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Article seems to indicate it's not arrests but patrols that are correlated with theft. Patrols dissuade potential thefts
by mtw 5y ago
Article seems to indicate it's not arrests but patrols that are correlated with theft. Patrols dissuade potential thefts
- bluedino 5y agoIt says a lot about your citizens when they regularly steal.
- TrainedMonkey 5y agoTotes, people should starve to death before resorting to stealing. /s
- mardifoufs 5y agoYou are saying the people who steal from trains would be starving otherwise? That's a ridiculous take, imo. As much as some Americans like to pretend that they are actually living in a 3rd world country & deny how privileged it is to even live there, the reality is that they are absolutely not. Even a minimum wage job in the US can get you above "starving" or even close to that point. Being poor in LA doesn't mean you're starving, and it's weird to assume that poor people just have to commit crimes and steal because they are poor. Regardless, let's assume Los Angeles was such an economically desolate place for the poor. Well, it turns out that train robberies still aren't a common occurrence in even much poorer places so there must be something else going on too.
- hogepiyo 5y agoBecause the only people who commit crime are desperate people struggling to survive? That's the level of argument you're on right now
- bagacrap 5y ago
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoThe article also says they're in charge of 36,000 miles of track. Presumably the trains are only in smaller segments, but that's still impossible to patrol it all. There is no reasonable amount of officers that could cover all of the parked trains 24/7 anyway. Without any actual consequences for getting caught, it's basically a minor inconvenience for the thieves. More officers just means slightly more inconvenience.
- ipaddr 5y agoSeems like a job for a fleet of drones.
- dahfizz 5y agoDrones that do what? Send video to the prosecutor who doesn't care? Shoot the thieves? I'm not sure the state of California would be down with that.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
- dahfizz 5y agoYou're right, that's awesome.
- ipaddr 5y ago- Play classical music to annoy robbers - Take pictures to post to twitter - Follow suspects and personally sue - Shooting blinding light or less deadly bullets - Record footage,sell rights to clip brokers
- KennyBlanken 5y agoGetting caught means being charged federally and the statue carries a maximum penalty of 20 years. Half the people commenting on this post don't understand that railway theft is a federal crime which is handled by federal prosecutors in federal court, and has nothing to do with the "liberal governor" or "lazy California prosecutors". On nearly anything related to societal matters not of a technological sort, HN commenters tend to demonstrate quite a bit of ignorance of the basic facts of the matter at hand. Also: obviously you don't just patrol 36,000 miles of track: you patrol where the thefts happen (piles of packaging by the tracks), and on the trains. Since you know the schedule of the trains, you even know when people will be trying to do the robberies...
- mulmen 5y agoGood point, I can understand that. I wonder what reasons were given for the layoffs.
- bagacrap 5y agowell yes, that would be the outcome if arrests don't lead to charges --- they accomplish nothing