Chronic. It’s the attack of diligence, globalization version. In mid-January, the Americans discovered that modern highwaymen were attacking rail transport. The photos, from the Lincoln Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles, have gone around the country. We see rails covered with thousands of gutted cardboard boxes, packaging, debris as after an earthquake. These are the remains left behind by train looters. TV cameras even showed pouches of Covid tests strewn between packages marked with the Amazon or FedEx logo.
Wild West outlaws, such as Butch Cassidy and his Sundance Kid, attacked convoys crossing the Great Plains. Contemporary looting is concentrated around Los Angeles, a strategic hub for the transhipment of consumer goods made in Asia to American markets. The containers are unloaded on the quays of Long Beach and Los Angeles – ports of entry for 40% of maritime imports from the United States – and distributed among the wagons of the Union Pacific Railroad. Then things go wrong.
The pandemic has created a bottleneck: too much traffic, not enough containers or dockers… Trains are forced to stop to wait for the way to be clear. The thieves puncture them at the bend of a narrow corridor of rails, below the road, in Lincoln Heights, only 7 km from the center of Los Angeles.
Exploitation of the homeless
As an ambush, all you need is a small drill to open the containers, which are not sealed. In a quarter of an hour, the sorting is done. Electronic devices, designer clothes, jewelry, tires are loaded into vehicles, parked nearby. Anything that isn’t salable – family photos, even a cremation urn – is left behind. And it’s not just the electronics: more than 80 rifles have been reported missing.
According to Union Pacific, 90 containers each day were subject to “intrusion” during the last three months of 2021. The number of lootings has increased by 160% since December 2020. The railway company implicates gangs which allegedly exploit the homeless, many along the tracks. According to her, the looters take turns in the tents supposed to be occupied by the homeless.
The Americans are destabilized. Empty shelves in supermarkets, and now deliveries stolen from boats…
Union Pacific and local authorities transfer responsibilities. The company, which is responsible for the security of routings, employs only a few dozen security guards for the Californian route. The police say they are overwhelmed; justice responds that it is often difficult to prove theft, the arrested claiming to have found the objects in the street. Councilman Joe Buscaino accused Union Pacific of neglecting the maintenance and safety of lanes that, coincidentally, “pass through neighborhoods populated by minorities as a priority” – including that of Watts, which was the scene of race riots in 1965 – when she “distributed 6.3 billion to its shareholders in 2020.
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