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?
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.