What are more trains and staff going to do? Conductors and engineers aren't going to start tackling thieves on moving trains.
The train companies already have their own police forces, but if they can't get convictions in court, all they can do is scare away the least coordinated thieves. So it's hard to understand what security investments are supposed to achieve.
Nah, another piece of this is that rail companies have eliminated rail yards and park those super-long trains on just random tracks (at least in the LA area). They then complain about the homeless who camp on the sides of the tracks and demand that LA county do something about the camps. The homeless may provide cover for the professional thieves but the homeless aren't the thieves (and the county should indeed eliminate the homeless camps by finding them housing but given a population of people can't legally or pleasantly sleep anywhere, that population is going gravitate to area least protected and that's railroad tracks and freeways, where problem things happen - notice recent freeway fire, etc).
Rail companies go in, apprehend the homeless for trespassing and then complain that county won't prosecute them. And no, the county sensibly doesn't want to fill it's jails with vagrants just 'cause the rail companies don't park their trains where they're safe.
All this is part of the "supply chain problems" of the last few years but the thing with those is the large carriers (shippers and railroads) actually made profits by a legal situation wound-up as "our losses are your losses, our gains are ours". They cried all the way to the bank.
There is only a tiny fraction of the housing required. There is single digit percentages of the actual housing required and low to mid double digits percentages of shelters where some of the time if you get their in time you can sleep in a communal space where you can't bring your belongings, your pets, cohabitate, where you might get raped, or acquire new 6 legged friends, or more recently covid before being turned out in the morning.
It's not like most people are being offered a job and an apartment. They are being asked if they would like to be warm for 10 hours and even worse off than before.
To expand on the above a bit, retail (and presumably freight rail?) security still has to refer cases through public law enforcement for prosecution.
Given limited resources and varying priorities, public law enforcement follow-through can range from helpful to apathetic to non-existent.
Even major, national retail chains with clear video evidence of organized theft rings can have issues getting local PD to pursue prosecution.
Edit: Courtesy of dwater's note up-thread, railroad police can indeed be empowered by states as law enforcement. Though I expect at some point prosecution still reverts to state/federal authority. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police#Jurisdiction...
Sorry but the railroads don't get to hide behind the "we need the cops to fix this" crap. In the US many railroads have their own police force with full arrest and police powers[0]. They can literally throw their own money and bodies at this problem if they really wanted to fix it.
A big part of this is those mile-long trains have to park "somewhere" and that can't be rail yards 'cause they're too big to fit.
So this wind-up being as if Fedex, to save money, eliminated their own parking lots and parked their trucks in the sketchy parts of town - and then demanded the cities eliminate the homeless 'cause their truck kept getting broken into.
1. Trains run through very long multi jurisdictional route often with no meaningful police along the routes and no access due to lack of roads along the route. This was especially true historically but still remains true today. Train robberies have been a real thing for a long time with the robbers not being stupid and attacking the train far from police presence. Further rail facilities require 24x7 protection that local police can’t afford to offer.
2. They often have specific laws at a federal level and as I understand it wouldn’t depend on general local courts and prosecutors, particularly on interstate lines. For spur lines it’ll usually be state prosecutors.
The crux of it is the rail companies probably don’t WANT to hire police if they absolutely can avoid it. That’s very expensive and I’m sure they would rather just eat losses, pay insurance premiums, and whine to local and state police for more coverage at the tax payers expense.
Sure they want their own police. Nothing better than being able to investigate yourself and find you did nothing wrong.
And when you call your local PD, good luck getting anywhere when another police force discontinued the investigation and local PD knows little/nothing about railways.
I think the better question is why are they investigating accidents in the first place instead of limiting jurisdiction exclusively to essentially loss prevention.
Item 1 is likely related to the spread of the railroads and how important they were so early on. I knew about railroad cops, and the no Social Security eligibility, but it wasn't until the recent strike threats that I learned how railroad employment is so different from most other employment because there are specifically different laws. The importance of the railroads is why there is so much checkerboarded land in the western US, it was given away in grants to the railroads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)
The railroads using shorter trains would allow them to keep the trains in the railyards, where they have more physical control. But that would involve more employees and seems to be something the rail companies are specifically avoiding for various reasons.
Presumably if it dovetails back into the existing public court system at the prosecution level (i.e. there are railroad lawyers empowered to bring cases similar to DAs), that's still a reasonable separation of powers.
But the slope towards the government (with democratic checks and balances) ceding enforcement authority to a private party (without democratic checks and balances) seems worrisome.
In this case: yes, because it puts undue burden on taxpayers given the unique nature of the rail system. Does every jurisdiction with rail freight traffic need a fully staffed, taxpayer-funded task force to cover these things? You'd bankrupt a ton of smaller counties.
The whole world is not New York City or the Bay Area where you have several billions of taxpayer revenues sloshing around you can throw at crime problems.
The "tough on crime" crowd needs to be less ideological and think deeply about the fiscal implications of taxpayers of their policies.
The state does not have a monopoly on violence in the United States. Private citizens can and have used lethal force to stop and/or prevent certain crimes (and I’m not talking about kooky stand your ground laws either).
It all makes sense given that we are, after all, a former British colony. Great Britain’s whole thing with its colonial empire was to outsource its territorial defense to its colonial citizens.
Sure, but I think the issue is that even when they are empowered as law enforcement, there's not much they can do if the DA isn't going to prosecute these cases.
My understanding is that they can pursue drug crime or break up organized fencing operations. But at the low level most of these train robberies are happening they probably don't waste their time.
And why do you think they cannot get convictions? If they get video evidence of someone damaging a train car and get that person in custody they will get an easy conviction.
Train companies do have police forces but since the advent of "precision railroading" they have been cutting all staff to the bone.
Shortening the time it takes for an employee to know what's going on means you can reach out and get authorities involved. Securing high value containers can slow down theft.
The train companies already have their own police forces, but if they can't get convictions in court, all they can do is scare away the least coordinated thieves. So it's hard to understand what security investments are supposed to achieve.