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.