Last week a photographer posted pictures of debris along the railroad tracks running through downtown LA, along with the startling statistic that thieves steal the goods from something like 90 cargo containers a day. This went viral, and naturally I wondered if it was something new. It's not:
Dumping, trash and encampments around railroad tracks last year prompted Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino to call for the city to declare them a public nuisance. But the effort was dropped after Union Pacific cleaned up a swath of tracks, said his spokesperson, Branimir Kvartuc.
Still, Buscaino said, Union Pacific needs to hire more agents to patrol the tracks. “It’s no surprise we are seeing the additional crimes,” he said in a text, adding that the problems had been “unabated for years.”
So this is all routine stuff. Apparently thieves have been targeting freight trains for years, and Union Pacific just considers it a cost of doing business.
I dunno, I used to take the Metrolink somewhat regularly into Union Station and, yeah, there was always some debris and scattered homeless encampments around the I-5/10 interchange and along the LA river channel, but nothing like in this picture. Maybe they used to clean it up more regularly or something, but that was pretty crazy. Apparently one of the main problem is that those modular shipping containers were made to be stacked 20-deep on a ship -- not a lot of pilfering going on in the middle of the Pacific -- and don't really have particularly secure locks on them, so sitting in a switchyard they're easy pickings for a couple of guys and a bolt cutter.
Maybe common...but seeing this makes me very unhappy. Why isn't Union Pacific adding security, why isn't the LAPD or the Sheriff's Department on this....obvious crime wave.
Like the recent smash and grab robberies, this is not something I am willing to overlook. There should be arrests, there should be added security, there should be hardened locks if this is the problem. Locks strong enough to withstand normal bolt cutters at least.
These are images of a society in total decline.
And are unacceptable.
Traveller
The railroad companies say the shipping companies should build more secure containers, but that costs money. The container companies say its up to the railroads to provide better security at their switchyards, but that costs more money and right now it's cheaper to just eat the cost of the lost merchandise. Same reason stores mostly let smash-and-grab theives just leave with the stuff -- cheaper than hiring lots of security and dealing with the liability if someone gets injured or killed trying to stop the robbery.
Perhaps the government should hire some people to capture suspected criminals and we should establish a branch of government to determine if they are really criminals and, if so, incarcerate them for long enough to deter such things?
I thought we paid taxes so government could do things like that?
I'm not getting the link between "breaking into cargo containers" and litter around the tracks. Of course, it's Monday.
Emporer of the North.
I really liked that movie. Borgnine was great.
You can't tell on the outside what's in the container, so thieves just jimmy open the doors and sort of ransack everything until they find a box with something valuable in it. The rest they just toss on the ground, hence all the debris.
Thanks!
In a video *this week* of a cargo train moving through the area, several cars had FedEx container-trailers with an open back.
People have said that bolt cutters can be used to break in, and maybe that's true, but there has got to be a technical solution. Locks on the inside that open with a QR code, or something like that.
Auto theft used to be a big problem, but with the advent of better anti-theft design, the situation has changed a whole lot for the better. The motor vehicle theft rate in 1990 was 657 / 100k population. In 2019 it was 220.
(2020 reversed the trend at 245, but that might be due to COVID.)
And it's not because there are fewer vehicles out there. Vehicles per 1,000 people rose from 773 (1990) to 816 (2014)
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-962-january-30-2017-vehicles-capita-other-regionscountries-compared-united-states
Check out this chart. It's incredible.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-vehicle-theft-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/
Years back, a coworkers husband worked on the docks, unloading containers. I was absolutely shocked at the stuff he brought home...
proverbial "fell off the truck"?
"The Gang Gets Made" is an underrated Always Sunny episode.
And you never reported it to the police.
There is a difference between cargo containers in general getting broken-into for years, and whether or not the rate of said break-ins has changed. Normally Kevin would have provided a graph to back-up his dismissal but that is conspicuously absent here.
I'm guessing companies don't like to report those statistics...
From the report to which Kevin links:
"Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County. The railroad didn’t release specific data on what was stolen or the value of what was lost but it said the increase in crime cost the company at least $5 million last year."
This is just more evidence the FBI & DOJ must reach out to the Hobo Mafia to negotiate railroad security.
So Kevin gave up on the post about Covid deaths and demographics?
Well, there is a lot of gaps in the data, so it's hard to say much.
Meh. This was happening in the NYC area in the 70's when I was a kid. Trains are not locked. They are secured with an aluminum band that if broken lets the buyer know there is a problem.
Almost half a million TEU in shipping containers move through the Port of Los Angeles every month, or about 15,000-20,000 per day - and about 35% of those use rail to leave, meaning the equivalent of 5250 TEU per day by rail. Your typical forty foot container is two TEU, so about 2625 containers by rail per day.
If 90 of those containers get looted every day, then it's about a 3% loss rate on those. That actually is kind of high - retail shrinkage is about 1.3% - although apparently it is within the acceptable range. I could easily see them deciding that it's just the cost of business, and replacing and re-shipping anything that goes missing. There's already some uncertainty built into ground shipping anyways, and for more urgent stuff they can make up for it with air mail.
That 3% loss rate assumes that the containers are emptied. A 40 foot container is about 39 feet long by 7.5 feet wide by nearly 10 feet high inside. That's about 3,000 cubic feet of cargo space, and the contents may weigh upwards of 30 tons, depending on the density of the contents. My guess would be that it is much more common for containers to be opened and a small portion of their contents removed. In other words, losses of maybe 3% of the contents of a container that's broken into, and overall losses of 3% of 3%, or .009%.
It's just another thing for conservatives to lie about 'liberals letting people get away with being criminals'.
In the 1970's I knew a RR worker who considered it a perk of the job to loot the freight trains. One time there were gobs of L'eggs for all of his female friends.
Anyone who has kids, or has friends who have kids, will recognize the "mess" in those photos as being roughly equal to two days of kids being allowed not to clean up their rooms.
In other words, no big deal. Pretty typical slow news day "controversy".
Has the act of breaking into rail cars been going on for years? Yes.
Has the rate increased, recently? Yes.
Why are you doing this?
You have evidence of that?
It actually is getting worse, but Union Pacific purposefully neglected to filly clean the track to bolster it's case that the state should pay more for their security so they don't have too.