4 ms·

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 p

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Hokusai 5y ago
> Being poor is not an excuse for criminality. Nor being rich.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Never said it was.
- sigmaprimus 5y ago
  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.
  - californical 5y ago
    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
    - sigmaprimus 5y ago
      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.
  - sigmaprimus 5y ago
    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.
    - Ancapistani 5y ago
      > There are waiting periods to buy guns No, there aren’t - not outside CA and a few other places.
Supermancho 5y ago
Once you have to live in the permanent mindset of "how can I make money?", it quickly becomes "how can I make the most money".
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  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.
  - ForOldHack 5y ago
    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.
- _moof 5y ago
  And when an entire society relentlessly shits on you, you're not exactly left brimming with respect for its norms.
floatingatoll 5y ago
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.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  There are homeless people in every state, but they aren't stealing off trains, are they? Also, I guarantee you that if property crime enforcement increased and there were more arrests, they would scram.
  - mjcohen 5y ago
    Trains may not be available.
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      There are more major train routes in the midwest than California. And yet homeless stealing from them hasn't made headlines anywhere...
      - floatingatoll 5y ago
        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.
newbie789 5y ago
ectopod 5y ago
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.
salawat 5y ago
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. Who'd'a thunk?
Ma8ee 5y ago
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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Hokusai 5y ago

> Being poor is not an excuse for criminality. Nor being rich.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Never said it was.
sigmaprimus 5y ago
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.
- californical 5y ago
  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
  - sigmaprimus 5y ago
    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.
- sigmaprimus 5y ago
  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.
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    > There are waiting periods to buy guns No, there aren’t - not outside CA and a few other places.

Supermancho 5y ago

Once you have to live in the permanent mindset of "how can I make money?", it quickly becomes "how can I make the most money".

gjsman-1000 5y ago
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.
- ForOldHack 5y ago
  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.
_moof 5y ago
And when an entire society relentlessly shits on you, you're not exactly left brimming with respect for its norms.

floatingatoll 5y ago

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.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
There are homeless people in every state, but they aren't stealing off trains, are they? Also, I guarantee you that if property crime enforcement increased and there were more arrests, they would scram.
- mjcohen 5y ago
  Trains may not be available.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    There are more major train routes in the midwest than California. And yet homeless stealing from them hasn't made headlines anywhere...
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      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.

newbie789 5y ago

ectopod 5y ago

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.

salawat 5y ago

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. Who'd'a thunk?

Ma8ee 5y ago

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.