Chronic. It is the attack on diligence, globalization version. Mid-January, the Americans have discovered that the bandits of the great modern roads tackled rail transport. The photos, from the Lincoln Heights district, in Los Angeles went around the country. There are rails covered with thousands of possible cardboard boxes, packaging, debris like after an earthquake. These are the remains left behind by the looters of trains. The television cameras have even shown Covid test pockets scattered between the packets marked with the Amazon or FedEx acronym.
The out-of-law of the Wild West, such as Butch Cassidy and his Sundance Kid, attacked the convoys that crossed the great plains. Contemporary looting focuses on Los Angeles, Strategic Node of Consumer Consumer Transhipment Made in Asia to US markets. The containers are discharged on the platforms of Long Beach and Los Angeles – 40% input ports of maritime imports from the United States – and distributed in the Wagons of the Union Pacific Railroad. Then things go bad.
The pandemic has created a clearance: too much traffic, not enough containers or dockers … The trains are obliged to stop waiting for the way to be free. The thieves punctuate them at the turn of a narrow rail corridor, below the road, to Lincoln Heights, just 7 km from the center of Los Angeles.
Operation of the homeless
In fact of ambush, it is enough for a small drill to open the containers, which are not sealed. In a quarter of an hour, sorting is done. Electronic devices, branded clothing, jewelry, tires are embedded in vehicles, parked nearby. All that is not salable – family photos, and even a funeral urn – is left on site. And it’s not just electronics: more than 80 rifles have been missing.
According to Union Pacific, 90 containers have, every day, is the subject of “intrusions” for the last three months of the year 2021. The number of looting has increased by 160% since December 2020. The railway company Told gangs that would exploit homeless, many along the ways. According to her, the looters relax in the tents supposed to be occupied by the homeless.
Union Pacific and local authorities are returning to the responsibilities. The company, which is responsible for the safety of the routing, does not use a few dozen vigils for the Californian route. The police were overwhelmed; Justice responds that it is often difficult to prove the lacins, the arrested claiming to have found the objects in the street. The Joe Buscaino councilor accused Union Pacific to neglect the maintenance and safety of ways, which, as by chance, “rank in priority of the neighborhoods populated by minorities” – including that of Watts, which was the scene of racial riots in 1965 – As it distributed 6.3 billion to its shareholders in 2020.
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