-institute.org/verbruggen-depolicing-al...

Defund the police came out of specific incidents, normally resulting in deaths, which are now being covered by police body cams and filming. From my own perspective the morale being affected is tied to the usually narratives of what happened in the incidents no longer being backed up by what the camera shows. Defund is the wrong word in my opinion though - if this was another professional job it would be more police training. We shouldn’t see indigents of a traffic stop resulting in the death of a driver with multiple police involved. Or why can I ask someone who lives in the woods come up with multiple names of people killed by the police that were unarmed - I’m sorry the morale is down and that it affects job performance but it can’t be that we expect to have multiple unarmed people killed a year as a normal part of the job.

They should consider not brutalising random people if they'd like people to be nicer to them.

That's moving the goalposts.

People wanted to defund police. Police budgets stayed flat or went up. Crime increased.

Maybe we should try defunding police.

How do you know it was "defund the police" and not COVID upending our world?

> "defund the police" [...] "din't mean it that way."

That was definitely a confusing time when multiple people meaning different things were using this slogan.

> Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. [...] Now that crime has risen in the past couple years

This probably looks like a "gotcha" to the average person not paying attention, but AFAIK not a single police department was defunded. In fact many had budget increases, including political support from President Biden himself.

The implication that somebody is backtracking on the slogan because defunding (which never happened) caused a crime surplus is rather hilarious misinformation.

Now deal with the fact that crime and police budgets both went up.

How many police departments were actually “defunded” and how does that correlate with the topic of this article?

Even if they weren’t directly defunded, they were probably demoralized, and likely lost good staff during the ‘ACAB’ period. Would you really want to remain a cop when ‘all cops’ are suddenly so viciously hated by so many in the media, politics, and activism?

It's one of the safest, best paid jobs you can get with few skills and minimal training. If they're so fragile they can't take the paycheck and deal with a little criticism, they have no business walking around with a gun and the force of law behind them.

In 2018, 106 police officers died on duty (roughly even split of feloniously killed vs accidental). There are other more dangerous jobs, but to describe policing as one of the safest _on a forum full of office workers_ is disingenuous.

The police had to choose between "being liked by the public" and "being able to murder members of the public without consequence" and chose option B in almost every single case.

Those protests, and the political activism generally, are just a symptom.

Every single person in the US has seen multiple videos of police violence, lies, and various other abuses. A mix of widespread cameras, and the police being increasingly flagrant with some abuses, has radically reshaped people's opinions.

Even if no one protested, seeing trust crater is to be expected.

While we're obviously seeing more widespread distribution of footage of the worst incidents via social media, isn't it likely that policing has actually improved over the last couple of decades, as the genuinely bad cops are increasingly likely to be caught on camera now that there's hundreds of millions of smartphones, dashcams, bodycams, CCTV cameras, etc out there?

At least for body cameras, the research I've seen suggests small or no effects on number of incidents: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/research-body-worn-camer...

The cameras do presumably need to be paired with police departments of prosecutors willing to do anything, which doesn't seem to be guaranteed.

You're making the assumption that without social media outrage, that that catching a cop doing bad things on video matters, or us evidence of some crime.

They aren't. The cops won't go after their own, and the politicians will only respond to public pressure.

Video footage makes it easier to get public outrage, but it's still the public outrage that has to do the work to hold cops accountable

Law enforcement officers are given privileges (social and legal) while they are on duty (and other informally while off duty) that other citizens do not have. They should be held to a much higher standard in return for those privileges. And true, many of those privileges are likely necessary in order for them to fulfill their law enforcement duties.

But it's not the media and politicians who are shooting unarmed civilians, or killing people in their custody. You can see many of the videos for yourself, often recorded by the officers' own body cameras. It's horrifying. The disregard for the decency and humanity of others is on display for anyone to see, unfiltered. The fact that it happens at all and the officers themselves aren't outraged by it is an outrage in and of itself. One bad apple spoils the bunch. If you can't trust one police officer, you can't trust any of them. And we can see for ourselves how they can so often get away with what would be a murder charge for anyone else.

This a good example of the free market self correcting imbalances. Other examples include, Canada raises taxes on tabacco and the resulting huge wave of black market tabacco, the music industry and the rise of napster, and also the entire illicit drug industry. Not saying anything about these being good or bad, just that its an expected outcome.

So, people are starving and so they’re stealing food - even to organized crime levels of food theft?

There is no connection between "people are starving" and organized gangs stealing $200K of cargo at a pop. The organized gangs aren't Robin Hood. They aren't giving it to hungry people.

Are you missing the global context of how much more expensive food is?

Sure they might not be “giving it to hungry people” that you know; but they themselves might also be hungry, or people they know. We have no idea what they’re doing with the food; and that means both of us don’t know.

At that scale, they’re likely profiteering off a commodity whose value is outpacing the logistics security.

They’re making prices worse for everyone.

Sure, but that’s not my point. My point is that this is a further reflection of the tipping point of food prices that we are experiencing.

Ah yes. I agree. The fact that criminals are stealing food now does indicate it’s becoming more worthwhile to steal. Prices are going up.

i would suggest it's the confluence of a number of changes. Including the higher food prices, we have: better comms like, cell phones, multi-user "database" like google docs, guns almost too cheap to meter and available within a 2-day cross country drive with no waiting period anywhere in the united states, more powerful vehicles for catching up to food trucks, and hauling away with quickness, low-touch mostly anonymous local and national branded markets with advertising and sales like tiktok, insta, craigslist, and ebay, as well as news spreading how other people are getting away with it, and possibly a lack of good information about where to get food from food banks. And if that's not enough, there are lots of recipes being shared. Just kidding about the last part.

Not everyone, not if you have an eye for identifying discount grocery stores with clearly grey market goods!

Fat Tony said it best

https://youtu.be/i6q_2zZXHMg

If you're desperate you steal opportunistically to satisfy your need. People who make a business out of it aren't usually the same kind of people. As different sorts of crime go I don't think this is that bad, but more of the downstream costs fall on poor/working class people because they're low-margin goods to start with.

Do you honestly think these are starving people just trying to get a meal? Honestly?

Although arguably this would be an economic inefficiency and so increases the cost of getting food to those starving people.

> The organized gangs aren't Robin Hood. They aren't giving it to hungry people.

There are many cases where organised gangs are robin hood. Gangs need the local population on their side. They will pay for festivals, art, schools, etc. sometimes.

Sometimes does the heavy lifting. Most of the time, they sell drugs in the community, rob people and businesses in the community, and shoot people in the community who aren't happy with their actions or are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Is that in-between drive-by shootings that kill neighborhood kids? I'm sure the neighborhood easily forgives a murdered 12-year old when they see a block party paid for by the gang members.

Could it be a response to our Government's wage and saving theft that comes from printing money to bail out Silicon Valley Bank and to pay for rich kid's college loans? (I don't think so. Someone just found a risk/reward profile to make money that they're willing to bet on.)

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