A loss of civic sense and cultural criminality are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root. I worry that the a mix of pessimism and a loss of civic sense is sending non-elite America into a death spiral.
Opponents of return-to-normalcy claim that these are temporary and anomalous circumstances as a result of covid. However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
Cost-benefit analyses have been ignored in favor of tunnel-visioning on viral outcomes and short term political gain. At the end of this, we might just find ourselves asking "We made it out of this, but at what cost?".
p.s: I am not advocating for any particular policy, just pointing to the absence of any holistic response. That being said, the complete failure of the American response in terms of 'viral outcomes' despite tunnel visioning on it, doesn't inspire confidence in it.
Having the community police its members can only be done with the proper external incentives to that community. The times in history where clans or family managed their own delinquents where also times where the clan or family as a whole was called to pay for the damage.
What we have here is not a sudden lapse in morals - it's a result of, rather on purpose, individualism. Since the community has nothing to lose or gain, the community just stands aside and looks.
As an aside, this reminds me of gypsy villages in Romania - places where lines of concern between insiders and outsiders are so sharply drawn, that from the outside it looks like complete lawlessness. It's not - it's lawless only if you're an outsider, and that village doesn't care about you.
Social mechanisms can be pretty complex (and fascinating). TBH, rather than trying to figure them out, it might be easier in cases like that to just throw manpower (and cameras) at the problem. But long term - this is where it's very much worth it to have cops work with/as social workers and get embedded in their communities. That this got to where it got speaks volumes about police and citizens there being in a purely adversarial context - otherwise the first old lady to meet a cop 6 months ago would have told him what's going on and who's started it.
Bingo. 'The community' ultimately does not own what's on the train. There is no communal interest in protecting the goods on the train; there may be an element of self preservation ("If the train is robbed, I can't buy the goods later!"), but there is little sense of communal preservation in a society that promotes individualism. The same thing applies to the thieves- anti-collective behavior is inevitable in a society that does not meet the needs of every individual.
> It’s not just in LA, theft and vandalism have gone way up on all the rail networks. My company is experiencing some of the worst loss numbers while in rail transit. We just announced that all transport carts will be welded shut and unwelded when it gets to the destination. Even locks aren’t enough.
Do you ever think to yourself that we're gradually headed to some dystopia like in the movie Elysium? Where a growing underclass is relegated to a garbage planet while the elites escape to a satellite world? Or at least parts of our planet?
I'm not even faulting the elites for it really -- how are you, in a non-authoritarian society, supposed to handle when basic services are under attack and can't effectively discipline or enforce law, either because you just can't police enough, people refuse to obey law and order any more, or you're not allowed to use force for political reasons? Or a certain level (or $ amount) of crime is just ok? All you can do is create greater moats around the areas you can protect and see if the underclass can sort itself out.
I see this kind of creeping / boiling the frog effect happening in lots of developments lately. (although I'm sure people of every generation have decried the end of the world too)
Take the Portland (or Oregon?) relaxation of drug penalties, etc. Sure, it only makes sense to stop criminalizing drug use when everyone's doing it and it's loading up your prisons. But you didn't exactly solve the problem. You just found a less bad way to deal with the effects. And you're still on a path where people are using drugs more and more, and the elites flee to their gated communities to let the underclass sort itself out downtown, because it's not "fair" or "equitable" to lock up people for drug use. "We need less policing, more understanding." Eventually you understand yourself all the way into a society that's broken down.
The sad thing is that the people who suffer most from crime and belief that having a system with rules is against them, are the poor and vulnerable.
I don't think our approaches to these problems is working well.
Are other cities that operate major Class I freight rail seeing the same looting issue, or is this just LA/UP "market disruption" that hasn't caught up with the rest of the country?
EDIT: To be sure, I wonder because my city is both HQ and a significant hub for one of those F500 major Class I freight rail operators, but I haven't heard of such brazen exploits happening locally...yet?
I'm reminded of recent realisations in the evolution of whales. The great size and efficiency of whales came about due to increased ocean productivity --- more available food, though often at widely-separated distances, an efficient feeding mechansism (lunge feeding), which could onboard vast quantities of krill in a single act, and the lack of any credible predators, allowing great whales to focus their evolutionary specialisation on long-distance speed and efficiency.
Similar principles apply to human transportation modes. In particular, safety of routes, for passengers and cargo, is absolutely paramount, and there's little that kills traffic, whether terminal or through-passage, than increased risk.
For rail, the equivalents are continent-spanning cargo operations, efficient freight loading and unloading (particularly via intermodal containerised traffic), and a lack of effective theft or crime operations against the trains and their cargo itself.
The Twitter thread here is strong evidence of a failure of that "no effective predators" requirement. Various supply-chain issues may be changing the calculus on long-distance freight operations and efficiency --- whether cargos decrease in quantity, in value, or in predictability, each of these would decrease operating efficiencies and opportunities. Containerisation is proving to be both a boon and a risk as well, by facilitating theft.
How challenging this might prove for railroads isn't clear, but I see a potentially large risk here.
As John Schreiber's thread notes, law enforcement for railroads is provided by the railroad companies themselves, in one of the first multi-jurisdictional police forces. Historically, railroad cops were more the scourge of hoboes and patrolled freight yards, but they might have to extend operations further if attacks such as these are increasing in frequency.
For those frustrated by Twitter's interface, Threadreader and Nitter links:
It also reminds me of certain episodes of the The History of Rome and The History of Byzantium podcasts where they depict the collapse of complex systems when the breakdown of security occurred.
During times when Roman security was good - the economy could develop complex systems of trade, which developed coinage, mathematics, architecture, and all sorts of specialists and artisans.
When security was no longer reliable due to the influx of raiders, piracy, and hoards of barbarians, all of those complex activities ceased.
The most complex aspects of society are always the first to collapse when security disappears.
...and eventually a "fend for yourself" attitude permeates society - which becomes a feedback loop, and it's no longer the externalities that are destroying security - but internal actors.
We were lucky to have a safe and stable society for so long that we are shocked to see mass looting. Once it's gone though, it is takes generations to rebuild that.
Wonder how organized that looting is. Is just individuals over many months or years, or a large gang over a few weeks time.
On the one hand it’s shocking to see it in LA in US. On the other I am surprised it’s not happening more often.
In large cities, some of my acquaintances had to get PO boxes as their packages kept getting stolen. But why bother wasting time going house to house, when you can hit a whole train car at once.
Those trains must be stalled there for long periods of time. I can't imagine they're robbing moving trains, but I could be wrong as thieves often prove to be very resourceful
I don't really understand what is happening here. Why is the ground completely covered in packages? Do thieves just break into the passing train compartments and start throwing out packages?
The trains are forced to stop at this accessible location sometimes, just outside the rail yard. They don’t stop for long, so the strategy is to hop on, cut a container open, and throw as much stuff to the ground as you can before the train starts moving again. Then you hop down and look through your spoils for items of value.
Hint: look for “lithium ion battery device inside” warning labels.
Don't think you would want to be walking around with someone else's package. Taking just the item gives some plausible deniability and there is probably no way to find the actual package that an item was taken from at that scale.
It is surreal to see this in a country where the police and “justice” system is extremely trigger happy and wants to lock everyone up for any reason they can get away with.
US is a big place. That means it's possible to get a steady stream of stories of innocent people getting arrested/killed by the police, and have jurisdictions that turn a blind eye to property crime.
They're two aspects of the exact same problem. Stopping and prosecuting real crime, while preserving the rights of the innocent, is a very difficult job. When police are criticized for failure in one aspect, they respond by closing ranks and doing even less of the other aspect. Criticize the level of crime and they respond by finding some easy targets to round up and pin charges on. Criticize their overreach, and they respond with a working strike and lawless police riots.
Succumbing to individual incentives, it's easier to focus on easier-to-handle perps and conduct organized militaryesque "operations"... just like it's easier to run roughshod over the rights of the accused by assuming they're guilty and doling out extrajudicial punishment. Neither one means doing their job better.
Ultimately it's a complete failure of accountability. Accountability of police organizations to their employers, the community, to effectively do what they are deputized to do. As well as the failure to bind police under the overarching law, both civil and criminal, like everyone else. The problem is not deep set and everywhere, but rather distributed because we're only seeing the cherry picked worst examples of both sides. But we need to seriously up our systems of accountability if anybody is going to have any faith in our institutions going forward.
Soft on crime policies like restorative justice simply attract crime. No consequences means no deterrent. It’s not surprising this happens in LA -
George Gascon is the DA and he’s facing increasing support for his recall (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/liberal-beverly-hill...).
How the heck is crime attractive? Why are you not attracted to this crime? Why am I not attracted to it as I sit working from home for a tech company?
I don't think crime is attractive, it isn't something that people want to do in a developed society. There are plenty of crimes I can commits and get away with but I am not attracted to doing them.
Apparently this is under the jurisdiction of the railroad police, not LAPD. Not clear to me what jurisdiction that falls under but sounds like it might be federal.
> Responsibility for policing the railroad right of way falls on Union Pacific Police... not local agencies like LAPD
So is 'Union Pacific Police' just a security company, or do you guys in the US actually have private businesses with their own police? Because that sounds pretty dystopian
Railroads emerged at a time when the only significant national law-enforcement entity would have been the military or US Marshall's service. (There were some customs and coast guard operations, also the postal police dating to 1772, before the United States declared their independence from England.)
Railroads operated across town or city, county, and state boundaries. They had a highly distinctive geography --- the linear alignment of tracks. And multi-jurisdictional law enforcement with competing interests would have been (and remains) problematic.
So railroads provided (or contracted, often through the infamous Pinkerton Agency) their own security serivce. Many railroad police have full law-enforcement police and arrest powers.
Note that there are other businesses and operations with some similar capabilities. A ship's captain traditionally had extraordinary powers when at sea, many hotels have or had house detectives, the US Postal Service as noted has its inspector service, and US Marshalls provide security aboard aircraft, though with partial coverage. Their presence and function received heightened awareness after the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
> Railroad police are certified state law enforcement officers with investigative and arrest powers both on and off railroad property in most states. They also have interstate law enforcement authority pursuant to federal law.
> The railroad police force dates to the mid-1800s, when the number of U.S. Marshals was insufficient to police America's growing rail network. Members were called Pinkertons, named after their originator, Alan Pinkerton. Today, each Class I railroad employs Special Agents across the country to protect America’s rail network.
It's just police who are probably paid by that business. That makes sense to me for a large business like this. If anything they're not doing a good enough job here.
Recall, if you will, that the rail lines are privately owned here. So you have privately owned trains, running on privately owned tracks that are on privately owned land ... it's not entirely clear what the legal framework for government police authority to take effect here is, at least not if you're concerned about the wierdness that would result from just saying "interstate commerce, put the FBI on it".
A state run police force I am forced to pay for that has qualified immunity sounds a lot more dystopian to me than a private security firm a company hires to protect its business infrastructure.
Funny I thought usually things feel more dystopian when the government is the one exerting the force or control. In this case it’s your perception that government law enforcement is routine where as private security firms are dystopian?
Lots of grey areas. But transportation and commerce affect everybody, and because there's big ticket issues at risk it becomes a political and practical priority.
You need a District Attorney willing to actively go after these kinds of suspects. In my experience the police don't really do anything about thefts unless they happen to catch the perpetrator in the act. My family had our car stolen from our driveway and they did virtually nothing to try and recover it. In fact, the only reason why we got it back was because the tweaker who stole it managed to park it in a reserved stall on private property and it was towed. The police said they swept the car for evidence, but we found multiple prescription bottles with the suspect's name on it in easy to reach places. The cops obviously missed this and refused to accept it as evidence. We did a LexisNexus search of the name on the bottle and lo-and-behold, multiple priors for armed robbery and auto theft. No charges were ever filed against the person.
So I have virtually no faith in security cameras. They do their jobs, but the DA certainly doesn't.
CCTV in an age of universal and accepted mask-wearing is pretty ineffective. I have video of people breaking into my business and stealing five figures worth of goods a few years back with specific identification of them, forwarded to the police, who have done nothing with it. Non-violent crimes (specifically property damage or theft) just aren't prosecuted, especially on the west coast.
In USA, railroad police have jurisdiction in this scenario. Uniquely, in USA, railroad police are employed by the railroad.
As evidenced by current BNSF strike, USA railroads presently have a tough relationship with their labor force.
For an underpaid and overstressed railroad cop, do they want to risk their life to try to stop this? My guess is generally no. They may even desire a cut of the proceeds.
Serious question: Have they not thought of mounting Mark Rober-style devices on each freight car that releases some combination of {glitter, fart spray, honey, glue, itch powder, pepper spray, ink}?
It might sound funny but I think the sheer discomfort would deter thieves in an instant, and they would be easy to identify for several days.
A device of this sort would be super useful for car thieves as well.
Amazon has already started doing their own shipping. Maybe they'll hire their own mercenaries to guard the shipments too. Eventually they'll replace the government. United States of Amazon. We won't even have to change all our monogrammed stuff.
[+] [-] screye|4 years ago|reply
A loss of civic sense and cultural criminality are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root. I worry that the a mix of pessimism and a loss of civic sense is sending non-elite America into a death spiral.
Opponents of return-to-normalcy claim that these are temporary and anomalous circumstances as a result of covid. However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
Cost-benefit analyses have been ignored in favor of tunnel-visioning on viral outcomes and short term political gain. At the end of this, we might just find ourselves asking "We made it out of this, but at what cost?".
p.s: I am not advocating for any particular policy, just pointing to the absence of any holistic response. That being said, the complete failure of the American response in terms of 'viral outcomes' despite tunnel visioning on it, doesn't inspire confidence in it.
[+] [-] radu_floricica|4 years ago|reply
What we have here is not a sudden lapse in morals - it's a result of, rather on purpose, individualism. Since the community has nothing to lose or gain, the community just stands aside and looks.
As an aside, this reminds me of gypsy villages in Romania - places where lines of concern between insiders and outsiders are so sharply drawn, that from the outside it looks like complete lawlessness. It's not - it's lawless only if you're an outsider, and that village doesn't care about you.
Social mechanisms can be pretty complex (and fascinating). TBH, rather than trying to figure them out, it might be easier in cases like that to just throw manpower (and cameras) at the problem. But long term - this is where it's very much worth it to have cops work with/as social workers and get embedded in their communities. That this got to where it got speaks volumes about police and citizens there being in a purely adversarial context - otherwise the first old lady to meet a cop 6 months ago would have told him what's going on and who's started it.
[+] [-] wildrhythms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmonk|4 years ago|reply
> It’s not just in LA, theft and vandalism have gone way up on all the rail networks. My company is experiencing some of the worst loss numbers while in rail transit. We just announced that all transport carts will be welded shut and unwelded when it gets to the destination. Even locks aren’t enough.
[+] [-] schnitzelstoat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kepler1|4 years ago|reply
I'm not even faulting the elites for it really -- how are you, in a non-authoritarian society, supposed to handle when basic services are under attack and can't effectively discipline or enforce law, either because you just can't police enough, people refuse to obey law and order any more, or you're not allowed to use force for political reasons? Or a certain level (or $ amount) of crime is just ok? All you can do is create greater moats around the areas you can protect and see if the underclass can sort itself out.
I see this kind of creeping / boiling the frog effect happening in lots of developments lately. (although I'm sure people of every generation have decried the end of the world too)
Take the Portland (or Oregon?) relaxation of drug penalties, etc. Sure, it only makes sense to stop criminalizing drug use when everyone's doing it and it's loading up your prisons. But you didn't exactly solve the problem. You just found a less bad way to deal with the effects. And you're still on a path where people are using drugs more and more, and the elites flee to their gated communities to let the underclass sort itself out downtown, because it's not "fair" or "equitable" to lock up people for drug use. "We need less policing, more understanding." Eventually you understand yourself all the way into a society that's broken down.
The sad thing is that the people who suffer most from crime and belief that having a system with rules is against them, are the poor and vulnerable.
I don't think our approaches to these problems is working well.
[+] [-] metaphor|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: To be sure, I wonder because my city is both HQ and a significant hub for one of those F500 major Class I freight rail operators, but I haven't heard of such brazen exploits happening locally...yet?
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-blue-whal...
Similar principles apply to human transportation modes. In particular, safety of routes, for passengers and cargo, is absolutely paramount, and there's little that kills traffic, whether terminal or through-passage, than increased risk.
For rail, the equivalents are continent-spanning cargo operations, efficient freight loading and unloading (particularly via intermodal containerised traffic), and a lack of effective theft or crime operations against the trains and their cargo itself.
The Twitter thread here is strong evidence of a failure of that "no effective predators" requirement. Various supply-chain issues may be changing the calculus on long-distance freight operations and efficiency --- whether cargos decrease in quantity, in value, or in predictability, each of these would decrease operating efficiencies and opportunities. Containerisation is proving to be both a boon and a risk as well, by facilitating theft.
How challenging this might prove for railroads isn't clear, but I see a potentially large risk here.
As John Schreiber's thread notes, law enforcement for railroads is provided by the railroad companies themselves, in one of the first multi-jurisdictional police forces. Historically, railroad cops were more the scourge of hoboes and patrolled freight yards, but they might have to extend operations further if attacks such as these are increasing in frequency.
For those frustrated by Twitter's interface, Threadreader and Nitter links:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/johnschreiber/status/148177072227...
[+] [-] q1w2|4 years ago|reply
During times when Roman security was good - the economy could develop complex systems of trade, which developed coinage, mathematics, architecture, and all sorts of specialists and artisans.
When security was no longer reliable due to the influx of raiders, piracy, and hoards of barbarians, all of those complex activities ceased.
The most complex aspects of society are always the first to collapse when security disappears.
...and eventually a "fend for yourself" attitude permeates society - which becomes a feedback loop, and it's no longer the externalities that are destroying security - but internal actors.
We were lucky to have a safe and stable society for so long that we are shocked to see mass looting. Once it's gone though, it is takes generations to rebuild that.
[+] [-] rdtsc|4 years ago|reply
On the one hand it’s shocking to see it in LA in US. On the other I am surprised it’s not happening more often.
In large cities, some of my acquaintances had to get PO boxes as their packages kept getting stolen. But why bother wasting time going house to house, when you can hit a whole train car at once.
[+] [-] reustle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labrador|4 years ago|reply
https://archive.is/F6QPf
Those trains must be stalled there for long periods of time. I can't imagine they're robbing moving trains, but I could be wrong as thieves often prove to be very resourceful
[+] [-] Ansil849|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blamazon|4 years ago|reply
Hint: look for “lithium ion battery device inside” warning labels.
[+] [-] codemac|4 years ago|reply
Once the train is moving again, they go through all the packages on the ground looking for things of value.
[+] [-] bostonsre|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vondur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avalys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|4 years ago|reply
Succumbing to individual incentives, it's easier to focus on easier-to-handle perps and conduct organized militaryesque "operations"... just like it's easier to run roughshod over the rights of the accused by assuming they're guilty and doling out extrajudicial punishment. Neither one means doing their job better.
Ultimately it's a complete failure of accountability. Accountability of police organizations to their employers, the community, to effectively do what they are deputized to do. As well as the failure to bind police under the overarching law, both civil and criminal, like everyone else. The problem is not deep set and everywhere, but rather distributed because we're only seeing the cherry picked worst examples of both sides. But we need to seriously up our systems of accountability if anybody is going to have any faith in our institutions going forward.
[+] [-] ramoz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] palijer|4 years ago|reply
I don't think crime is attractive, it isn't something that people want to do in a developed society. There are plenty of crimes I can commits and get away with but I am not attracted to doing them.
[+] [-] DanHulton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] King-Aaron|4 years ago|reply
So is 'Union Pacific Police' just a security company, or do you guys in the US actually have private businesses with their own police? Because that sounds pretty dystopian
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
Railroads emerged at a time when the only significant national law-enforcement entity would have been the military or US Marshall's service. (There were some customs and coast guard operations, also the postal police dating to 1772, before the United States declared their independence from England.)
Railroads operated across town or city, county, and state boundaries. They had a highly distinctive geography --- the linear alignment of tracks. And multi-jurisdictional law enforcement with competing interests would have been (and remains) problematic.
So railroads provided (or contracted, often through the infamous Pinkerton Agency) their own security serivce. Many railroad police have full law-enforcement police and arrest powers.
Note that there are other businesses and operations with some similar capabilities. A ship's captain traditionally had extraordinary powers when at sea, many hotels have or had house detectives, the US Postal Service as noted has its inspector service, and US Marshalls provide security aboard aircraft, though with partial coverage. Their presence and function received heightened awareness after the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
[+] [-] unityByFreedom|4 years ago|reply
> The railroad police force dates to the mid-1800s, when the number of U.S. Marshals was insufficient to police America's growing rail network. Members were called Pinkertons, named after their originator, Alan Pinkerton. Today, each Class I railroad employs Special Agents across the country to protect America’s rail network.
https://www.up.com/aboutup/community/safety/special_agents/i...
It's just police who are probably paid by that business. That makes sense to me for a large business like this. If anything they're not doing a good enough job here.
[+] [-] rdtsc|4 years ago|reply
It is crazy here, what can I tell ya ;-)
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macinjosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt-attack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmorici|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Axsuul|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w_t_payne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|4 years ago|reply
So I have virtually no faith in security cameras. They do their jobs, but the DA certainly doesn't.
[+] [-] icelancer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|4 years ago|reply
Its not that this is hard or impossible to solve.
[+] [-] slig|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suction|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blamazon|4 years ago|reply
As evidenced by current BNSF strike, USA railroads presently have a tough relationship with their labor force.
For an underpaid and overstressed railroad cop, do they want to risk their life to try to stop this? My guess is generally no. They may even desire a cut of the proceeds.
[+] [-] friendlydog|4 years ago|reply
Additionally they are releasing hazardous materials by breaking open boxes:
18 U.S. Code section 1992
[+] [-] dheera|4 years ago|reply
It might sound funny but I think the sheer discomfort would deter thieves in an instant, and they would be easy to identify for several days.
A device of this sort would be super useful for car thieves as well.
[+] [-] somethoughts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imgabe|4 years ago|reply