Law enforcement is the state’s job, and companies do pay taxes. Blithely ignoring train robberies on the premise that if it gets bad enough, the company will hire private armed forces won’t lead to the kinds of societal changes you’re hoping for.
The kinds of theft happening in LA on a regular basis are essentially unheard of in places like Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Any such occurrence would be shocking news and police would be all over it.
It doesn’t appear the system has been very effective in recent years, compared to other approaches internationally, unfortunately.
It doesn't seem like they hire enough people.
That's more likely because these places (as does Europe, by the way - we also don't have people burglarizing trains!) have robust social security networks for their population. The homeless get at least basic assistance, the mentally ill get taken care of.
The US does neither. People who have fallen through the cracks simply don't get any help at all (except from some charities), and mentally ill people don't get any care.
With the exception of Japan, every one of the places I listed spends less on social security and welfare in general as percentage of GDP than the US does. In most cases, dramatically less.
And on top of that, it creates a very effective price cap on rents in the non-social housing sector, because people could just go and live into marginally lower-quality housing instead.
The train companies already have their own police forces, but if they can't get convictions in court, all they can do is scare away the least coordinated thieves. So it's hard to understand what security investments are supposed to achieve.
Rail companies go in, apprehend the homeless for trespassing and then complain that county won't prosecute them. And no, the county sensibly doesn't want to fill it's jails with vagrants just 'cause the rail companies don't park their trains where they're safe.
All this is part of the "supply chain problems" of the last few years but the thing with those is the large carriers (shippers and railroads) actually made profits by a legal situation wound-up as "our losses are your losses, our gains are ours". They cried all the way to the bank.
It's not like most people are being offered a job and an apartment. They are being asked if they would like to be warm for 10 hours and even worse off than before.
Given limited resources and varying priorities, public law enforcement follow-through can range from helpful to apathetic to non-existent.
Even major, national retail chains with clear video evidence of organized theft rings can have issues getting local PD to pursue prosecution.
Edit: Courtesy of dwater's note up-thread, railroad police can indeed be empowered by states as law enforcement. Though I expect at some point prosecution still reverts to state/federal authority. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police#Jurisdiction...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police#Jurisdiction_a...
So this wind-up being as if Fedex, to save money, eliminated their own parking lots and parked their trucks in the sketchy parts of town - and then demanded the cities eliminate the homeless 'cause their truck kept getting broken into.
Presumably if it dovetails back into the existing public court system at the prosecution level (i.e. there are railroad lawyers empowered to bring cases similar to DAs), that's still a reasonable separation of powers.
But the slope towards the government (with democratic checks and balances) ceding enforcement authority to a private party (without democratic checks and balances) seems worrisome.
With a very narrow space and scope.
The whole world is not New York City or the Bay Area where you have several billions of taxpayer revenues sloshing around you can throw at crime problems.
The "tough on crime" crowd needs to be less ideological and think deeply about the fiscal implications of taxpayers of their policies.
It all makes sense given that we are, after all, a former British colony. Great Britain’s whole thing with its colonial empire was to outsource its territorial defense to its colonial citizens.
1. Why should individuals and companies be responsible for their own law enforcement? That's literally the point of government.
2. They still rely on the court system and prosecutors. The railway companies aren't allowed to execute looters on sight.
2. They often have specific laws at a federal level and as I understand it wouldn’t depend on general local courts and prosecutors, particularly on interstate lines. For spur lines it’ll usually be state prosecutors.
The crux of it is the rail companies probably don’t WANT to hire police if they absolutely can avoid it. That’s very expensive and I’m sure they would rather just eat losses, pay insurance premiums, and whine to local and state police for more coverage at the tax payers expense.
And when you call your local PD, good luck getting anywhere when another police force discontinued the investigation and local PD knows little/nothing about railways.
Canada has similar private rail police and that’s basically what happened at least once: https://theconversation.com/why-major-canadian-railways-must...
The railroads using shorter trains would allow them to keep the trains in the railyards, where they have more physical control. But that would involve more employees and seems to be something the rail companies are specifically avoiding for various reasons.
My understanding is that they can pursue drug crime or break up organized fencing operations. But at the low level most of these train robberies are happening they probably don't waste their time.
Train companies do have police forces but since the advent of "precision railroading" they have been cutting all staff to the bone.
> but if they can't get convictions in court
Why wouldn't they be able to get convictions?
Because the prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute (since the California electorate doesn't want them to).
For example, if a company chooses to ignore a RCE vulnerability in their software for years, are they to blame when that vulnerability is exploited? I'd say absolutely they are.
One question though, what are the laws like surrounding security for trains in the US? In Canada, security employed by rail companies actually have actually been granted all the powers of a police officer by the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police#United_States
Your analogy doesn't quite hold up here.
1. we do expect people to take preventative measures. I think this is more like someone being blamed for a burglary because they left their house unlocked. I have had car insurance policies that excluded theft resulting from leaving the key in the car.
2. Businesses are not individuals.
Come to think of it, that may be why this behavior is being encouraged. "the people" insisted we militarilized to protect their stuff.
I am off to ground my tinfoil hat now.
Edit: I think there may be 2 staff, but they're trying to change it to 1 and you basically aren't allowed to ever call in sick or else you're fired.
They train companies should still have crew, but they should be for use on secondary lines and the crew lives near that line and just works 1 week a month (most of that time doing mandatory training). With a little work on scheduling they can find local farmers looking for a side job when there isn't farming to do.
This is so out of left field. In what sort of dystopia do we confront the end of scarcity with... more mandatory training? Also, why do you assert 1 week a month? Wouldn't you need four crews to work this section then?
He noted that rail companies are actively trying to lengthen trains, and reduce the staff to 1.
This is exactly like shoplifting at Target — thieves now know the employees are not allowed to violently engage them, so there's absolutely no deterrent. If you think 4 unarmed railway employees are going to take it upon themselves to defend train cargo against cartel thugs or mentally ill and drugged out looters, you are insane.
With that said, it makes less than zero sense for Target to ask retail employees to risk their lives in order to stop someone stealing a cart full of Tide or pockets full of sonicare replacement heads. Not to mention, the potential for interventions to quickly escalate and become a danger to other shoppers.
Until then, this is a no-op.
In other words, they have to move more freight... but it's after-tax profit neutral for them whether they have a huge amount of theft or a little.
This reminds me of patio11’s assertion that the optimal amount of fraud in a system is not 0 because the marginal price of reducing fraud to 0 is far higher than the amount lost to the hardest to eliminate fraud.
The key is to make sure that the costs of eliminating theft are internalized. So as long as the train company reimburses everyone fully then I would imagine they will quickly figure out what the correct level of security is.
However, if it gets expensive enough, I would expect that the parent companies will start to self-insure.
The actual issue here is train companies have cut staff down to almost nothing while simultaneously increasing train length to miles and miles. (And they are trying to cut staff even further).
A train with 2 miles worth of cargo and 2 people to defend it ends up being SUPER easy for a thief to target and rob. It takes an hour just for someone to figure out what's happening to the train.
What's the solution? How about the train companies employ more people, install more cameras, or shorten their trains? Or they can use their insurance to cover the cost of lost goods (as they are almost certainly already doing).
Train companies are trying to operate like the dollar general and are putting on surprised pikachu faces when they get robbed like a dollar general store. Almost certainly what they want to happen is the offloading of their security problems onto the public. We the public should not be subsidizing private monopolies because their bad business decisions make them particularly vulnerable to crime.
A company that earns 25 billion dollars of revenue a year can afford moving back to older business practices to avoid theft.