Being poor is not an excuse for criminality. These people aren't stealing bread to live or clothing to not freeze. They are stealing valuables ("Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools") because they can, knowing their poor status will cause people like you to express sympathy for them and thus allowing them to get away with it.
They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.
The sad part of this situation is the initial people that broke into the containers on the trains are long gone with their loot, now the marginalized people are getting caught digging through the discarded items that were not valuable enough for ones that broke in and most likely they will be the ones prosecuted for political gains even if they get out on no cash bail.
What needs to happen in these cities is some auditing of the second hand sellers. Pawn shops are required by law to record all items that they purchase but many of the people advertising and selling online are moving larger volumes of product with zero accountability.
The Kijiji and Craigslist type sites have mostly been allowed to operate in a gray area but there is no doubt they are facilitating the buying and selling of stolen items and as such a percentage of their profit is actually subject to seizure through proceeds of crime legislation.
You don’t really believe that rich people stormed in and stole all of the good stuff before the poor people got there, do you?
If you’re stealing things off a train, you’re already in a pretty bad place in life, it’s not like the earlier people were any better off than the later people
There is a lot of people that fit between rich and poor, do I think that organized gangs with cell phones and bolt cutters were the ones that initially broke in? I sure do, do I think they are rich? nope.
Just the amount of discarded items indicates an organized effort on behalf of the thieves and most likely a steal to order game plan.
I have no doubt that the entire scheme was cooked up by some meth head while the rest of us were sleeping. Those guys are always looking for an angle to make a quick buck and yes they are desperate too but that shouldn't be the stick we measure criminality and the punishment required by.
In many states a pawn shop is required to hold any items brought in for a minimum amount of time before they are allow to resell them. This may be a solution to prevent online marketplaces from enabling thieves to ply their wares so easily.
There are waiting periods to buy guns it would be just as easy to require an item for sale to be advertised for a minimum amount of time before the contact details are provided.
To be honest, stealing off trains knowing you likely won't get caught is way more compelling than dealing with irate customers at McDonalds. That doesn't mean it's OK though.
But making billions by exploiting every single one of your workers ( i.e. Amazon, McDonalds ), or irresponsibly shimming off of every transaction ( Bezos ) is cool. Start by making a list of the most egregious crimes, and put this somewhere around 350~450 on your list.
That’s an awfully dismissive broad-brush viewpoint about homeless people, that isn’t supported by studies of — and social support of — homeless people around the world.
Take a map of homeless population density per postal code (where LA would figure in the top 5, if not top 1).
Apply a map of retailer container shipping traffic per postal code (where LA would, again, figure in the top 5, due to the ports and their surrounding infrastructure such as warehouses and garment manufacturing).
What other areas of high homeless density also have as high a density of goods throughout as this particular cluster route in LA?
Is the security and prosecution of crimes in those areas as lax as it is in the LA train yard?
If so, then perhaps the only thing preventing thefts there is that no one’s done the math yet and found it. Or that they’re keeping it to themselves and not earning national attention, because no reporter has done a drone flyover of the carnage yet, or because they’re keeping it to such a low volume that no one has noticed.
If you have a genuine choice of steal or starve, even then you won't necessarily steal food. You might steal whatever is easiest to and sell it to buy food.
Well, if you paid them enough to buy wares, made the wares cheaply enough they could be afforded, and structured the entire thing to be relatively painless, equitable, and easy for everyone involved to participate in constructively, there wouldn't be a problem, now would there?
Society subject to stabilizing optimizations formulated by intelligent free agents acting in a way counter to the desires of system architects who decided to scale beyond what they could actually guarantee the security of.
I have some mixed feelings. On one hand I certainly can sympathise with people that feel that they never got a fair chance and they think that the only thing they do is making Jeff Bezos slightly less rich.
Inequality is a big part of it. I know that in the US property rights are considered holy. But many people never even got the chance to go to a good school because they were born by the wrong parents, are working their asses off just to keep their noses above the water, and at the same time are being surrounded by wealthy people that work less than them whose only advantage seems to be that they were lucky enough to be born by the right parents. Some of the unlucky people might think that there are fundamental unfairnesses and that trying to balance those should trump property rights.
They aren't stealing out of necessity - they are stealing because they can.
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