The Great Train Heists

 Going through my bookmarks, I came across this article from January 2024: "The great train heists of the 21st Century: Thieves armed with bolt cutters and crowbars are clambering aboard lumbering freight locomotives laden with Amazon boxes and staging brazen raids that shame Los Angeles." The gist of the story is that the rise of online shopping has made robbing trains lucrative. From the article:

    California cops have been left scrambling as gangs of thieves armed with bolt cutters and crowbars are clambering aboard mile-long trundling freight trains to loot expensive electronic goods, high-end clothing and jewelry.

    Sometimes the robbers strike while the lumbering locomotives are still moving, while others brazenly trigger the emergency brakes so that their accomplices can hack their way into the metal containers.

    LA is the undisputed 'capital of cargo theft' with trains ferrying goods from the major ports, but the spate of train thefts have almost doubled across the nation since 2019.

    The issue of mass cargo theft shot into focus almost three years ago, when a Union Pacific railway track was overrun with thousands upon thousands of ransacked delivery boxes. 

    Stunning footage captured by NBC Los Angeles in November 2021 showed the tracks littered with cardboard as opportunistic criminals picked at the scraps - before the cameraman caught a thief in action with a pair of bolt cutters. 

    As outrage over the thefts swept the internet - with one expecting mother in Seattle telling the outlet she was 'honestly just disgusted in human behavior' after seeing her child's car seat on the side of the tracks - photojournalist John Schrieber went to see the looting in action for himself. 

    He shared clips to X of abandoned packages 'as far as the eye can see' from the side of a Lincoln Heights track several months after, where he noted that thieves make an effort to target products bound for people's homes as they are more valuable than bulk items such as toilet paper. 

    But the episodes are far from isolated incidents. 

    In 2022, Union Pacific claimed around 90 cargo containers were being illegally opened each day, and theft on its trains on the West Coast were up 160 percent that year. 

    Compared to the year ending October 2021, the spike stood at a staggering 356 percent.   

    In January 2022, the crisis even brought out California Governor Gavin Newsom to the tracks, where he likened the mess caused by the thefts to a shanty town, adding: 'I couldn't take it. I can't turn on the news anymore. What the hell is going on?' 

    The year before, the FBI estimated that cargo-theft losses amounted to $1 billion - a figure it admits is an undercount, according to the New York Times. 

    The outlet cited a supply-chain risk expert that gave their own estimate at over $50 billion lost annually, with the reasons for the crimewave primarily falling on the abundance of online shopping, and lax security on freight trains.  

Much of the blame lies with lax policing and prosecution, with even the National Review pointing fingers at Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón, who they described as a "paradigm exemplar of today’s progressive prosecutors, this is literally the express-track redistribution of wealth." Read the whole thing.