OMAHA SPEAKS.

Somebody in Union Pacific's communications office gave up part of Wild Card Weekend to comment on the news reports about looted container trains.

Union Pacific has 1,600 employees covering 275 miles of track at its nine rail facilities throughout Los Angeles County. The railroad mobilized an aggressive response, increasing the number of police assigned to protecting the targeted areas in Los Angeles County, as well as leveraging technology, such as drone surveillance, specialized fencing and trespass-detection systems.

Union Pacific agents have made hundreds of arrests, but less than half are booked and some are released in less than 24 hours.

In addition to Union Pacific efforts, partnership with local and state law enforcement and elected public officials is essential. Over the past year, rail thefts have increased by 160% in Los Angeles County and have spiked in the past three months during the holiday peak season. In October 2021 alone, thefts from Union Pacific trains increased 356% compared to October 2020.

Thefts over the past two weeks left Union Pacific rail property littered with debris, as reported by numerous media outlets.

The railroad called attention to their problem before Christmas. If you're a George Soros-backed prosecutor, you don't have to bother.

“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,” said the letter. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than 24 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 Union Pacific by these same criminals.”

The letter goes on to say criminals are boasting to Union Pacific officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence.

The letter urged the District Attorney to reconsider the policy applied to these cases: “While we understand the well-intended social justice goals of the policy, we need our justice system to support our partnership efforts with local law enforcement, hold these criminals accountable, and most important, help protect our employees and the critical local and national rail network.”

Apparently government jobs programs aren't bringing relief to the hobo jungles, but organized crime workfare is.

A bottleneck in the supply chain and the presence of homeless encampments near rail lines have contributed to the thefts, officials said.

"Organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft ... impacts our employees, our customers in the overall supply chain industry," said Adrian Guerrero, a director of public affairs for Union Pacific.

Guerrero estimates that about 90 cargo containers a day are compromised, sometimes by an organized group that has halted trains and recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.

Los Angeles officials, however, seem to be taking a similar line to Chicago's mayor. In Chicago, she took Magnificent Mile retailers to task for not investing enough in security (wait, what happened to the talking point that in-store security is all about the profiling, with those security people following lawful shoppers around?)  Likewise, it's apparently Union Pacific's fault that there aren't enough railroad bulls on the property.

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."

It's not as if the city fathers haven't been aware of the situation.

Dumping, trash and encampments around railroad tracks last year prompted Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino to call for the city to declare them a public nuisance. But the effort was dropped after Union Pacific cleaned up a swath of tracks, said his spokesperson, Branimir Kvartuc.

Still, Buscaino said, Union Pacific needs to hire more agents to patrol the tracks. "It's no surprise we are seeing the additional crimes," he said in a text, adding that the problems had been "unabated for years."

I wouldn't put it past California politicians to suggest that cleaning out hobo jungles is somehow not equitable. Meanwhile, the pilfering continues, and apparently local residents pick over the stuff the first wave of container robbers toss out.

No, I'm not joking about any of that.

In a hard-hitting social media post, Buscaino accused Union Pacific of not spending enough money and employing too few people to keep the areas around the tracks clean.

“I join the affected communities who are fed up with the lack of basic standards of maintenance along these tracks from a company who made $6.3 billion for their shareholders in 2020,” Buscaino wrote on his Facebook page, “and who boasted that Trump’s tax cut bill saved them $5.9 billion in 2017.”

In California, there are no limits to what you can blame on Donald Trump.  Even though Los Angeles's soft on crime policies are making conditions countrywide worse.