When people know property crimes will not be prosecuted, they are less likely to report it. When the police know that people who commit such crimes will be released without charges, they are less likely to arrest such criminals.
One big reason is insurance requires you to file a police report in most situations before they'll do anything for you. That does only increase reporting in more affluent areas of course but there are reasons beyond the police doing their jobs.
well, last year in every discussion about the "retail theft wave" people would bring up police statistics indicating only a modest rise or actual decline, and were thus criticized for assuming accuracy. so, let's just exercise the same skepticism here
The whole notion that it's even possible to credibly measure property crime in a place like LA is farcical even absent the institutional corruption and incompetence of the LAPD.
For only one example, Buckeye, Arizona was accused of misreporting crime statistics to make it the safest place in Arizona for a while [0]. I'm sure this happens to some extent throughout many jurisdictions, and the idea of the LAPD reporting favorable statistics doesn't seem far fetched at all.
Wonder if in this case how they’d count the stats. Are these packages counted each as a single instance of theft? Wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t count at all as occurring in LA but in the state where the train is owned.
This is total speculation on my part until I can find a better reference, but I assume it's tracked in terms of rail cars since that's how STB tracks other statistics: https://www.stb.gov/reports-data/rail-service-data/
Though I'm not sure how that calculation would work when we're talking about intermodal container theft, since modern intermodal "well cars" can consist of one, three, or even five permanently-coupled platforms holding two stacked containers each: https://www.gatx.com/wps/wcm/connect/GATX/GATX_SITE/Home/Rai...
I don't trust any crime statistics other than murders. Police in many cities barely investigate minor crimes and often actively discourage victims from filing reports, so the statistics are artificially low.
That assumes a constant relationship between reported crime and actual crime. I don't think that's a safe assumption to make. For instance it may be that as property crime becomes more prevalent so does public awareness of the futility of filing a report for it. This would lead to a decrease in the ratio of reported crime to actual crime.
So instead of using the actual data that's available we should make up whatever bias we want that fits our existing world view? Even with no evidence to support it other than conjecture?
Yes. You should have an opinion on an organisation's probity based on what you know about it. If you don't have data on a specfic organsiation's track record you default to the reference class. If you see something like SF, where records suggest crime in all areas bar murder is falling, but retailers are shutting stores, boarding up windows and putting razor blades behind the counter you just don't trust the figures.
When you know the data is bullshit and lies you say so.
I’ve heard the railways have their own jurisdiction but the environments around those railways sure have a way of breeding criminals, giving them cover, and contributing to all of this. It’s hard for me to view this as anything but a result of California policy and the kind of justice system promoted by folks like Gascon (LA DA) or Boudin (SF DA). After all, we don’t hear about train raids in Texas or Montana or whatever.
I agree and am anti Boudin/Gascon and other Soros sponsored DA's, but the destination of rail transported goods into LA, Chicago etc are typically through very poor neighborhoods. Stopping in these port and transport hub areas, whether semi trucks or trains, has always attracted crime and looting. The difference now is the centralization bottlenecks Amazon has created. Huge amounts of predictable opportunities have not gone unnoticed...
But from the above quotes from the sheriff, doesn’t it also seem like that dept is asleep at the wheel?
Perhaps we read into this what we already want to read into this. I do agree that our current criminal reform looks to have swung too far in one direction. But I also think the sheriff is a dick, and the dept is practically a gang enterprise.
It is a mess, for sure. Somewhere I read they clean it up every few days. It's been happening for years. But also, those pictures were taken with a long telephoto lens from quite a ways off, which compresses distance and makes it look like an even bigger mess than it really is.
A news report posted elsewhere in this thread[1] says the mess goes on for "miles" and thieves are there "daily". It doesn't seem to me like this is a visual distortion caused by lens type.
Anecdotally, in the past few months I've had five or six packages just never show up from Amazon whereas in all the years prior that happened so rarely I don't recall any such thing.
Even close shots and shots across rather than down the tracks show tremendous amounts of packaging.
John Schreiber's original Twitter thread shows plenty of cross-track, close-in, and overhead shots from both bridges and drones all lacking telephoto compression and revealing abundant strewn packaging:
Well, for the past few decade or so, the country has been gradually destroying the underlying mechanisms that made it different from the 3rd-world countries, so you can hardly be surprised by those actions starting to bear fruit.
The growing disconnect between the person's decisions and their economic output. Imagine you wake up at 10am and make $1K, and your neighbor wakes up at 6am and makes $2K. You could be happy with it (extra $1K not worth 4 lost hours of sleep) or could force yourself to wake up at 6am as well, or would find some compromise in between. The main thing is that if you yourself pick the tradeoff between the level of inconvenience and the pay.
On the other hand, if your neighbor makes $500, while you make $450 regardless of when you wake up, you'll be extremely irritated by the unfairness. And would not notice that your employer makes $750 off each of you, while you are busy quarreling about who's more privileged.
Most of the jobs in the cities are just that - standard work routine, standard pay, little room for decisions, little growth, little personal responsibility, little chance becoming financially independent. Brought to you by low interest rates fueling endless acquisitions and consolidation of bargaining power in fewer and fewer hands.
2008 was the end of the previous economic cycle where the big players got too greedy and too dumb, made stupid decisions with big money, and were destined to crash and burn, allowing the new wave of smaller companies to take their place. But the government decided that too much was at stake, and just bailed them out.
Around 2012 people started noticing that something is wrong, which took the rather silly form of Occupy Wall Street. The corporate response to it was shifting of the focus to social justice and equity - term that was supposed to take into account historical inequalities, but is so loose and unquantifiable, that every person would see it slightly differently, creating endless opportunity for division.
So now we have an entire generation that does not aspire wealth through personal responsibility and hard work, but rather blames someone else on having an unfair advantage and is dreaming of taking it away. That's how 3rd-world countries and dictatorships function. People are busy fighting over the leftovers from the feast left by the ruling class, and feel accomplished when they manage to steal the extra bag of potatoes their neighbor was hiding under the stairs.
At certain scales, small losses don't concern growth capitalists. It's just like companies taking fines rather than fixing the issue or doing things legally, because it's cheaper in the end.
Problems can "grow" too. I guess people implicitly assume businesses grow faster than their problems, but given the broken window effect etc etc I'm not sure ignoring the issue here is what a capitalist should be doing..
Curious why people are downvoting this. Do you really think the people stealing these goods prefer to be doing this compared to other options available to you and me?
Yes based on the wildly different behavior between them and the average programmer. Why would you expect them to have the same preferences and inclinations in life?
Because the idea that property laws shouldn't be enforced and that the response to property crime is to give the thieves more stuff (housing and UBI) is a perverse incentive and a recipe for a lawless society where criminality is rewarded.
This isn't an argument against UBI or expanding housing per se, it's an argument against the people saying property laws should not be enforced because the criminals are poor.
People resort to stealing when they have unsatisfied ambition. When they want more than they have, and don't see a legal way to get it. If every job available to you is minimum wage where you don't make any noticeable difference, you resort to making that difference elsewhere.
UBI won't solve this problem. It will skyrocket the rent/food prices due to supply/demand mechanics and further entrench stockholders/real estate owners vs. the salary/rent class. And even if you somehow solve that (somehow get free food/housing for everyone), you will still end up with plenty of depressed people with plenty of free time and a strong belief that someone else is hiding a patch of greener grass under their carpet.
On the other hand, if you modify the tax rules to make corporations and large chains less viable than small businesses (i.e. forcing most of the population to work for themselves and trade with their peers, rather than following the corporate manual), people will suddenly start respecting each other more and will pressure the victim mentality folks to sober up and join the ranks.
But that's not going to happen, because all 3 branches of power + the media are controlled by the shareholder class, that will swiftly redirect any dangerous leanings to the direction bringing them further profit (remember how BLM conveniently diverted the "protestor type" from Occupy Wall Street?). So don't be surprised if having a mailing address will soon count as a privilege and your workplace will offer mandatory trainings asking you to denounce it in the name of all good against all evil.
Which isn't the case for anyone in this labor shortage. There's plenty of employers willing to pay more than double that who still can't find unskilled workers.
It's trickier then just the paycheck. People have an inherent need of seeing their actions slowly making a progress to some global goal. Saving for retirement could be one. Paying off your mortgage, or growing your business, or raising your kids, or even having a meaningful career (that gives you more control over the company's decisions) could be another one.
If everyone is replaceable and the salary only covers recurring expenses, people go nuts and start looking elsewhere. A lot of the visible homeless lifestyle is a (petty) power to inconvenience others. A lot of the theft is about the power over someone else to get what was intended for them.
Opening your own bakery and turning people into recurring customers through clever recipes scratches the same itch, but makes the society a much more pleasant place to live. Except, given the interest rates, centralized suppliers and property prices, good fucking luck with that.
Oh, really? I know plenty of people with amazing credentials who are being let go like nothing. That's empirical and n=1, but that's what I see from where I'm at.
> The sad part of this situation is the initial people that broke into the containers on the trains are long gone with their loot, now the marginalized people are getting caught digging through the discarded items that were not valuable enough for ones that broke in and most likely they will be the ones prosecuted for political gains even if they get out on no cash bail.
I did not realize that. It makes it even more of a sad situation.
It appears that you're shielding criminals behind mental illness, and making light of the plight of the victims by suggesting that they're wealthy elite. Most of the packages stolen off the trains belong to regular folks.
> But Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.
Half-way through the article we get the point. This is just another example of how our retail supply lines are optimized at every turn to shovel maximum crap through the pipe... be it minimally-staffed stores or unsecured trains. It's all about cash flow, baby!
How can the market fix the problem? Some people aren't abiding by the market so how could the market constrain them? It's like advising a chess player to just play better when his opponent is snatching his pieces off the board - that might not work.
If the market reacts by making it harder to steal, then presumably this will increase the cost of goods which will, presumably, increase the value of stealing them. The market doesn't have a lot of options that I can see.
The idea that government shouldn't be the party to address crime seems very foreign and wrong to me. We shouldn't want private companies handling crime and punishment. That is a role for government.
Government or police? Government enforces pollution laws and will step in over wage theft. But you can't call 911 and say "my boss stole from my paycheck!" whereas that happens all the time with shoplifting.
Why must the government step in when these skeleton-crewed retail stores and supply chains have inevitable, predictable loss issues? The article itself makes this point.
Railroads already have police, armored cars are allowed armed guards (as do other high-value shipments, I'm sure), retail stores have security (however neutered they may be).
I don't see why shoplifters are thrown in jail and wage thieves are not. Why do cops gun down shoplifters but won't lift a finger for wage thieves? Why don't cops bust down the doors of polluters? It's the selective enforcement of property rights I have a problem with. The enforcers already side with capital 9 times out of 10.
I understand that you have justified complaints, but saying stupid things (government should not go after retail and supply chain theft) in order to take potshots against "capital" does not make a good conversation and I would rather see less of it on HN. Obviously you want shoplifters to be prosecuted as well as wage thieves and polluters.
The original articles on this are already very sympathetic to capital, and so that’s the direction of my criticism. The story suggests we should feel bad for the railroad companies without any investigating whether the company itself could share some of the blame. Today there’s a story about how UP cut many of their security employees.
The original articles and discussion here on HN is surprisingly one-sided.
Obviously I don’t like railroad theft but let’s not send in the army to protect a supply chain which has perhaps been made too efficient.
The government has a legal monopoly on many things, including putting people behind bars. If you pay taxes, you'd expect them to "do something", because if they don't, where's the point in paying those taxes?
> If the market reacts by making it harder to steal, then presumably this will increase the cost of goods which will, presumably, increase the value of stealing them. The market doesn't have a lot of options that I can see.
These increases needn't be the same. It could be that by increasing the security budget 10%, theft decreased by 90%, and prize increased by 1%, which wouldn't be high enough to create a "theft demand". It could also be that the same security budget increase did nothing on the theft rate. My point is this is not necessarily how the market works.
This is similar to the argument that taxes increase the cost of products, which increases the cost of running the government (since the government consumes free market products), which will require more taxes. This needn't be the case.
In any case, there are and have been societies with more inequality and poverty than USA where there was less crime. Obviously nobody wants those solutions in USA but the market would find its was absent regulation in this case.
Optimization is good. It means everything is efficient, cheaper, more abundant and new things can be built on top of old things. It's a wonderful quality.
Now, in which first world country do freight train need guards across their route? And it's not like the train is being hit in the middle of the desert, Breaking Bad style. There are few spots where this happened.
It seems to me like police across the US are either scared of doing their job or simply don't care, together with a public which has been desensitized to crime.
So what you're saying is that the reason all the crime statistics are lower than in the past is because people stopped reporting these Incredibly Rampant crimes, and the solution is to bring back the people who presided over high crime rates? Why wouldn't those people suppress the crime statistics to look good if it's so easy to suppress them now? What will make them more effective now than they were before? More violence? More cops? More guns and tear gas grenades?
Rail theft is an incredibly specific crime compared to something like a carjacking or a house burglary. There are only so many trains to rob and only so many rail lines. It doesn't make sense to extrapolate from it to all other crimes.
Crime rates are a huge lie due to under reporting. The police may intentionally "forget" to follow up on reports which coincidentally makes their stats look better than they should. I've filed reports which were promptly lost within four hours when I followed up. One of those was a hit and run.
It's a known problem, yes. Unless that is a new problem, however, lower crime rates are still lower crime rates. If you're arguing that under-reporting is a new or dramatically worse problem, how does switching in 'tough on crime' politicians fix under-reporting? Under-reporting is a police department policy that makes cops look good, so why would they stop doing it? If you want to fix that problem in particular, you should vote someone in who will fix it, not someone who wants to throw more people into the local lock-up.
If cops have been throwing out 50% of reports forever, then 200% of a lower number is still less than 200% of a bigger number from past statistics.
The degree of under reporting can and does change through time. If you have a pro crime pro criminal DA like Chesa Boudin people respond to that. People report less crimes if they know nothing will be done. If they know stopping crime isn't a priority police are less likley to do anything to stop it.
People respond to incentives. Incentives vary over time.
I heard it's Kamala(the VP) who started this 'stealing under $950 each time you got it for free' in CA, is it true?
Anyways I guess the voters got what they voted for, only them can change that by next vote. Nobody to blame really as those who made these rules are elected by CA voters.
Law and order are key to modern society, it's not perfect, the alternatives are just much worse.
> Kamala Harris told voters in 2014 that Proposition 14(typo) was "The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act." Among other reductions in penalties, the law "requires misdemeanor sentence instead of felony for the following crimes when amount involved is $950 or less: petty theft, receiving stolen property, and forging/writing bad checks.
It's not just misdemeanor vs felony. If you report a robery to Texas police, they will investigate and prosecute the thief. LA police will tell you to screw off.
Recorded property crimes are at their lowest since 1960. In San Francisco shops have boarded up their windows to stop smash and grabs[1] and shoplifting has become blatant and all pervasive[2]. People don't report crime if they know it won't be prsosecuted
> Crime data is only as good as what gets reported
A former property manager of a Walgreens store tweeted the Chronicle article didn’t take into account that police crime data is only as good as the crimes that get reported — and his Walgreens had “stopped reporting” retail theft “since there was no point” with “multiple shoplifting incidents every single day. See [2]
maybe most people are at home these days? plus you can shoplift in public at daytime for $950, why bothering to break in anyone's property while adults are at home ready to shoot back?
> If criminals can get away with constant car break ins, burglaries, and daylight mass raids of stores, why stop there?
This is rich. The rich always get away with crimes: wage theft, labor violations, financial fraud, environmental destruction, opioid crisis... but some people shoplift and society is falling apart? Cry me a river.
Let the market fix their own broken supply chains.
People have been writing songs about retail theft for ages. Think about the term "riding shotgun"! This isn't a new problem.
what happens when the market fixes its supply chains with private police forces that are entirely unaccountable to local governments, and purely protect the rich? That's what's happened to South Africa.
This already happened in the US, too, regarding strike-breaking forces. See, for example, the official history of the Pennsylvania State Police.
But there are numerous solutions between the current situation and what you describe. Better locks, housing the homeless, reducing the amount of junk we import, etc.
I remember as a kid trains had cabooses (a sign of more employees). But of course that has all been optimized away. I’m guessing the skeleton crew is completely unable to secure the train if they wanted to.
Edit: downvotes for saying that the US has handled the identified problem in the past? (Which was a slippery-slope comment, anyway.)
Shoplifting is the act of stealing from a retailer, not an individual. Yes, I make a very big distinction between the two. I just don’t see why corporations in the US can get away with so much (shoplifting and wage theft are both estimated to cost the economy $40bln per year) and I’m supposed to feel bad someone is stealing from Amazon or Louis Vuitton? Doesn’t mean I’m “ok” with shoplifting, I simply feel it should be a civil matter like wage theft.
Railroads have always had their own police, so I’m not sure the reluctance. Retail/supply chain theft is a cat-and-mouse game… always had been, always will be. Step up enforcement, improve the locks, house the homeless and move on.
>Shoplifting is the act of stealing from a retailer, not an individual
No. You can shoplift from a small business or a family owned convenience store, which is essentially stealing from an individual. Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.
Yes, my argument is a little muddled by grouping retail and supply chain theft together. I definitely think supply chain theft is somehow more serious.
But grouping the two together is a result of the recent San Francisco story being mentioned in this thread. People here on HN are usually so critical of the media, but this LA train story and the San Fran shoplifting story were both treated as a symptom of some larger societal problem. And maybe they are! But that is not at all evident from the stories.
In my opinion, both symptoms are the result of a decades long brutal drive for absolute efficiency in both supply chains and retail stores. And of course organized criminals are going to take advantage of the fact that perhaps that "efficiency" went too far in cutting security.
This particular train incident seems to have gotten a lot of press. I don't think it's a new issue, though. Railroad police have existed for as long as the railroad has existed. The way I see it, the railroad police were napping and as a result, Union Pacific's insurance company is going to make a slightly smaller profit this month. If this becomes widespread, Union Pacific can implement mitigations to reduce the number of trains that are robbed or pay higher insurance premiums. If they raise prices to cover the insurance premiums, then customers can use BNSF instead.
I'm not sure what government measures would be more helpful than the free market here. Let's say the state executes everyone who tresspasses on railroad property. This is extremely costly, which takes resources away from other governmental functions. And, we tried this with murder, and the results don't seem that good. Murder rates in areas with the death penalty are not lower in areas that abolished the death penalty. Criminals plan to not get caught, so the consequences aren't a deterrent. My conclusion is that being tough on crime doesn't really change much. A slightly better lock on the containers would probably be the winning solution here.
> There’s a straight line that can be drawn from progressive policies like restorative justice or defunding initiatives to these outcomes.
Californians get all bent out of shape when they aren't welcomed with open arms when they move to more center/right-of-center/right states like Nevada, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, etc. The surrounding states are worried (amongst other things), that the progressive voters will come to their states and wreck them with ultra-progressive policies like they wrecked the state they are leaving.
As a Utahn, can confirm. There are some things that bug me about this state (ridiculous weather sometimes, and religious monoculture), but I love it, and it's my home. The ultimate blow would be to see Californians evacuate their cesspit and redo it all over again in this beautiful state.
This is the Twitter thread from 1/13 that I think kicked off the coverage. In some ways the thread is a lot better than the LA Times article in that the latter has only a few stills and no additional context.
> recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.
This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world. Poor people are neither violent nor thieves. But they can be convinced to become that when inequality is so high.
dunno, but lets assume it did: is it more likely that existing thieves switched to a higher returning crime, or that out of work kindergarten teachers started stripping roof AC units?
Wait, if the gap in wealth inequality has been doing nothing but expanding... why does the crime rate do nothing but fall? With very few, and very brief, exceptions - this is the case.
> We find that the average arrest rate for a cohort entering the labour market during a recession is 10.2% higher than for an otherwise similar cohort entering a more buoyant labour market. [1]
…
> Weinberg and his collaborators Eric D. Gould of Hebrew University and David Mustard of the University of Georgia examined young males with no more than a high school education—the demographic group that commits the most crime—they found that average wages and unemployment rates were directly linked to the incidence of property crimes. [2]
…
> Crime has increased during every recession since the late 1950s, sociologists said. [3]
No, because having death penalty for the most heinous of crimes does not help everyday safety, if the lower level crimes are deliberately left without prosecution - which is exactly what is happening now in California.
With 2.2 million people in jail or prison I think it's a bit ridiculous to argue that the US has lax prosecution as an issue relative to any other countries.
I'll be a bit more specific - there are about 400,000 people currently incarcerated in the US for property crimes. That's higher than the per capita rate of incarceration for any crime in Canada. If the US is lax in prosecuting property crimes, then I don't think any other developed country is hard on crime.
You're confusing several different things, which is excusable for a person not living in the US, but still very misleading.
What is overwhelmingly driving US's incarceration rate is War on Drugs. US has some insane policies - depending on the state, but it's a large contributor to the overall figure - regarding drug-related crimes. Legalization of some drugs, like in California, helps a bit - but given an insane amount of regulation and taxation the legal business is beset by, the illegal route is still very attractive and profitable.
The other side is the proliferation of "woke" prosecutors and local managers, refusing to prosecute crimes like petty theft (in SF, theft below $900 is in essence legal), property destruction, simple assault, etc. That is compounded by extremely permissive policies towards public homelessness and establishing homeless camps on any public property, often even burdening the adjacent private property with tolerating and supporting them. All this creates a very fertile ground for certain type of crime - there's a bunch of people that aren't very connected to social norms at the best of times, but also they know they'd never suffer any consequences for robbing a store or breaking into a car, or punching someone on the street. And there's organized crime, which knows these people can be exploited as foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise of stealing high-value items and reselling them in ad-hoc markets, or online - which is never being prosecuted, because people who are supposed to stop this are ideologically bound to address "societal roots of the crime" - which never happens - instead of going for the criminals.
So yes, you can have both high incarceration rates and extremely lax prosecution for certain crimes - at the same time. Worst of the both worlds.
>What is overwhelmingly driving US's incarceration rate is War on Drugs.
Yeah, that's only a part of it. While a significant problem, drug related crimes make up only 20% of the total incarcerated number. (That 1/5 is still on its own more than the incarcerated per capita rates for all crimes in comparable countries like Canada and the UK, so it's definitely a big deal.)
The numbers for non-violent drug crimes are higher as an overall percentage in the Federal system than they are at the State level.
Again, 400,000 is just property crimes. About 1 in 3 people currently held in jail for property crimes are there for larceny/theft or stolen property.
I don't agree about the 'fertile ground' for crime you're talking about in part because I have never seen any evidence for it. It's in movies, but I haven't really seen it in real life, and I've been looking at the data for a little while now. I am completely willing to be schooled on that if you've got some evidence though.
But I don't need UP to give me evidence - I see it each time I leave home and see ever-growing homeless camps next to my house, and read about robberies in the stores I visited only recently. Over 16 years I've lived in California, I never seen this type of brazenly open criminality around. I wish it were movies, but it's the reality.
Being poor is not an excuse for criminality. These people aren't stealing bread to live or clothing to not freeze. They are stealing valuables ("Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools") because they can, knowing their poor status will cause people like you to express sympathy for them and thus allowing them to get away with it.
They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.
The sad part of this situation is the initial people that broke into the containers on the trains are long gone with their loot, now the marginalized people are getting caught digging through the discarded items that were not valuable enough for ones that broke in and most likely they will be the ones prosecuted for political gains even if they get out on no cash bail.
What needs to happen in these cities is some auditing of the second hand sellers. Pawn shops are required by law to record all items that they purchase but many of the people advertising and selling online are moving larger volumes of product with zero accountability.
The Kijiji and Craigslist type sites have mostly been allowed to operate in a gray area but there is no doubt they are facilitating the buying and selling of stolen items and as such a percentage of their profit is actually subject to seizure through proceeds of crime legislation.
You don’t really believe that rich people stormed in and stole all of the good stuff before the poor people got there, do you?
If you’re stealing things off a train, you’re already in a pretty bad place in life, it’s not like the earlier people were any better off than the later people
There is a lot of people that fit between rich and poor, do I think that organized gangs with cell phones and bolt cutters were the ones that initially broke in? I sure do, do I think they are rich? nope.
Just the amount of discarded items indicates an organized effort on behalf of the thieves and most likely a steal to order game plan.
I have no doubt that the entire scheme was cooked up by some meth head while the rest of us were sleeping. Those guys are always looking for an angle to make a quick buck and yes they are desperate too but that shouldn't be the stick we measure criminality and the punishment required by.
In many states a pawn shop is required to hold any items brought in for a minimum amount of time before they are allow to resell them. This may be a solution to prevent online marketplaces from enabling thieves to ply their wares so easily.
There are waiting periods to buy guns it would be just as easy to require an item for sale to be advertised for a minimum amount of time before the contact details are provided.
To be honest, stealing off trains knowing you likely won't get caught is way more compelling than dealing with irate customers at McDonalds. That doesn't mean it's OK though.
But making billions by exploiting every single one of your workers ( i.e. Amazon, McDonalds ), or irresponsibly shimming off of every transaction ( Bezos ) is cool. Start by making a list of the most egregious crimes, and put this somewhere around 350~450 on your list.
That’s an awfully dismissive broad-brush viewpoint about homeless people, that isn’t supported by studies of — and social support of — homeless people around the world.
Take a map of homeless population density per postal code (where LA would figure in the top 5, if not top 1).
Apply a map of retailer container shipping traffic per postal code (where LA would, again, figure in the top 5, due to the ports and their surrounding infrastructure such as warehouses and garment manufacturing).
What other areas of high homeless density also have as high a density of goods throughout as this particular cluster route in LA?
Is the security and prosecution of crimes in those areas as lax as it is in the LA train yard?
If so, then perhaps the only thing preventing thefts there is that no one’s done the math yet and found it. Or that they’re keeping it to themselves and not earning national attention, because no reporter has done a drone flyover of the carnage yet, or because they’re keeping it to such a low volume that no one has noticed.
I would expect this is the work of a small group of people who are spreading word about the security gap left by too few security guards on the ground, and that Southern Pacific has been trying to maximize profits by not hiring more security guards for their LA interchange and having all the insurance companies involved pay for the lost items. I suspect the nationwide news showing these photos is going to antagonize those insurance companies into spiking the rates of all involved shippers, but it’s unclear to me whether Southern Pacific is vulnerable to — or insulated from — insurance company outrage in this regard.
So maybe it’s a bit soon to pass moral judgment upon homeless people, and instead wonder “what group of opportunists are exploiting a logistics weakness and inviting desperate homeless people to join the free money party?”. Hard to imagine desperate people turning down free money at essentially zero risk, but they weren’t doing this on their own before. Find the ringleaders and deal with them instead.
If you have a genuine choice of steal or starve, even then you won't necessarily steal food. You might steal whatever is easiest to and sell it to buy food.
Well, if you paid them enough to buy wares, made the wares cheaply enough they could be afforded, and structured the entire thing to be relatively painless, equitable, and easy for everyone involved to participate in constructively, there wouldn't be a problem, now would there?
Society subject to stabilizing optimizations formulated by intelligent free agents acting in a way counter to the desires of system architects who decided to scale beyond what they could actually guarantee the security of.
I have some mixed feelings. On one hand I certainly can sympathise with people that feel that they never got a fair chance and they think that the only thing they do is making Jeff Bezos slightly less rich.
Inequality is a big part of it. I know that in the US property rights are considered holy. But many people never even got the chance to go to a good school because they were born by the wrong parents, are working their asses off just to keep their noses above the water, and at the same time are being surrounded by wealthy people that work less than them whose only advantage seems to be that they were lucky enough to be born by the right parents. Some of the unlucky people might think that there are fundamental unfairnesses and that trying to balance those should trump property rights.
Isn't it odd that crime is skyrocketing in places which are governed by people who think in these terms? It is almost as if policies which are based on those ideas lead people into a life of crime where they would otherwise have been given the satisfaction of taking care of themselves. It is not as if it is hard to get a job right now after all?
Note how I did not state the people doing the stealing are poor. If you think they are, please explain the many images of people driving up in fairly new and rather shiny cars to fill them with looted goods.
This looting is not done by "the poor" and they are not stealing "to fill their hungry children's mouths". They are looting because it is free season, they'll either use or sell off whatever loot they get and spend the returns on whatever they fancy.
Better yet, check out "working homeless" (take [1] for example). That things like this happen in the richest, most powerful country in history is beyond belief.
Does that mean 'consistently lowering over the last 10-20 years and now significantly lower than it was 20 years ago?' Because that's a pretty odd definition.
Odder still - while CA homicide rates have increased in 2020-2021, they have done so by a percentage LOWER than the national average. So basically, CA is safer and has lower homicide rates than the national average and your suggestion is to change leadership to be more like the rest of the country?
> Isn't it odd that crime is skyrocketing in places which are governed by people who think in these terms?
"Fun" facts: California was the epicenter of the 20th-century American eugenics movement[0] whose ideas became very famous around 1940, was the place that invented single-family zoning[1] (in Berkeley in 1916) immediately after banning land ownership by non-whites in 1913[2], that once passed a state referendum to explicitly nullify a state-level fair-housing act[3] passed a year prior, that passed the first modern firearms-restriction act on explicitly racial grounds[4], and that pioneered regressive segregation-with-extra-steps property tax laws[5]. It is an extremely racially-segregated place, to this day[6], and always has been despite our leaders' constant pandering to the contrary. There are so many things to love about California, but this isn't one of them and I'd urge you to reconsider what you know about it :/
I think statistically less intelligence correlates to higher violence and poverty. Therefore, those who are poor due to low intelligence are more likely to also be violent.
I agree there is room for improvement, however intelligence appears to largely genetic. Studies put it at 40-80%, I’m of the view that it’s at the high end of that. If the mechanism was better understood then it may be possible to induce higher intelligence even in those who don’t have the genetic predisposition.
40% is not the median of the studies which appear to have it at 70%. I’m of the view that it’s 80%+. I think there are some improvements that can be made to the studies but I have not had a good enough reason to redo their math.
“Japan has some of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, according to a UNICEF report. It ranked Japan 34th out of 41 industrialised countries. According to Japan's Health Ministry statistics, as of May 2017, 16% of Japanese children live below the poverty line.”
You're conflating two issues: poverty and inequality.
US is one of the richest countries, has less poor people than other rich countries, the "poor" in the US are richer than the "poor" in e.g. UK or Italy, and "average" (mean and median) incomes in UK or Italy would be considered "poor" in the US.
So, inequality is irrelevant, only absolute poverty is relevant.
EDIT: NOTE: the graph in the link above is disposable income (a.k.a. above cost of living)
Personally, I don't think that poverty is the issue here. People aren't looting Apple stores because they're poor. But the lack of social safety net (income, health, mental health) for the poorest probably doesn't help.
Impoverished people in richer countries have, to a limited extent, some advantage from increased capital investment in their vicinity (e.g. in theory, on average, better local infrastructure than in absolutely poorer countries). They are still crushed by living expenses.
A person doesn’t steal 10 iPhones to use them personally.
If you steal 10 iPhones you might end up with thousands of dollars and that keeps the lights on and feeds you for awhile. If you steal a loaf of bread and a pack of lunch meat you eat for a week.
It takes a very specially cultivated state of mental confusion to genuinely believe people driving in in multiple high-end cars, smash-and-grab robbing a jewelry store and departing in the same cars are doing it because they're so poor they can't find any alternative to feed themselves. And this state of mental confusion seems to be carefully cultivated among Californians.
> US is one of the richest countries, has less poor people than other rich countries, the "poor" in the US are richer than the "poor" in e.g. UK or Italy,
Certain structural factors matter a lot:
How affordable is it to get decent healthcare?
How affordable is it to get decent food?
Is drug use criminalized?
Is there a high rate of violent crime?
Do people own their own homes?
Are there informal social relations that act as social safety nets?
A relatively poor country that nevertheless answers those questions correctly will likely provide a better life even to its poor.
Of course an conservative think tank will say that! That graph does show why you should move to the US to earn big bucks, it says nothing about being poor in those countries. It is a complex subject. Just going aroudn on gapminders site about how much people spend around the world it's easy to understand how complex it is.
The numbers on the US states I've seen puts them in the lower brackets of the EU countries if you count precentage of the population that are poor, not bad by any means but not good. These numbers are meaningless though, especially on the subject discussed here.
One needs only google "income inequality chart usa" and look at images to see that the present trends are not going to result in anything good in the long run. What we'll end up with is something like wealthy parts of mexico where the richest 1-2% live in fortified enclaves protected by private armed security, and the poor are desperately poor. Not unlike the rich burbclaves predicted in Snow Crash, actually.
One need only look at a smattering of poor villages around the world to see that this is indeed true. When they are as well off as their neighbors, people rarely complain, or steal to get ahead. One problem is that the internet has given everyone extremely wealthy neighbors.
This has nothing to do with "inequality". The existence of Elon Musk does not make people rob the trains. The refusal of the law enforcement - openly and clearly proclaimed - to actually enforce the law does. If it has been publicly said that theft won't be prosecuted and in general property crime is not a true crime ("it's all ensured!") then why not do it? There's literally not a single reason not to do it. So people are starting to do it.
> This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world.
I find this statement to be misleading. If one person in the entire country lived in extreme poverty than there would be some population that is among “some of the poorest populations in the world.”
However, while the US does have issues which should not be ignored, the US cannot be compared to countries where much of the population lives in extreme poverty and other human rights issues. This comparison hurts the real cause that other countries desperately need help and that entire populations do truly live in extreme poverty.
The United Nations Development Programme puts out the Human Development report which has a great website and iPhone / Android app to access the data. A good indicator is the percentage of the population living below the income poverty line. Explore this site, it’s great. Here is a link to one stat.
Governments that aren't willing to use force to defend property inevitably wind up discovering that they have become ex-governments. Even Lenin had to dial it back to stave off the famines.
This really has almost nothing to do with governments. The Union Pacific has mountains of specific laws that give it sweeping police powers. They could stop this instantly.
I genuinely feel like I've been scammed. All your life, you hear "the government keeps you safe", "the government builds the roads", etc etc.
The roads are so bad I had to replace my bent wheels from the potholes. The government can't be bothered to stop, investigate, or prosecute rampant crime. My tap water isn't even safe to drink. And I get absolutely robbed at tax time anyway.
Feels like the country is failing to solve any real issues and is coming apart at the seams. You can blame many people, events and factors. But it's hard to ignore it anymore. Where the average person was 25 years ago and where they are now are not even comparable.
A lot of the lawlessness we are seeing is a direct result of us just standing idly by last summer when Manhattan was ransacked and cities had properties burned all over with windows knocked out everywhere. I even think (controversial opinion) that that lawlessness was a "green light" for what happened on January 6th. Why wouldn't you think if you see DC helicopter video of several blocks aflame in DC that you could storm the Capitol? Seems fairly rational to me (though wrong.) I don't think the "broken window theory" is 100% right, but there is certainly something to it. Instead of letting up on drug prosections, we've let some actual criminals go free, something I simply don't understand. Minor property descrtuction and theft can snowball.
I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior; only marching. Commercial theft seems to have been, overwhelmingly, performed by opportunists and not the protesters themselves, and only one actual property fire was recorded[1].
This is in direct contrast to the efficient cause of the riots during January 6th, which was political and not opportunistic in nature. Attempting to discharge the responsibility of those involved in the latter by appealing to the former is distasteful, to say the least.
To me the comparison is very accurate. On both occasions there were mostly peaceful protests and some opportunist. The fact that you call one a protest and another a riot is quite telling of your bias.
The key observation is that the NY protests had two discrete groups: protestors, and opportunists.
There was no such distinction during J6: the opportunists who did storm the Capitol and menace our legislative branch started as protestors, and promoted themselves to riotous behavior when the opportunity presented itself.
I am not denying that stores were looted, or excusing looting.
Read the comment carefully: the distinction is between protesters and opportunists, with the latter not being protestors. There is no evidence that protestors individually or collectively engaged in looting.
Are you going to make the same distinction for all the peaceful protesters on January 6th who never entered the Capitol? Because if not I don't really see a difference.
Actually, I do make that distinction, and I think most people do as well. I'm not particularly enthused about the initial protest, but I would not characterize the protestors who did not enter the Capitol (and did not encourage others to do so) as "rioters."
I haven’t heard of any investigation, much less charges leveled, of people who protested but did not enter the Capitol.
People who might know of / ultimately be charged with incitement have been subpoenaed, but again, I don’t know of any charges. Anyone pressing such charges will have to show a clear line between first amendment speech and not, so they are going to be careful not to waste their time.
I and all my personal friends make that distinction about both sets of events. Regardless - reading a thoughtful, honest post that you happen to disagree with on some ideological level, and projecting your internal image of a hypocritical political enemy onto them by extrapolating to things they didn't say, is one of the most common forms of conversation poison.
> projecting your internal image of a hypocritical political enemy onto them by extrapolating to things they didn't say, is one of the most common forms of conversation poison.
> I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior;
If that isn’t meant to imply there wasn’t any looting, then why did you add it?
The rest of what you said is just about definitions and is irrelevant to the facts of what happened.
“There is no evidence that protesters engaged in looting”
That’s because you use a different name for the people who did. You have no way to be certain nobody who looted wasn’t also there to protest, so the labelling doesn’t mean anything.
In aggregate the protests unquestionably led to looting that wouldn’t otherwise have happened. The fact that not all protesters were looters is irrelevant. The looting was part of the protesting, even if not all protesters supported it.
> If that isn’t meant to imply there wasn’t any looting, then why did you add it?
Because there's a falsehood in the original post: that protestors were somehow responsible for the riotous behavior. The original post then goes on to use that falsehood to justify a different instance of riotous behavior, except that the specifics are inverted: the protestors and rioters during J6 were in the same crowd.
The labeling means a lot in terms of the legitimacy and legacy of the single largest American civil rights protests in the last 50 years. I'm proud of the ways that hundreds of thousands of New Yorks peacefully and righteously comported themselves during the protests, and I do not want their legacy unduly influenced by opportunists. We should judge them not by others' actions.
Right - so you are trying to use language to separate the actions of the protesters from the actions of the looting.
I don’t think it’s that simple. The riots only happened because of the protests. The protests interfered with the police response, and the protesters didn’t stop the looting themselves.
That doesn’t make the protesters into looters, but it does mean that the looting was a side effect of the protests and the protesters bear some responsibility for that.
The protesters actions had consequences, one of which was to enable looting and the destruction of people’s livelihoods.
I’m fine if you want to say that the cost was worth it to make this political statement, but I think it’s ludicrous to pretend that the looting would have happened without the protesters.
> That doesn’t make the protesters into looters, but it does mean that the looting was a side effect of the protests and the protesters bear some responsibility for that.
This is a chilling and dangerous responsibility to burden protestors with: are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in? They did, after all, interfere with the police response and provide moral support for the single greatest outrage against our government in nearly two centuries.
Our cultural and legal standards of free speech enshrine protest, and ensure that protestors are not vilified for actions that are not theirs. I do not think we should undermine that.
> are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in?
Didn't the government already decide the answer to this is "yes", though, by filing criminal charges against people just for being there?
> This is a chilling and dangerous responsibility to burden protestors with:
No it’s not. It’s simply a reality. The way the chose to protest facilitated the looting. When the looting started they could have ended the protest and summoned the police.
You seem to be conflating legal liability with responsibility. I’m not saying they should be prosecuted.
I’m saying that it’s just a mental fantasy to pretend they don’t bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
> are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in?
Sure - once it became a riot, if people stuck around and got in the way of the police, they certainly bear responsibility.
> They did, after all, interfere with the police response and
Yes, and they are responsible for thst.
> provide moral support for the single greatest outrage against our government in nearly two centuries.
Moral support is a different matter.
> Our cultural and legal standards of free speech enshrine protest, and ensure that protestors are not vilified for actions that are not theirs.
Preventing police from doing the job of protecting business from being looted is their action.
> I do not think we should undermine that.
Blocking police from doing their jobs is not speech.
Nobody is talking about limiting free speech or protests. That’s a red-herring.
Well I can assure you the protesters in Minneapolis were violent, destructive, and I personally saw hundreds of protesters looting stores, breaking ATMs, smashing windows etc. etc. Hell, the protesters even burned down the police precinct.
The riots in Minneapolis were worse by every metric than Jan 6. And in some cases orders of magnitude (cost of damage, for one). And I'll tell you what else - a lot more people are going to jail for the Jan 6 riots than the Minneapolis ones.
Not that there is a reason to compare the two, but a mob of people going after the elected leaders of a democratic country, especially during election procedures, has far more implications and ramifications on a country than looting.
I would have said the same thing if non Trumpers stormed the building containing a country’s political leaders performing election procedures to certify the country’s new leaders.
At least 85 people have been charged with carrying or using a weapon during the riot[1]. It seems like a large number were knives and other blades which, while not as eye-popping as carrying a rifle into the Capitol, are just as illegal.
Last week, 11 people were indicted under the seditious conspiracy statute 18 USC §2384--basically, by force attempt to overthrow the government. Part of the allegations ([1] is the full indictment) include that they amassed a weapons cache in Arlington, just across the Potomac River from DC, to be ready for use when the time came for it.
Oh, and this was the less extreme of the anti-Obama militias.
I can't speak for Minneapolis, because I don't live there. But I'm actively invested, as a New Yorker, in dispelling myths about what it was like here.
As for whether things were "worse": I consider the political and cultural damage of storming our nation's Capitol worse than just about anything you can put a bill of damage on. You can't put that kind of cultural trespass back in the box the way you can with "ordinary" protests and riots.
"Manhattan was ransacked" is total hyperbole and absurd. The whole island of Manhattan was ransacked? Of what? When, exactly? You know Manhattan is a really big place, right? Have you been there?
As to the "letting up on drug prosecutions", in the Reagan-esque war on drugs, the Drugs won that war a long time ago. Maybe it's time to start treating serious drug addiction (meth, coke, heroin, etc) as a mental health crisis instead. Turns out that it actually costs a lot of money each year to keep a person incarcerated, and when they get turned loose back into society without addressing the underlying metal health and addiction issues, it just repeats in a loop.
There was effectively no police response for the first few days and each night looting got worse. Eventually the police mobilized and normalized the situation
I lived there at the time, it was very widespread and pretty much universal across mid-lower manhattan.
Anyway, I saved you the trouble:
"An estimated 450 businesses across New York City were vandalized and in some cases looted in late May and early June, according to the city's Department of Small Business Services."
Don't need the stats to back it up if you were there to see it though.
What's the acceptable threshold for society as far as looting goes? In my eyes, even one business warrants a firm police response. 450 is an admission of losing sovereignty.
Well, how are you computing it? Majority of looting was in retail businesses in lower Manhattan.
If you're computing overall number of businesses in New York then you're just being disingenuous. So you're counting retail stores in Staten island too? Are you including non retail businesses?
How about watch literally any video of the protests in Manhattan to see for yourself?
To say there wasn't widespread looting in Manhattan is just wrong, and easily disproven by the evidence.
450 businesses is about 1.4% of NYC's retail businesses. According to the state, "In 2019, New York City’s retail sector comprised 32,600 businesses" [0]. That's enough to be noticable, but I wouldn't describe it as a huge percentage. Per my understanding, most of the thefts occured at high-end retail in Lower Manhattan. Is that what you saw?
Vast majority was in lower Manhattan. Which represents about 5% or less of NYC landmass. So you can multiply 1.4% by 10-20 to get a more accurate number
You're not very knowledgeable about the geography of New York, are you?
Do you know what the landmass of lower Manhattan relative to overall New York City is?
Do you understand what a non uniform distribution is? Clearly nobody responding is familiar with basic math.
I'll spell it out for you guys. Landmass of lower Manhattan = very small vs overall New York. Using total retail stores in New York is highly misleading for that reason alone.
I could also say 450 is only .000001% of stores in the USA, so there's no problem! Same logic you're using, by the way
You're not very knowledgeable about the geography of New York either, are you?
Like your 450 number is from all 5 boroughs, did you not realize that New York City refers to all 5 boroughs and not just like Midtown or something?
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I don't know why you're trying so hard to mislead people. Do you just live in Soho and want to act like Soho is lower Manhattan? Or more specifically, like the 4 blocks of Broadway in Soho that got hit hardest?
I already commented this but those protests did not do widespread damage to Manhattan, there were very centralized pockets of damage.
In fact, Manhattan probably had the most damage by dollars because of Soho luxury stores, but by actual damage to individual businesses the outer boroughs were infinitely worse off, and even that was highly centralized...
No, I'm the one who's not misleading people. Looting was 90% concentrated in lower Manhattan.
If you were there, or watch any news report from the time, it's extremely obvious and supported by the evidence.
All I said is that lower Manhattan had widespread looting, which is true.
Everybody here throwing out total retail or even total businesses in NYC to discredit what I'm saying are the ones being misleading. Everything I've said is backed up by facts.
Say 450 is an accurate number. Well 90% can reasonably be assumed to be lower Manhattan, and we know lower Manhattan is less than 5% of the landmass of NYC.
So no, you're the one being misleading. Pretty crazy all these people trying to gaslight as if it didn't happen, when I lived there and walked down the streets and saw it myself.
It's no surprise an ex cop just won as mayor of NYC, when you have people with this attitude supporting retail theft/looting at all costs. New Yorkers got tired of it, sorry.
Instead of the hand waving insistence that 450 is probably concentrated in Manhattan, why not just post a source that actually tells us how many stores in lower manhattan were looted?
> All I said is that lower Manhattan had widespread looting, which is true.
It's not true. The only people who would say this are faux-New Yorkers who use Lower Manhattan as a term when they mean 5th avenue in Soho and Broadway in Flatiron District (aka the bougie retail areas of Lower Manhattan that account for like 1% of the landmass).
As someone who lives next to Barclays where 5000 people gathered and works in Midtown, you're just pushing a false narrative that oversells what happened to outsiders.
I walked those same streets, I live in NYC too, and I'm not falling for it.
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What you're doing is exactly what you're accusing others of doing. Confusing basic facts to push a narrative.
The looting sucked, yes businesses got hurt, but saying "Manhattan was ransacked" is an insult to what a place that's been ransacked looks like.
That's the point.
...also:
> It's no surprise an ex cop just won as mayor of NYC, when you have people with this attitude supporting retail theft/looting at all costs. New Yorkers got tired of it, sorry.
The guy who didn't know NYC includes the outer boroughs is trying to speak for New Yorkers. Maybe next you'll tell us about grabbing your daily baconeggandcheese from ock at Gregory's Coffee. God help us all.
I'm more than familiar with the boroughs of New York City.
The 450 "vandalized and in some cases looted" statistic you provided was for New York City as a whole. If you would like to confine your focus to Lower Manhattan, the onus is on you to find the relevant statistic for Lower Manhattan, because that 450 includes vandalism from all over the city (to repeat your own quote with appropriate emphasis, "An estimated 450 businesses across New York City were vandalized and in some cases looted in late May and early June, according to the city's Department of Small Business Services.")
To really get a true picture of things, we'd also need to know what the background level of vandalism for business in a more-than-a-month time window is - because I assure you, it is not zero.
> I could also say 450 is only .000001% of stores in the USA, so there's no problem! Same logic you're using, by the way
No, the logic I'm using is that if .000001% of stores in the USA were "vandalized and in some cases looted", then the statement "Huge percentage of stores were vandalized and had their goods stolen" made about the USA would be laughably hyperbolic and incorrect simply on the cold facts.
Given the massive and disproportionate police response in DC to the protests over the summer, I find it extremely puzzling how you could conclude anyone would see that very large response as a green light for a protest, let alone storming the Capitol.
I could keep going, but all of this and you think... protests caused this?
You saying "Manhattan was ransacked" is hilarious, I live in Brooklyn, next stop after Barclay Center, where global news networks were painting a picture of a warzone using an overturned car...
Almost every person who marched at Barclay went past my apartment and you know what the damage was? The police removed the trash cans on my street in anticipation, so for a good two weeks afterwards there was trash everywhere as people just dumped it in the street instead.
Oh yeah, and some businesses took way too long removing their plywood defenses despite 0 signs they were actually tested.
Actually one cool story literally steps from that burning car was those same protestors stopping would-be rioters from breaking into stores...
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Seriously, we need to drop this narrative that the iron fist of the law is what would stop this.
So many people trying to run interference by pointing the finger at "defund the police" chants... is the only thing stopping you from stealing from a train the idea the police might catch you?
Criminals are criminals, they don't respect the rule of law so you're not going to get them by sprinkling more agents of the law to crack down on people.
(Note the author here, Gary Kleck, this is someone who's practically a patron saint of tough-on-crime proponents after his work on DGU. And even his study can't seriously back the claim.)
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Now you can try jailing all the criminals of course, and just keep growing your jails until you've exhausted the sources of crime...
But even with the harshest prosecutors, eventually these people need to leave. If our prisons were about reform it'd be one thing, but crime is rampant is our prison system.
So all you're doing is sticking criminals in an incubator while screwing over the communities they're from and setting the next generation of criminals in motion...
Linking all of this to the War On Drugs losing the wind in it's sails is a Reaganesque leap. We've had broken windows policy, all it's done is rope a lot of black and hispanic people into the system after manufacturing crimes through the War On Drugs.
Manhattan was not "ransacked" last summer. You clearly don't live in one of these American cities. The overwhelming majority of the protests were peaceful [1].
Your claim that an attempted coup was somehow spurned by protests relating to the extrajudicial killing of black men is a rather bold one to make with absolutely no supplied evidence. I suppose finding cause in the drastic uptick of far-right violence [2] you have conveniently omitted, which would serve as a much better basis for the "broken window theory", is too easy of a conclusion to make. As is finding cause in the president quite literally inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on the basis of false claims of election fraud. No, it's those protesters!
You’d think that all the empty packages on the ground would be a clue that there is package theft going on and that they should do something about it. Like avoid stopping in those areas, organize security, something. USPS recently lost my package in transit through LA, given the timing it seems likely it was stolen in one of these raids.
That may be illegal due to various anti-discrimination laws:
> But Free and other riders were baffled over proposed legislation that would lower mandatory penalties for taxi drivers who refuse to pick up certain passengers, or turn down requests to take passengers to a specific destination.
I figured cargo was separate to passenger. I assume they have their reasons to stop, like making way for traffic, or waiting for more cargo. Just wish they’d prioritize alternative solutions. At this stage I’m going to have to send packages by air instead. A little harder to hijack.
Never taken cabs in New York, but that seems insane. How can cabbies be legally compelled to take fares e.g. somewhere they fear for their own safety, or on a route that will lose them money?
There are lots of laws like that. Yesterday, I went to a pizza restaurant. It was myself and another person waiting in the restaurant. A person walks in with a large pitbull.
Immediately the other person ran to the opposite corner and asked the person with the dog to wait outside the restaurant because they had been a victim of a pitbull attack. And, of course, the person with the dog pulled the service dog card.
At this point, the business owner can do nothing. Once someone says a dog is a service dog, no one can ask them to leave until after the dog causes damage, per the ADA.
The person in the restaurant with the dog immediately claimed they forgot the vest that says their dog is a service animal. This tells me the dog was definitely not a service animal, because anyone who actually needs one knows that no proof is required.
Anyway, my point is the laws in the US right now let any dog owner walk around with impunity and impose dogs on people who do not want to be around dogs. Which means I have to modify my behavior with my toddlers and leave places where any random person can bring a Rottweiler or pitbull.
Edit: In the dog situation, you can even go further and see that NY state just forced owners of less dangerous and aggressive breeds to subsidize owners of more dangerous and aggressive breeds. Why would the government need to get involved in subsidizing risks of various dog breeds?
I don't think the problem is with service animal laws, which I think are genuinely well-intentioned, but with the type of people who would consider owning a potentially dangerous dog in the first place.
Some animals really aren't suitable as pets for the vast majority of owners - which might be a more fruitful discussion than objecting to service animals too quickly.
I did not write that I object to service animals. There is clearly no enforcement of service animal laws, which are lacking, and no recourse for anyone harmed by them, which is what I was trying to point out.
There are already laws that ban dogs from restaurants and grocery stores. But there is a higher law that says if you say the words service dog, then no one can say anything to you and you do not have to prove anything, rendering the laws banning dogs from restaurants and grocery stores useless.
It might be a conversation for another time, but dog bite cases are a staple of basic tort claims. Plenty of recourse - an owner is responsible for any reasonably foreseeable harm caused by their animal.
Doesn't stop certain obnoxious owners from taking their animals where they really ought not, etc.
Any dog of substantial size can be “a dangerous dog”. I have owned two American Bulldogs and 1 “pit bull” and they were all well-trained and probably overly friendly. My cat has done more damage to me and to the dogs. The only dog that isn't potentially "potentially dangerous" are probably ones like the small breeds like chihuahuas and Pekingese. It really is 90% training/how-they're-raised and 10% genetics. Don't get a dog unless you can make him/her a part of your pack/family. Cats are much better if you just want a pet to chill with.
> Some animals really aren't suitable as pets for the vast majority of owners - which might be a more fruitful discussion than objecting to service animals too quickly.
The problem isn't service dogs, but fraudulent service dogs claims. And often health departments hold business owners liable for these fake claims (fine the owners because they should have known that the pit bull wasn't a service dog because they lacked a harness), which is doubly ridiculous if you aren't allowed to challenge someone's service dog claim (which actually isn't true, I think, there isn't a law on the book that businesses cannot verify service dogs, its just culture that pushes them to trust).
> Q7. What questions can a covered entity's employees ask to determine if a dog is a service animal?
>A. In situations where it is not obvious that the dog is a service animal, staff may ask only two specific questions: (1) is the dog a service animal required because of a disability? and (2) what work or task has the dog been trained to perform? Staff are not allowed to request any documentation for the dog, require that the dog demonstrate its task, or inquire about the nature of the person's disability.
> Q8. Do service animals have to wear a vest or patch or special harness identifying them as service animals?
>A. No. The ADA does not require service animals to wear a vest, ID tag, or specific harness.
Among other reasons, people's fear for their safety may be driven by reasons that aren't rational. For example, someone who is afraid to drive into neighborhoods that have a high percentage of black residents even when the neighborhood isn't particularly dangerous.
Because those conditions are attached to operating a permitted cab in New York. The permits have changed hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years, they aren't agreeing to the terms by accident.
There is effectively no difference between the state placing those conditions on all taxis, or forbidding all taxis except those that have a medallion, to which those conditions are attached.
If the medallions are changing hands for more than $0 we can infer that most buyers are opting into the conditions attached to the medallion. They may not be happy with all of them, but they have had an opportunity to consider them.
I think they are forced to transit these areas. Only so many rail lines that exist and they have to slow down due to practicalities of congestion at freight and trainyards which the low speed makes them vulnerable to being boarded.
Especially given that its the port of LA we are talking about that these trains are traveling to and from for the most part. Most goods from Asia in this continent have come through that port.
Until they are convicted, sure - the problem with cash bail is of course that it's a 3:1 ratio of unconvicted to convicted people in jail at any given time and it massively disproportionately affects the poor. The average person unable to make bail has a salary of around 14k; the average bail is set at $10,000.
You're a retail worker making 26k a year. You're arrested, and can't come up with $1,000 to get a bond, so you stay in jail for a couple of weeks, lose your job and get evicted. Now the prosecutor comes to you with a choice: take a plea deal and get out now with time served or go to court - the court date is of course in a month and you'll have to stay in jail over that period.
That's not how it works. They're going to have bail and will probably pay it no matter what. People shouldn't be imprisoned until their trial outside exceptional circumstances. Stealing packages doesn't qualify.
Dangerous people should be jailed and flight risks should be jailed. Everything else is just a bail bond racket and power play by prosecutors. If the "charged" commits another crime or breaks the limits of his "freedom" they should go right back to the slammer until their court date.
Thanks, I guess the wheels are turning. My comment was facetious, clearly they know, I just wish the people involved given the evidence would be able to act faster and more decisively.
This stuff is a temporary problem caused by the backlog of shipping containers, giving an opportunity for some the less fortunate in L.A. to take advantage of the stopped trains. As soon as things are moving more smoothly again, the issue will go away.
This isn't indicative of society's collapse, nor of the anti-work masses rising up, nor even of a catastrophic government failure. It does point out once again that California has an untenable disparity of wealth and we need to continue to work on fixing that problem.
> Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California’s role as a hub for the movement of goods.
> Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County
Both e-commerce and LA’s status as a hub are established. So why the increase now? I didn’t see a mention of economic realities driving crime, aside from the increased presence of homeless camps, such as skyrocketing costs of everything.
Means: your new home in California being a tent or car by the railway tracks
Motive: money.
Opportunity: unguarded rails and bottlenecked supply chain
America’s problems, especially the tragic amount of homelessness in CA, are becoming a lot harder to hide.
I’m implying that people don’t resort to theft when they can afford food, housing, medical care, and that the solution is probably a lot more complex than just throwing money at one symptom of deeper problems.
"SCOTT: Yeah. Well, you know, it's not just an issue of money; it's also about spending it well. I've talked to many homeless advocates who have been in this world for decades who argue that city officials misspending, even wasting, resources that they do have over the years is a big part of what has gotten LA to this point, with more than 40,000 people homeless on its streets."
at $25'000 per capita we should be seeing some improvements, but it's hard to know how much of that has disappeared to 'administration fees'. Also the article talks about how the main push for this was creation of affordable housing, that has a long lead time and with material shortages I would be surprised to find any new units built last year.
Louis Rossman has a lot of videos on this in New York, essentially 50,000$ a year for tiny little slumlord hovels run by people with connections. More money isn't what's needed, it's for people who actually care to be spending it instead of politicians.
Original idea: fire all the administrators and use the money they were paid for year after year to tackle a problem they did not resolve to said homeless, just the same way: 1 cheque every 2 weeks :)
$1B doesn't sound like a very large number. Google says there's 63,706 homeless.
If LA for example is needing to build new low income housing for even a small part of that 63k number, well with spiking construction and land costs, that's going to be well more than $1B
That's more than 15k per person per year. When your homelessness program is spending close to what a basic income for said people would cost without making a dent, you start wondering if your institutions are broken.
This would be less per month than the median rent in LA.
If one disbursed all of it it would probably not really be enough for housing, let alone the other costs of living, and there'd be $0 for any sort of supportive programs whatsoever.
Organized crime has been taking advantage of an opportunity created by rising e commerce and a DA office that has been unwilling to prosecute a lot of petty crimes:
"In a letter to Dist. Atty. George Gascón, Union Pacific’s Guerrero estimated that more than 100 people have been arrested but they “boast to our officers that charges will be pled down.” "
Is this happening in any Red States? I've not heard of these kinds of issues in Texas or Florida etc. Is it just in NY and California and some other Blue states?
Not sure how much you can conclude based on one city. You’d need per capita package loss data on dozens of cities while also accounting for package volume per city.
It’s 90% Chicago & LA 90% of the time, historically.
There are two ports where consumer products enter the United States from the ocean/Asia: LA, and to a much lesser degree Seattle. That’s it.
Both essentially lead directly to Chicago from the west coast, with very little inbetween.
Eg Texas freight lines are for transporting things like animal feed and crushed gravel to export terminals with little in the way of hubs. Florida isn’t significant and its port capacity is minuscule, repeat for most of the country.
Massive (unguarded) consumer products hub x population, Chicago is the only other qualifier, where rail theft is unsurprisingly also a constant issue.
Easy to figure out what's going on here. Online shopping has increased dramatically, but the amount of security around packages hasn't increased proportionally. Perhaps packages are harder to secure than retail stores, so we need a more than proportional increase.
This is one of those flashy problems that criminals come up with and then gets solved. Find an exploit, patch the exploit. I find it humorous because it give Republicans like Megan McCain to bloviate about what a shit hole California is. I'm writing from there now. Everything is fine.
Another reason that makes California look like not a great place to live from the sky high homelessness (i experienced that first hand WoW and in 2013) to this to the landslides, earthquakes, raging annual destructive forest fires, sky high cost of real estate... am i missing something (oh Google blatantly stealing from Sonos to MIT students)... im sure there's more.
I guess the good is the nice weather and beaches... what am i missing in terms of good?
This is a great case study in how news media manufactures hysteria over commonplace occurrences. A reporter "keeps hearing of train burglaries on the scanner" and goes to take pictures, then tweets them. What did the location look like before? We don't know. Are the reports on the scanner more common? Also not discussed.
The tweets prompt reporters to start calling the usual suspects: The company experiencing losses gives one misleading comparison to locked-down 2020 and an absolute figure for losses rather than a relative comparison over time. That makes sense, because they want government and cops to step in so they don't have to cover it. Next up the reporters call LAPD, who have a political motive to imply that the problem is worse than ever, to justify increased jurisdiction and funding.
And that's… pretty much where it ends. Nobody bothers to look back to 2019 or before; nobody bothers to see whether a higher percentage of rail cars are looted, or whether there are now more rail cars and online shopping in total; nobody bothers to analyze whether the increased wait times or any other factor are in play. I would love to actually understand this issue, but the article is designed to shock me with photos of debris and make me feel as if anarchy has descended upon the streets of Los Angeles, a fear-based reaction that apparently many HN commenters are susceptible to. It's dismaying and ultimately unsatisfying to read when the only goal is to drive clicks and engagement.
Good reporting involves investigation, not assuming that the first time you’re seeing something is the first time anyone is seeing it. If you’ve gone anywhere near railroad tracks in industrial parts of Los Angeles in the past decade, you’ve seen things that are hard to believe are happening, but have indeed been commonplace for years. I’m not asserting this mess is commonplace or isn’t, but it would be great if the reporter bothered to investigate whether it was, so that readers have context.
>Good reporting involves investigation, not assuming that the first time you’re seeing something is the first time anyone is seeing it.
What gave you the impression otherwise? Three paragraphs in, there's a person being interviewed who claims "he comes to the tracks regularly". That definitely suggest they know they're not the first people seeing it.
>If you’ve gone anywhere near railroad tracks in industrial parts of Los Angeles in the past decade, you’ve seen things that are hard to believe are happening, but have indeed been commonplace for years.
Like what?
>I’m not asserting this mess is commonplace or isn’t, but it would be great if the reporter bothered to investigate whether it was, so that readers have context.
The article mentions: "Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County.". An increase of 160% suggests that it was not "commonplace for years".
355 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] thread* the rich buy security guards and security mechanisms.
* the middle class try their best to do the same on a budget.
* the poor have no protection.
Then a politician comes along and says, "Let's socialize the cost of security so that everyone is protected, not just the 1%"
And then you get police again.
“According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime was up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019.”
This is a trustworthy source of information?
The numbers are political fiction.
[0] https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/are-buc...
Though I'm not sure how that calculation would work when we're talking about intermodal container theft, since modern intermodal "well cars" can consist of one, three, or even five permanently-coupled platforms holding two stacked containers each: https://www.gatx.com/wps/wcm/connect/GATX/GATX_SITE/Home/Rai...
When you know the data is bullshit and lies you say so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970
Twitter thread with video of package litter and opened containers on rail cars.
LA Times does add significant detail and context to the story, and mentions John Schreiber's Twitter posts.
It’s remarkable to me that he didn’t have any awareness of this issue. But then again, who has jurisdiction over the railways?
Still, it has to be a multi-agency effort, given that UP’s jurisdiction is only like 50 ft wide.
But from the above quotes from the sheriff, doesn’t it also seem like that dept is asleep at the wheel?
Perhaps we read into this what we already want to read into this. I do agree that our current criminal reform looks to have swung too far in one direction. But I also think the sheriff is a dick, and the dept is practically a gang enterprise.
Anecdotally, in the past few months I've had five or six packages just never show up from Amazon whereas in all the years prior that happened so rarely I don't recall any such thing.
1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg
John Schreiber's original Twitter thread shows plenty of cross-track, close-in, and overhead shots from both bridges and drones all lacking telephoto compression and revealing abundant strewn packaging:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html
On the other hand, if your neighbor makes $500, while you make $450 regardless of when you wake up, you'll be extremely irritated by the unfairness. And would not notice that your employer makes $750 off each of you, while you are busy quarreling about who's more privileged.
Most of the jobs in the cities are just that - standard work routine, standard pay, little room for decisions, little growth, little personal responsibility, little chance becoming financially independent. Brought to you by low interest rates fueling endless acquisitions and consolidation of bargaining power in fewer and fewer hands.
2008 was the end of the previous economic cycle where the big players got too greedy and too dumb, made stupid decisions with big money, and were destined to crash and burn, allowing the new wave of smaller companies to take their place. But the government decided that too much was at stake, and just bailed them out.
Around 2012 people started noticing that something is wrong, which took the rather silly form of Occupy Wall Street. The corporate response to it was shifting of the focus to social justice and equity - term that was supposed to take into account historical inequalities, but is so loose and unquantifiable, that every person would see it slightly differently, creating endless opportunity for division.
So now we have an entire generation that does not aspire wealth through personal responsibility and hard work, but rather blames someone else on having an unfair advantage and is dreaming of taking it away. That's how 3rd-world countries and dictatorships function. People are busy fighting over the leftovers from the feast left by the ruling class, and feel accomplished when they manage to steal the extra bag of potatoes their neighbor was hiding under the stairs.
This is what growth optimized capitalism looks like.
This isn't an argument against UBI or expanding housing per se, it's an argument against the people saying property laws should not be enforced because the criminals are poor.
UBI won't solve this problem. It will skyrocket the rent/food prices due to supply/demand mechanics and further entrench stockholders/real estate owners vs. the salary/rent class. And even if you somehow solve that (somehow get free food/housing for everyone), you will still end up with plenty of depressed people with plenty of free time and a strong belief that someone else is hiding a patch of greener grass under their carpet.
On the other hand, if you modify the tax rules to make corporations and large chains less viable than small businesses (i.e. forcing most of the population to work for themselves and trade with their peers, rather than following the corporate manual), people will suddenly start respecting each other more and will pressure the victim mentality folks to sober up and join the ranks.
But that's not going to happen, because all 3 branches of power + the media are controlled by the shareholder class, that will swiftly redirect any dangerous leanings to the direction bringing them further profit (remember how BLM conveniently diverted the "protestor type" from Occupy Wall Street?). So don't be surprised if having a mailing address will soon count as a privilege and your workplace will offer mandatory trainings asking you to denounce it in the name of all good against all evil.
Which isn't the case for anyone in this labor shortage. There's plenty of employers willing to pay more than double that who still can't find unskilled workers.
If everyone is replaceable and the salary only covers recurring expenses, people go nuts and start looking elsewhere. A lot of the visible homeless lifestyle is a (petty) power to inconvenience others. A lot of the theft is about the power over someone else to get what was intended for them.
Opening your own bakery and turning people into recurring customers through clever recipes scratches the same itch, but makes the society a much more pleasant place to live. Except, given the interest rates, centralized suppliers and property prices, good fucking luck with that.
I did not realize that. It makes it even more of a sad situation.
Half-way through the article we get the point. This is just another example of how our retail supply lines are optimized at every turn to shovel maximum crap through the pipe... be it minimally-staffed stores or unsecured trains. It's all about cash flow, baby!
Let the market fix the problem.
If the market reacts by making it harder to steal, then presumably this will increase the cost of goods which will, presumably, increase the value of stealing them. The market doesn't have a lot of options that I can see.
This is not an issue for which society/government should pay the cost to fix it (which you seem to imply by saying the markets have no options).
Why must the government step in when these skeleton-crewed retail stores and supply chains have inevitable, predictable loss issues? The article itself makes this point.
I don't see why shoplifters are thrown in jail and wage thieves are not. Why do cops gun down shoplifters but won't lift a finger for wage thieves? Why don't cops bust down the doors of polluters? It's the selective enforcement of property rights I have a problem with. The enforcers already side with capital 9 times out of 10.
The original articles and discussion here on HN is surprisingly one-sided.
Obviously I don’t like railroad theft but let’s not send in the army to protect a supply chain which has perhaps been made too efficient.
These increases needn't be the same. It could be that by increasing the security budget 10%, theft decreased by 90%, and prize increased by 1%, which wouldn't be high enough to create a "theft demand". It could also be that the same security budget increase did nothing on the theft rate. My point is this is not necessarily how the market works.
This is similar to the argument that taxes increase the cost of products, which increases the cost of running the government (since the government consumes free market products), which will require more taxes. This needn't be the case.
In any case, there are and have been societies with more inequality and poverty than USA where there was less crime. Obviously nobody wants those solutions in USA but the market would find its was absent regulation in this case.
Now, in which first world country do freight train need guards across their route? And it's not like the train is being hit in the middle of the desert, Breaking Bad style. There are few spots where this happened.
It seems to me like police across the US are either scared of doing their job or simply don't care, together with a public which has been desensitized to crime.
"Efficient" in terms of what outputs, relative to what inputs?
Rail theft is an incredibly specific crime compared to something like a carjacking or a house burglary. There are only so many trains to rob and only so many rail lines. It doesn't make sense to extrapolate from it to all other crimes.
If cops have been throwing out 50% of reports forever, then 200% of a lower number is still less than 200% of a bigger number from past statistics.
People respond to incentives. Incentives vary over time.
Anyways I guess the voters got what they voted for, only them can change that by next vote. Nobody to blame really as those who made these rules are elected by CA voters.
Law and order are key to modern society, it's not perfect, the alternatives are just much worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
I would say "stealing under $950 each time you got it for free" is inaccurate.
> Crime data is only as good as what gets reported A former property manager of a Walgreens store tweeted the Chronicle article didn’t take into account that police crime data is only as good as the crimes that get reported — and his Walgreens had “stopped reporting” retail theft “since there was no point” with “multiple shoplifting incidents every single day. See [2]
[1]https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-stores-board-amid-wav....
[2]https://engardio.com/blog/shoplifting-walgreens
This is rich. The rich always get away with crimes: wage theft, labor violations, financial fraud, environmental destruction, opioid crisis... but some people shoplift and society is falling apart? Cry me a river.
Let the market fix their own broken supply chains.
People have been writing songs about retail theft for ages. Think about the term "riding shotgun"! This isn't a new problem.
But there are numerous solutions between the current situation and what you describe. Better locks, housing the homeless, reducing the amount of junk we import, etc.
I remember as a kid trains had cabooses (a sign of more employees). But of course that has all been optimized away. I’m guessing the skeleton crew is completely unable to secure the train if they wanted to.
Edit: downvotes for saying that the US has handled the identified problem in the past? (Which was a slippery-slope comment, anyway.)
So you are okay with people stealing from you, as long as they're poor?
>Let the market fix their broken supply chains
There is resistance in this thread to instating armed guards, stating that it's dystopian to enforce property laws.
Railroads have always had their own police, so I’m not sure the reluctance. Retail/supply chain theft is a cat-and-mouse game… always had been, always will be. Step up enforcement, improve the locks, house the homeless and move on.
No. You can shoplift from a small business or a family owned convenience store, which is essentially stealing from an individual. Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.
> Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.
And?
I think it comes from a stagecoach having a driver and a shotgun guard. That has nothing to do with retail theft; the stagecoach wasn't a store.
But grouping the two together is a result of the recent San Francisco story being mentioned in this thread. People here on HN are usually so critical of the media, but this LA train story and the San Fran shoplifting story were both treated as a symptom of some larger societal problem. And maybe they are! But that is not at all evident from the stories.
In my opinion, both symptoms are the result of a decades long brutal drive for absolute efficiency in both supply chains and retail stores. And of course organized criminals are going to take advantage of the fact that perhaps that "efficiency" went too far in cutting security.
I'm not sure what government measures would be more helpful than the free market here. Let's say the state executes everyone who tresspasses on railroad property. This is extremely costly, which takes resources away from other governmental functions. And, we tried this with murder, and the results don't seem that good. Murder rates in areas with the death penalty are not lower in areas that abolished the death penalty. Criminals plan to not get caught, so the consequences aren't a deterrent. My conclusion is that being tough on crime doesn't really change much. A slightly better lock on the containers would probably be the winning solution here.
Californians get all bent out of shape when they aren't welcomed with open arms when they move to more center/right-of-center/right states like Nevada, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, etc. The surrounding states are worried (amongst other things), that the progressive voters will come to their states and wreck them with ultra-progressive policies like they wrecked the state they are leaving.
https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384
This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world. Poor people are neither violent nor thieves. But they can be convinced to become that when inequality is so high.
Wait, if the gap in wealth inequality has been doing nothing but expanding... why does the crime rate do nothing but fall? With very few, and very brief, exceptions - this is the case.
…
> Weinberg and his collaborators Eric D. Gould of Hebrew University and David Mustard of the University of Georgia examined young males with no more than a high school education—the demographic group that commits the most crime—they found that average wages and unemployment rates were directly linked to the incidence of property crimes. [2]
…
> Crime has increased during every recession since the late 1950s, sociologists said. [3]
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/03/do-recessions-increas...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-recessions-inc...
[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'll be a bit more specific - there are about 400,000 people currently incarcerated in the US for property crimes. That's higher than the per capita rate of incarceration for any crime in Canada. If the US is lax in prosecuting property crimes, then I don't think any other developed country is hard on crime.
What is overwhelmingly driving US's incarceration rate is War on Drugs. US has some insane policies - depending on the state, but it's a large contributor to the overall figure - regarding drug-related crimes. Legalization of some drugs, like in California, helps a bit - but given an insane amount of regulation and taxation the legal business is beset by, the illegal route is still very attractive and profitable.
The other side is the proliferation of "woke" prosecutors and local managers, refusing to prosecute crimes like petty theft (in SF, theft below $900 is in essence legal), property destruction, simple assault, etc. That is compounded by extremely permissive policies towards public homelessness and establishing homeless camps on any public property, often even burdening the adjacent private property with tolerating and supporting them. All this creates a very fertile ground for certain type of crime - there's a bunch of people that aren't very connected to social norms at the best of times, but also they know they'd never suffer any consequences for robbing a store or breaking into a car, or punching someone on the street. And there's organized crime, which knows these people can be exploited as foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise of stealing high-value items and reselling them in ad-hoc markets, or online - which is never being prosecuted, because people who are supposed to stop this are ideologically bound to address "societal roots of the crime" - which never happens - instead of going for the criminals.
So yes, you can have both high incarceration rates and extremely lax prosecution for certain crimes - at the same time. Worst of the both worlds.
Yeah, that's only a part of it. While a significant problem, drug related crimes make up only 20% of the total incarcerated number. (That 1/5 is still on its own more than the incarcerated per capita rates for all crimes in comparable countries like Canada and the UK, so it's definitely a big deal.)
The numbers for non-violent drug crimes are higher as an overall percentage in the Federal system than they are at the State level.
Again, 400,000 is just property crimes. About 1 in 3 people currently held in jail for property crimes are there for larceny/theft or stolen property.
I don't agree about the 'fertile ground' for crime you're talking about in part because I have never seen any evidence for it. It's in movies, but I haven't really seen it in real life, and I've been looking at the data for a little while now. I am completely willing to be schooled on that if you've got some evidence though.
But I don't need UP to give me evidence - I see it each time I leave home and see ever-growing homeless camps next to my house, and read about robberies in the stores I visited only recently. Over 16 years I've lived in California, I never seen this type of brazenly open criminality around. I wish it were movies, but it's the reality.
They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.
Nor being rich.
What needs to happen in these cities is some auditing of the second hand sellers. Pawn shops are required by law to record all items that they purchase but many of the people advertising and selling online are moving larger volumes of product with zero accountability.
The Kijiji and Craigslist type sites have mostly been allowed to operate in a gray area but there is no doubt they are facilitating the buying and selling of stolen items and as such a percentage of their profit is actually subject to seizure through proceeds of crime legislation.
If you’re stealing things off a train, you’re already in a pretty bad place in life, it’s not like the earlier people were any better off than the later people
Just the amount of discarded items indicates an organized effort on behalf of the thieves and most likely a steal to order game plan.
I have no doubt that the entire scheme was cooked up by some meth head while the rest of us were sleeping. Those guys are always looking for an angle to make a quick buck and yes they are desperate too but that shouldn't be the stick we measure criminality and the punishment required by.
There are waiting periods to buy guns it would be just as easy to require an item for sale to be advertised for a minimum amount of time before the contact details are provided.
No, there aren’t - not outside CA and a few other places.
Also, I guarantee you that if property crime enforcement increased and there were more arrests, they would scram.
Apply a map of retailer container shipping traffic per postal code (where LA would, again, figure in the top 5, due to the ports and their surrounding infrastructure such as warehouses and garment manufacturing).
What other areas of high homeless density also have as high a density of goods throughout as this particular cluster route in LA?
Is the security and prosecution of crimes in those areas as lax as it is in the LA train yard?
If so, then perhaps the only thing preventing thefts there is that no one’s done the math yet and found it. Or that they’re keeping it to themselves and not earning national attention, because no reporter has done a drone flyover of the carnage yet, or because they’re keeping it to such a low volume that no one has noticed.
I would expect this is the work of a small group of people who are spreading word about the security gap left by too few security guards on the ground, and that Southern Pacific has been trying to maximize profits by not hiring more security guards for their LA interchange and having all the insurance companies involved pay for the lost items. I suspect the nationwide news showing these photos is going to antagonize those insurance companies into spiking the rates of all involved shippers, but it’s unclear to me whether Southern Pacific is vulnerable to — or insulated from — insurance company outrage in this regard.
So maybe it’s a bit soon to pass moral judgment upon homeless people, and instead wonder “what group of opportunists are exploiting a logistics weakness and inviting desperate homeless people to join the free money party?”. Hard to imagine desperate people turning down free money at essentially zero risk, but they weren’t doing this on their own before. Find the ringleaders and deal with them instead.
Society subject to stabilizing optimizations formulated by intelligent free agents acting in a way counter to the desires of system architects who decided to scale beyond what they could actually guarantee the security of.
Who'd'a thunk?
Inequality is a big part of it. I know that in the US property rights are considered holy. But many people never even got the chance to go to a good school because they were born by the wrong parents, are working their asses off just to keep their noses above the water, and at the same time are being surrounded by wealthy people that work less than them whose only advantage seems to be that they were lucky enough to be born by the right parents. Some of the unlucky people might think that there are fundamental unfairnesses and that trying to balance those should trump property rights.
And if you think “a job” is all it takes to not be poor, then you are just completely out of touch with reality.
This looting is not done by "the poor" and they are not stealing "to fill their hungry children's mouths". They are looting because it is free season, they'll either use or sell off whatever loot they get and spend the returns on whatever they fancy.
What makes you think that poor people does not have jobs? Search the term "the working poor".
Better yet, check out "working homeless" (take [1] for example). That things like this happen in the richest, most powerful country in history is beyond belief.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel...
Does that mean 'consistently lowering over the last 10-20 years and now significantly lower than it was 20 years ago?' Because that's a pretty odd definition.
Odder still - while CA homicide rates have increased in 2020-2021, they have done so by a percentage LOWER than the national average. So basically, CA is safer and has lower homicide rates than the national average and your suggestion is to change leadership to be more like the rest of the country?
"Fun" facts: California was the epicenter of the 20th-century American eugenics movement[0] whose ideas became very famous around 1940, was the place that invented single-family zoning[1] (in Berkeley in 1916) immediately after banning land ownership by non-whites in 1913[2], that once passed a state referendum to explicitly nullify a state-level fair-housing act[3] passed a year prior, that passed the first modern firearms-restriction act on explicitly racial grounds[4], and that pioneered regressive segregation-with-extra-steps property tax laws[5]. It is an extremely racially-segregated place, to this day[6], and always has been despite our leaders' constant pandering to the contrary. There are so many things to love about California, but this isn't one of them and I'd urge you to reconsider what you know about it :/
[0] https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/josef-mengele/
[1] https://globalurban.org/Berkeley_Zoning_Origins.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_14
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
[6] http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea
Poverty and violence causes mental and physical health problems. Fix poverty if you want educated and intelligent citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Japan
US is one of the richest countries, has less poor people than other rich countries, the "poor" in the US are richer than the "poor" in e.g. UK or Italy, and "average" (mean and median) incomes in UK or Italy would be considered "poor" in the US.
see: https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1469070902813995014
So, inequality is irrelevant, only absolute poverty is relevant.
EDIT: NOTE: the graph in the link above is disposable income (a.k.a. above cost of living)
Personally, I don't think that poverty is the issue here. People aren't looting Apple stores because they're poor. But the lack of social safety net (income, health, mental health) for the poorest probably doesn't help.
No it isn't. Cost of living matters.
Impoverished people in richer countries have, to a limited extent, some advantage from increased capital investment in their vicinity (e.g. in theory, on average, better local infrastructure than in absolutely poorer countries). They are still crushed by living expenses.
A person doesn’t steal 10 iPhones to use them personally.
If you steal 10 iPhones you might end up with thousands of dollars and that keeps the lights on and feeds you for awhile. If you steal a loaf of bread and a pack of lunch meat you eat for a week.
Certain structural factors matter a lot:
How affordable is it to get decent healthcare?
How affordable is it to get decent food?
Is drug use criminalized?
Is there a high rate of violent crime?
Do people own their own homes?
Are there informal social relations that act as social safety nets?
A relatively poor country that nevertheless answers those questions correctly will likely provide a better life even to its poor.
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/
The numbers on the US states I've seen puts them in the lower brackets of the EU countries if you count precentage of the population that are poor, not bad by any means but not good. These numbers are meaningless though, especially on the subject discussed here.
Why would a wealthy person want to participate? They can just buy the stuff and not be involved in a crime.
I find this statement to be misleading. If one person in the entire country lived in extreme poverty than there would be some population that is among “some of the poorest populations in the world.”
However, while the US does have issues which should not be ignored, the US cannot be compared to countries where much of the population lives in extreme poverty and other human rights issues. This comparison hurts the real cause that other countries desperately need help and that entire populations do truly live in extreme poverty.
The United Nations Development Programme puts out the Human Development report which has a great website and iPhone / Android app to access the data. A good indicator is the percentage of the population living below the income poverty line. Explore this site, it’s great. Here is a link to one stat.
http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/167106
App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/human-development-report-app/i...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-t...
The roads are so bad I had to replace my bent wheels from the potholes. The government can't be bothered to stop, investigate, or prosecute rampant crime. My tap water isn't even safe to drink. And I get absolutely robbed at tax time anyway.
This is in direct contrast to the efficient cause of the riots during January 6th, which was political and not opportunistic in nature. Attempting to discharge the responsibility of those involved in the latter by appealing to the former is distasteful, to say the least.
[1]: https://citylimits.org/2020/06/09/how-widespread-was-violenc...
There was no such distinction during J6: the opportunists who did storm the Capitol and menace our legislative branch started as protestors, and promoted themselves to riotous behavior when the opportunity presented itself.
No, you witnessed a tiny portion of the protests.
I personally know of business owners whose businesses were looted, literally just local store owners.
Read the comment carefully: the distinction is between protesters and opportunists, with the latter not being protestors. There is no evidence that protestors individually or collectively engaged in looting.
People who might know of / ultimately be charged with incitement have been subpoenaed, but again, I don’t know of any charges. Anyone pressing such charges will have to show a clear line between first amendment speech and not, so they are going to be careful not to waste their time.
Can you explain how they did this?
If that isn’t meant to imply there wasn’t any looting, then why did you add it?
The rest of what you said is just about definitions and is irrelevant to the facts of what happened.
“There is no evidence that protesters engaged in looting”
That’s because you use a different name for the people who did. You have no way to be certain nobody who looted wasn’t also there to protest, so the labelling doesn’t mean anything.
In aggregate the protests unquestionably led to looting that wouldn’t otherwise have happened. The fact that not all protesters were looters is irrelevant. The looting was part of the protesting, even if not all protesters supported it.
Because there's a falsehood in the original post: that protestors were somehow responsible for the riotous behavior. The original post then goes on to use that falsehood to justify a different instance of riotous behavior, except that the specifics are inverted: the protestors and rioters during J6 were in the same crowd.
The labeling means a lot in terms of the legitimacy and legacy of the single largest American civil rights protests in the last 50 years. I'm proud of the ways that hundreds of thousands of New Yorks peacefully and righteously comported themselves during the protests, and I do not want their legacy unduly influenced by opportunists. We should judge them not by others' actions.
I don’t think it’s that simple. The riots only happened because of the protests. The protests interfered with the police response, and the protesters didn’t stop the looting themselves.
That doesn’t make the protesters into looters, but it does mean that the looting was a side effect of the protests and the protesters bear some responsibility for that.
The protesters actions had consequences, one of which was to enable looting and the destruction of people’s livelihoods.
I’m fine if you want to say that the cost was worth it to make this political statement, but I think it’s ludicrous to pretend that the looting would have happened without the protesters.
This is a chilling and dangerous responsibility to burden protestors with: are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in? They did, after all, interfere with the police response and provide moral support for the single greatest outrage against our government in nearly two centuries.
Our cultural and legal standards of free speech enshrine protest, and ensure that protestors are not vilified for actions that are not theirs. I do not think we should undermine that.
Didn't the government already decide the answer to this is "yes", though, by filing criminal charges against people just for being there?
No it’s not. It’s simply a reality. The way the chose to protest facilitated the looting. When the looting started they could have ended the protest and summoned the police.
You seem to be conflating legal liability with responsibility. I’m not saying they should be prosecuted.
I’m saying that it’s just a mental fantasy to pretend they don’t bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
> are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in?
Sure - once it became a riot, if people stuck around and got in the way of the police, they certainly bear responsibility.
> They did, after all, interfere with the police response and
Yes, and they are responsible for thst.
> provide moral support for the single greatest outrage against our government in nearly two centuries.
Moral support is a different matter.
> Our cultural and legal standards of free speech enshrine protest, and ensure that protestors are not vilified for actions that are not theirs.
Preventing police from doing the job of protecting business from being looted is their action.
> I do not think we should undermine that.
Blocking police from doing their jobs is not speech.
Nobody is talking about limiting free speech or protests. That’s a red-herring.
The riots in Minneapolis were worse by every metric than Jan 6. And in some cases orders of magnitude (cost of damage, for one). And I'll tell you what else - a lot more people are going to jail for the Jan 6 riots than the Minneapolis ones.
[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/capitol-riot...
Oh, and this was the less extreme of the anti-Obama militias.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1462481/downl...
As for whether things were "worse": I consider the political and cultural damage of storming our nation's Capitol worse than just about anything you can put a bill of damage on. You can't put that kind of cultural trespass back in the box the way you can with "ordinary" protests and riots.
As to the "letting up on drug prosecutions", in the Reagan-esque war on drugs, the Drugs won that war a long time ago. Maybe it's time to start treating serious drug addiction (meth, coke, heroin, etc) as a mental health crisis instead. Turns out that it actually costs a lot of money each year to keep a person incarcerated, and when they get turned loose back into society without addressing the underlying metal health and addiction issues, it just repeats in a loop.
Here you go: https://www.google.com/search?q=manhattan+2020+protest+retai...
There was effectively no police response for the first few days and each night looting got worse. Eventually the police mobilized and normalized the situation
I lived there at the time, it was very widespread and pretty much universal across mid-lower manhattan.
Anyway, I saved you the trouble:
"An estimated 450 businesses across New York City were vandalized and in some cases looted in late May and early June, according to the city's Department of Small Business Services."
Don't need the stats to back it up if you were there to see it though.
If you're computing overall number of businesses in New York then you're just being disingenuous. So you're counting retail stores in Staten island too? Are you including non retail businesses?
How about watch literally any video of the protests in Manhattan to see for yourself?
To say there wasn't widespread looting in Manhattan is just wrong, and easily disproven by the evidence.
Here you go: https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=Manhattan...
Don't believe your lying eyes, right? Funny all this pushback from people who most likely don't even live there.
[0] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/osdc/retail-sector-new-y...
450/36000 == 1.3% of retail businesses were "vandalized and in some cases looted", phrasing which suggests rather less than that were actually looted.
The suggestion that "Huge percentage of stores were vandalized and had their goods stolen" seems absurdly hyperbolic given these numbers.
edit: corrected accidental use of state wide number
Do you know what the landmass of lower Manhattan relative to overall New York City is?
Do you understand what a non uniform distribution is? Clearly nobody responding is familiar with basic math.
I'll spell it out for you guys. Landmass of lower Manhattan = very small vs overall New York. Using total retail stores in New York is highly misleading for that reason alone.
I could also say 450 is only .000001% of stores in the USA, so there's no problem! Same logic you're using, by the way
Like your 450 number is from all 5 boroughs, did you not realize that New York City refers to all 5 boroughs and not just like Midtown or something?
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I don't know why you're trying so hard to mislead people. Do you just live in Soho and want to act like Soho is lower Manhattan? Or more specifically, like the 4 blocks of Broadway in Soho that got hit hardest?
I already commented this but those protests did not do widespread damage to Manhattan, there were very centralized pockets of damage.
In fact, Manhattan probably had the most damage by dollars because of Soho luxury stores, but by actual damage to individual businesses the outer boroughs were infinitely worse off, and even that was highly centralized...
If you were there, or watch any news report from the time, it's extremely obvious and supported by the evidence.
All I said is that lower Manhattan had widespread looting, which is true.
Everybody here throwing out total retail or even total businesses in NYC to discredit what I'm saying are the ones being misleading. Everything I've said is backed up by facts.
Say 450 is an accurate number. Well 90% can reasonably be assumed to be lower Manhattan, and we know lower Manhattan is less than 5% of the landmass of NYC.
So no, you're the one being misleading. Pretty crazy all these people trying to gaslight as if it didn't happen, when I lived there and walked down the streets and saw it myself.
It's no surprise an ex cop just won as mayor of NYC, when you have people with this attitude supporting retail theft/looting at all costs. New Yorkers got tired of it, sorry.
It's not true. The only people who would say this are faux-New Yorkers who use Lower Manhattan as a term when they mean 5th avenue in Soho and Broadway in Flatiron District (aka the bougie retail areas of Lower Manhattan that account for like 1% of the landmass).
As someone who lives next to Barclays where 5000 people gathered and works in Midtown, you're just pushing a false narrative that oversells what happened to outsiders.
I walked those same streets, I live in NYC too, and I'm not falling for it.
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What you're doing is exactly what you're accusing others of doing. Confusing basic facts to push a narrative.
The looting sucked, yes businesses got hurt, but saying "Manhattan was ransacked" is an insult to what a place that's been ransacked looks like.
That's the point.
...also:
> It's no surprise an ex cop just won as mayor of NYC, when you have people with this attitude supporting retail theft/looting at all costs. New Yorkers got tired of it, sorry.
The guy who didn't know NYC includes the outer boroughs is trying to speak for New Yorkers. Maybe next you'll tell us about grabbing your daily baconeggandcheese from ock at Gregory's Coffee. God help us all.
The 450 "vandalized and in some cases looted" statistic you provided was for New York City as a whole. If you would like to confine your focus to Lower Manhattan, the onus is on you to find the relevant statistic for Lower Manhattan, because that 450 includes vandalism from all over the city (to repeat your own quote with appropriate emphasis, "An estimated 450 businesses across New York City were vandalized and in some cases looted in late May and early June, according to the city's Department of Small Business Services.")
To really get a true picture of things, we'd also need to know what the background level of vandalism for business in a more-than-a-month time window is - because I assure you, it is not zero.
> I could also say 450 is only .000001% of stores in the USA, so there's no problem! Same logic you're using, by the way
No, the logic I'm using is that if .000001% of stores in the USA were "vandalized and in some cases looted", then the statement "Huge percentage of stores were vandalized and had their goods stolen" made about the USA would be laughably hyperbolic and incorrect simply on the cold facts.
Most of the damage in all 5 boroughs was highly concentrated in specific blocks like what happened on 5th Ave
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Like I get it, for a small business owner sweeping out their store 1 was too many, but c'mon, don't be dishonest.
450 businesses across all 5 boroughs and including even basic graffiti in that count... that was the literal opposite of widespread looting.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/11/unemploymen...
- K shaped recovery driving near unprecedented acceleration of wealth inequality
https://www.businessinsider.com/k-shaped-recovery-definition
- Raging mental health crisis bearing down on an already overwhelmed medical system
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/16/well/mental-h...
- Raging drug crisis also raging on concurrently
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/wk/ane/2017/00000125/...
- Clogged supply chain resulting in unprecedented amounts of vulnerable goods
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supply-chain-issues-cargo-theft...
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I could keep going, but all of this and you think... protests caused this?
You saying "Manhattan was ransacked" is hilarious, I live in Brooklyn, next stop after Barclay Center, where global news networks were painting a picture of a warzone using an overturned car...
Almost every person who marched at Barclay went past my apartment and you know what the damage was? The police removed the trash cans on my street in anticipation, so for a good two weeks afterwards there was trash everywhere as people just dumped it in the street instead.
Oh yeah, and some businesses took way too long removing their plywood defenses despite 0 signs they were actually tested.
Actually one cool story literally steps from that burning car was those same protestors stopping would-be rioters from breaking into stores...
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Seriously, we need to drop this narrative that the iron fist of the law is what would stop this.
So many people trying to run interference by pointing the finger at "defund the police" chants... is the only thing stopping you from stealing from a train the idea the police might catch you?
Criminals are criminals, they don't respect the rule of law so you're not going to get them by sprinkling more agents of the law to crack down on people.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001112871038226...
(Note the author here, Gary Kleck, this is someone who's practically a patron saint of tough-on-crime proponents after his work on DGU. And even his study can't seriously back the claim.)
-
Now you can try jailing all the criminals of course, and just keep growing your jails until you've exhausted the sources of crime...
But even with the harshest prosecutors, eventually these people need to leave. If our prisons were about reform it'd be one thing, but crime is rampant is our prison system.
So all you're doing is sticking criminals in an incubator while screwing over the communities they're from and setting the next generation of criminals in motion...
Your claim that an attempted coup was somehow spurned by protests relating to the extrajudicial killing of black men is a rather bold one to make with absolutely no supplied evidence. I suppose finding cause in the drastic uptick of far-right violence [2] you have conveniently omitted, which would serve as a much better basis for the "broken window theory", is too easy of a conclusion to make. As is finding cause in the president quite literally inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on the basis of false claims of election fraud. No, it's those protesters!
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
That may be illegal due to various anti-discrimination laws:
> But Free and other riders were baffled over proposed legislation that would lower mandatory penalties for taxi drivers who refuse to pick up certain passengers, or turn down requests to take passengers to a specific destination.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-fines-...
Immediately the other person ran to the opposite corner and asked the person with the dog to wait outside the restaurant because they had been a victim of a pitbull attack. And, of course, the person with the dog pulled the service dog card.
At this point, the business owner can do nothing. Once someone says a dog is a service dog, no one can ask them to leave until after the dog causes damage, per the ADA.
The person in the restaurant with the dog immediately claimed they forgot the vest that says their dog is a service animal. This tells me the dog was definitely not a service animal, because anyone who actually needs one knows that no proof is required.
Anyway, my point is the laws in the US right now let any dog owner walk around with impunity and impose dogs on people who do not want to be around dogs. Which means I have to modify my behavior with my toddlers and leave places where any random person can bring a Rottweiler or pitbull.
Edit: In the dog situation, you can even go further and see that NY state just forced owners of less dangerous and aggressive breeds to subsidize owners of more dangerous and aggressive breeds. Why would the government need to get involved in subsidizing risks of various dog breeds?
https://www.syracuse.com/state/2022/01/new-ny-state-law-bans...
Some animals really aren't suitable as pets for the vast majority of owners - which might be a more fruitful discussion than objecting to service animals too quickly.
There are already laws that ban dogs from restaurants and grocery stores. But there is a higher law that says if you say the words service dog, then no one can say anything to you and you do not have to prove anything, rendering the laws banning dogs from restaurants and grocery stores useless.
Doesn't stop certain obnoxious owners from taking their animals where they really ought not, etc.
The problem isn't service dogs, but fraudulent service dogs claims. And often health departments hold business owners liable for these fake claims (fine the owners because they should have known that the pit bull wasn't a service dog because they lacked a harness), which is doubly ridiculous if you aren't allowed to challenge someone's service dog claim (which actually isn't true, I think, there isn't a law on the book that businesses cannot verify service dogs, its just culture that pushes them to trust).
> Q7. What questions can a covered entity's employees ask to determine if a dog is a service animal?
>A. In situations where it is not obvious that the dog is a service animal, staff may ask only two specific questions: (1) is the dog a service animal required because of a disability? and (2) what work or task has the dog been trained to perform? Staff are not allowed to request any documentation for the dog, require that the dog demonstrate its task, or inquire about the nature of the person's disability.
> Q8. Do service animals have to wear a vest or patch or special harness identifying them as service animals?
>A. No. The ADA does not require service animals to wear a vest, ID tag, or specific harness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion
You're a retail worker making 26k a year. You're arrested, and can't come up with $1,000 to get a bond, so you stay in jail for a couple of weeks, lose your job and get evicted. Now the prosecutor comes to you with a choice: take a plea deal and get out now with time served or go to court - the court date is of course in a month and you'll have to stay in jail over that period.
Innocent until proven guilty matters.
"UP considering rerouting it’s trains out of LA county. UP asks DA to be harder on theives. Says they’re back out on the tracks a day after released"
https://twitter.com/CBSLAKristine/status/1482115852216385538
This isn't indicative of society's collapse, nor of the anti-work masses rising up, nor even of a catastrophic government failure. It does point out once again that California has an untenable disparity of wealth and we need to continue to work on fixing that problem.
> Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County
Both e-commerce and LA’s status as a hub are established. So why the increase now? I didn’t see a mention of economic realities driving crime, aside from the increased presence of homeless camps, such as skyrocketing costs of everything.
Means: your new home in California being a tent or car by the railway tracks
Motive: money.
Opportunity: unguarded rails and bottlenecked supply chain
America’s problems, especially the tragic amount of homelessness in CA, are becoming a lot harder to hide.
LA alone dedicated close to $1B to fight homelessness in 2021! [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989015659/la-dedicates-1-bill...
at $25'000 per capita we should be seeing some improvements, but it's hard to know how much of that has disappeared to 'administration fees'. Also the article talks about how the main push for this was creation of affordable housing, that has a long lead time and with material shortages I would be surprised to find any new units built last year.
Louis Rossman has a lot of videos on this in New York, essentially 50,000$ a year for tiny little slumlord hovels run by people with connections. More money isn't what's needed, it's for people who actually care to be spending it instead of politicians.
If LA for example is needing to build new low income housing for even a small part of that 63k number, well with spiking construction and land costs, that's going to be well more than $1B
If one disbursed all of it it would probably not really be enough for housing, let alone the other costs of living, and there'd be $0 for any sort of supportive programs whatsoever.
It's clearly not enough money.
"In a letter to Dist. Atty. George Gascón, Union Pacific’s Guerrero estimated that more than 100 people have been arrested but they “boast to our officers that charges will be pled down.” "
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-16/rail-the...
There are two ports where consumer products enter the United States from the ocean/Asia: LA, and to a much lesser degree Seattle. That’s it.
Both essentially lead directly to Chicago from the west coast, with very little inbetween.
Eg Texas freight lines are for transporting things like animal feed and crushed gravel to export terminals with little in the way of hubs. Florida isn’t significant and its port capacity is minuscule, repeat for most of the country.
Massive (unguarded) consumer products hub x population, Chicago is the only other qualifier, where rail theft is unsurprisingly also a constant issue.
I guess the good is the nice weather and beaches... what am i missing in terms of good?
Wasn't this a twitter thread like a week ago?
The tweets prompt reporters to start calling the usual suspects: The company experiencing losses gives one misleading comparison to locked-down 2020 and an absolute figure for losses rather than a relative comparison over time. That makes sense, because they want government and cops to step in so they don't have to cover it. Next up the reporters call LAPD, who have a political motive to imply that the problem is worse than ever, to justify increased jurisdiction and funding.
And that's… pretty much where it ends. Nobody bothers to look back to 2019 or before; nobody bothers to see whether a higher percentage of rail cars are looted, or whether there are now more rail cars and online shopping in total; nobody bothers to analyze whether the increased wait times or any other factor are in play. I would love to actually understand this issue, but the article is designed to shock me with photos of debris and make me feel as if anarchy has descended upon the streets of Los Angeles, a fear-based reaction that apparently many HN commenters are susceptible to. It's dismaying and ultimately unsatisfying to read when the only goal is to drive clicks and engagement.
I'm going to go on a limb and say that the tracks being absolutely covered in discarded envelopes isn't normal.
What gave you the impression otherwise? Three paragraphs in, there's a person being interviewed who claims "he comes to the tracks regularly". That definitely suggest they know they're not the first people seeing it.
>If you’ve gone anywhere near railroad tracks in industrial parts of Los Angeles in the past decade, you’ve seen things that are hard to believe are happening, but have indeed been commonplace for years.
Like what?
>I’m not asserting this mess is commonplace or isn’t, but it would be great if the reporter bothered to investigate whether it was, so that readers have context.
The article mentions: "Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County.". An increase of 160% suggests that it was not "commonplace for years".