"A top official with Union Pacific revealed last week that the company could move its rail operations from Los Angeles County unless law enforcement stops thieves from raiding shipping containers.
Last week, a viral video showed how thieves are pillaging through shipping containers in the infamous Logan Heights neighborhood. Tens of thousands of destroyed packages littered the area around the rail tracks.
... Adrian Guerrero, general director of public affairs, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón demanding his office stop the "spiraling crisis of organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft."
Shockingly, Guerrero revealed that "over 90 containers are compromised per day."
"Since December 2020, UP has experienced an over 160% increase in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles County.
In several months during that period, the increase from the previous year surpassed 200%.
In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020,"
Guerrero explained. "Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties moving trains."
However, the actual crimes are not the only issue.
Guerrero explained that far-left criminal justice policies have exacerbated the problem and emboldened criminals.
Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine.
These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours.
Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals.
In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be plead down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence. (Except trespassing in the US Capitol building = over one year in "Adolph" Biden's political prison, with no bail or trial. Ye Editor)
Without any judicial deterrence or consequence, it is no surprise that over the past year UP has witnessed the significant increase in criminal rail theft described above.
According to Guerrero, UPS and FedEx, which utilize Union Pacific's rail services, are seeking to divert their business away from Los Angeles County — and Union Pacific may join them.
"Like our customers, UP is now contemplating serious changes to our operating plans to avoid Los Angeles County," Guerrero wrote, adding that such a "drastic change" would significantly impact the national supply chain.
Guerrero went on to say that Union Pacific understands "the well-intended social justice goals" of Gascón, but demanded he "hold these criminals accountable."
How did Gascón respond?
In response, Gascón's office claimed they are committed to ensuring the safety of Los Angeles County's infrastructure.
In a statement, the office also said many cases are not prosecuted due to "insufficient evidence."
"Some cases presented to our office by Union Pacific have been filed, such as burglary and grand theft, while others have been declined due to insufficient evidence.
We make charging decisions based on the evidence," the statement said.
However, Guerrero explained in his letter to Gascón that despite over 100 criminals having been arrested while actively vandalizing trains, Union Pacific "has not been contacted for any court proceedings."
"That scene at the Union Pacific rail depot is all about wokesterism, not the weird things the press is cooking up
Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, it's worth a million or more views.
That's wokesterism in action.
Union Pacific is ready to throw in the towel on Los Angeles because these thefts are out of control — something like one out of six containers now gets broken into — and very few thieves are ever prosecuted.
Wokesterism is the problem.
That pretty well lays it out.
But don't imagine that the press has caught on.
The Los Angeles Times, whose headquarters is walking distance from the track mess,
meaning it missed the big story that CBS got that was literally right in front of its reporters' eyes for weeks now,
has gone on to claim that the problem is vague e-commerce and geography, with a dollop of blaming the victim.
They carefully didn't mention that the district attorney doesn't prosecute looters.
Here's some of their execrable reportage, if you can call it that:
So we didn't have e-commerce, and Southern California was never a hub of trade (memo to LAT:
Look at the diagonal street grids of the area and Google why they were built that way) until the last year or two when this shambles started happening?
This wouldn't pass a sixth-grade term paper as far as logic goes.
And like the packages on the nearby tracks, the answer is right in front of their faces.
Los Angeles has a wokester district attorney who refuses to prosecute crimes.
That's what's happening, but like the track shambles itself, they didn't notice.
And it's a really big story now, making national headlines, given that most Americans had no idea that their country had gone this far down into becoming a third-world hellhole.
The practical problems are obvious, too.
Rail shipments are a linchpin of the supply chain, and these thefts are not only keeping store shelves empty but are also raising prices, as the cost of theft is always passed on to the consumer.
The land-based pirates, operating in rings, break into the shipping containers because they have no fear of prosecution.
Store shelves go empty,
COVID test kits get strewn on the tracks and out of pharmacies,
and missing package claims are filed to the tune of billions with the postal service and retailers.
It's a wholesale merger of the supply chain crisis and the Soros crime crisis right there in Los Angeles.
And man, it's ugly.
They could have had that story, but they had a "narrative," so their story got flabby.
Then they blamed the victim.
Union Pacific is charged with guarding the rail areas and has just private security guards to keep the thieves away.
Cops don't enforce that area.
The Los Angeles Times couched all of the complaints coming from Union Pacific about the extent of theft as something the company "claimed" to start — suggesting that maybe the company was exaggerating or lying.
Union Pacific is deploying more drones, has brought in extra security and enlisted the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to combat the thefts, Guerrero said.
But Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.
"We have millions of dollars of items and equipment, but it is unpoliced," Hurtado said.
"There are even sometimes weapons on these trains.
Everything goes by train, you learn."
The rail line didn't need large numbers of guards in the past, nor do they need brigades of guards when they pull into other stations in other cities...but that little issue escaped the LAT.
Next, the Times got out the gaslights, claiming that the crime isn't happening at all and it's all in our heads:
Though Los Angeles has seen a significant increase in homicides over the last two years, property crimes like the rail thefts are a different story.
That stat is literally irrelevant.
It doesn't describe what's happening at the Union Pacific depot.
It also barely notes that crimes are being not reported.
When the Union Pacific guards pick up a looter, the far-left district attorney of Los Angeles doesn't bother to prosecute.
Why go through the bother of reporting a crime if the district attorney is just going to fail to prosecute?
The Times included a crummy statement that should have been a "claim" from the D.A.'s office that the crimes they don't prosecute simply don't have enough evidence.
That's the Chesa Boudin line up in San Francisco, too.
It's like they read from the same talking points.
Win-win for the looter.
Win-win for the Soros left.
Not surprisingly, the shambles that have followed very likely led to the train derailment in Los Angeles just the other day.
That much crap on the tracks has to eventually contain something hard enough or massive enough to damage tracks or derail by itself a slow-moving freight train getting into or out of the station, so the shambles are getting harder to defend.
Wokesterism is causing these problems,
and the minute Los Angeles gets a district attorney willing to prosecute crimes to protect America's supply chain, the thieves will be gone
— and in the best scenario, locked up.
The press bid to cover up for the pirates and looters and explain away the shambles makes one wonder who these people are working for. Wokesterism, and only wokesterism, is behind this lunacy."
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