Once the media ran out of stories to tell about shoplifting, they went to the trains. A flurry of articles popped up about a rail hub in Los Angeles County where, Union Pacific alleges, people have been targeting trains and their cargo to steal items. According to one New York Times story, some people were using “bolt-cutters” to open cargo holds and then loading items into vans or trucks. (Others have pointed out the issue of sourcing – these are all based on second-hand knowledge or corporate spin and not specific reports or confessions.) According to Union Pacific, their police have made “hundreds of arrests,” but less than half are booked, setting themselves up as an innocent victim in the myth of lax criminal penalties.
The whole series of stories appears to have come from one source – a photojournalist who said he heard “on the scanner” about railroads thefts and then went to take pictures. On Twitter, they went viral and inspired a flurry of journalists to go and check it out, like tourists in a strange terrain.
The accompanying photos are really the story – a flurry of garbage strewn about, people’s mail, Amazon packages, larger items like televisions, etc. – all told with amazement and concern. A “wasteland,” the New York Times declares. The pictures depict alarming disorder, like the aftermath of a tornado or fire, as well as the gluttony of capitalism gone amuck – boxes labeled REI, Amazon, and the Home Depot, plastic water bottles, epi-pens, etc. Your family photos strewn about railroad tracks for all to see, CAN YOU IMAGINE? The New York Times features a propped-up photo of a family dressed in matching clothes for a portrait. The absolutely cruelty. Then some members of the media called the people on the packages. You get a call – DID YOU KNOW your Amazon return is lying alongside railroad tracks. Investigative journalism in action.
The stories come, notably, after over a year of media-fueled fears of inflation and supply chain management – read, it takes longer to get things – as well as the visible collapse of transportation methods people thought were failsafe – the cargo ship stuck in the canal – reminding consumers that not everything comes through a network of tubes into our brain but must actually be delivered by real people via earth-bound transportation.
A few years ago, I spent time reporting on and researching “rural crime,” which includes things like the theft of cattle, nuts, beehives, and, yes, trains – train cargo and train horns (which interestingly have a black market and, from what I can tell, are just really, really loud horns). Part of my reporting involved spending time with a unit that specializes in “agricultural crimes” in California’s Central Valley. I spoke with detectives, people in agri-business, and citizens who lived in rural areas, and I attended professional meetings of agri-business organizations.
It was through this reporting that I first heard about the “train police.” Union Pacific, which is the second-largest train company in the United States but runs most of the trains in California, has its own police force which consists not just of security guards but also detectives who have jurisdiction over alleged crimes that happen either on trains or around train tracks. The Union Pacific police have the authority to enforce all state laws – not federal – wherever the railroad has property. (In general, states license such private police and have their own rules.) But, the Union Pacific police can also pursue suspects anywhere, including over state lines, which makes the railroad police more influential – and less accountable – than one might think. In fact, according to Union Pacific, their police are also involved in homeland security/ border patrol operations both as joint task forces and through surveillance. Features include “$72.5 million invested over the last decade on support for drug interdiction programs at the US-Mexico border” as well as “virtual fencing” and other surveillance methods.
The Union Pacific railroad police is actually a descendant of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was established in the 1850s by an Illinois barrel-maker and took over a lot of investigative work for the federal government. As many scholars have pointed out, the early development of policing included a lot of private security and agencies that were “police-like;” today there are more private security guards than public police. And, even though the law draws a bright line between the two, both history and reality show that not only did public and private policing develop in parallel, but that they also share many of the man qualities — namely, for the purposes of this writing — a concern about protect capital and corporations at the expense of people.
Like a lot of other police agencies, the fiction and fact often blend together when talking about early policing in the U.S. Pinkerton wrote pulpy novels. Sheriffs write entire histories of their department without mentioning their role in Jim Crow. The train police are similarly enveloped in the history of the West and its popular heroes: Buffalo Bill. Pony Express. Wyatt Earp. The Western U.S. is so popular that the glut of fanboy material makes it difficult to actually determine what is “true.”
But the development of the Western United States could also be told as a tale of capitalism, with the main characters being workers, merchants, and lawyers, not gunslingers and bad guys. Western imperialism presented a challenge when it came to law enforcement. While some cities had police forces after the Civil War, almost nowhere in the West did. “Law enforcement” was provided by a spotty assortment of sheriffs and their posse – basically armed citizenry – alongside vigilance committees.
The history of the United States’ westward expansion involved both the systemic killing and displacement of Native Americans as well as the desire to capitalize the natural resources. The war-like attitudes of the people who moved West deeply impacted the nascent law enforcement forces, which is something I think some of the histories of early police ignore. Most of the police-style people in California, for example, made their reputation and built their shooting chops by killing Native Americans and then capturing them for forced labor. Some of the early laws in the Western U.S. criminalized “providing alcohol” to Native Americans because, the racist thinking went, Native Americans were peculiarly impacted by booze and became less useful as workers. (Never mind that many white people paid Native American workers with alcohol in lieu of cash.) My point here is to be clear that the roots of private and public policing were deeply racist and xenophobic, which would translate smoothly into deeply resentful and suspicious attitudes about workers, especially migrant workers, and inevitability when there is massive growth in capital.
Similarly, there were deep concerns about unwanted migrants from the East who were considered less capable and inclined to commit crimes. There were not enough people to have a standing police force (or army), so most of the time, the elected county sheriff would call a posse of local men to his aid. There was no difference in training or expertise; no requirements or licensing. It would make sense that the demands of capitalism would also demand the professionalization of “solving crime,” hence the development of the Pinkerton agency.
Railroad companies like Union Pacific were extremely influential in how all aspects of the West developed. For example, when Union Pacific made North Platte, Nebraska, a major hub, “the Union Pacific built a major depot, a twenty-car roundhouse, machine and blacksmith shops, an icehouse, coal sheds, a hotel, and a restaurant.” Other professionals and industries built around the railroad town.
One of the things the railroad brought was its own private, professional police force to protect company property and sometimes assist with law enforcement. Just as the Union Pacific company town created, in essence, a real town, Union Pacific police would lead to the creation of municipal police. In Nebraska, for example, less than 10 years after Union Pacific created North Platt, the town incorporated, levied taxes, and built a courthouse and jail (along with a schoolhouse and half-a-dozen churches). So, rather than seeing private police as a development born of public policing (or vice versa), it’s more proper to see both evolving alongside each other. There wouldn’t be a jail, for example, without a critical amount of capital flowing through a population center to protect.
And nothing really reflects the private-public partnership better than the fact that the first sheriff in Lincoln County (which contains North Platte) was O.O. Austin, an engineer for Union Pacific. (Did he have experience? Who cares.) Multiple other sheriffs and law enforcement officials cycled in and out of Union Pacific police forces throughout the West, so, just as now, it was common to find people who did both. In Nebraska, at least, there was always more private police than public throughout the 19th century.
The other thing that Union Pacific brought was laborers and, often, camp towns, nicknamed “hell on wheels” because of their reputation for gambling, murder, and prostitution. People from the time report an increase in saloons that seemed to match the bourgeoning population – a typical railroad town would go from a few hundred people to a few thousand in a short period of time. The alleged “vice” that came with camps of construction crews created another justification for increased policing. Alongside the railroad police, cities would create a local police force in addition to the county sheriff; sometimes, ranchers would hire their own detectives as well.
On top of the laborers who brought alleged problems of drinking, violence, and gambling, railroads and railroad towns became notorious for transients, called “tramps” or “hobos.” These were people who, according to police and Union Pacific, hitched a ride on a train into town, commit a crime, and then hop out of town on the train before law enforcement could catch them. The media caught onto this phenomenon like a dog with a bone.
Some sample headlines
“War with Tramps” -- Oregon, 1889. “The tramp nuisance is assuming serious proportion on this line of road.”
“Can Capture Tramps. Scheme to Keep the Railway Yards Free from Hobo Tenantry.” -- Iowa, 1897
The scheme involved transporting sealing the train car containing “tramps” and then transporting the car back to Cedar Rapids for the authorities to handle.
We would have to go through hundreds of records of individual towns, but what I have seen indicates that theft and robbery were the most common crimes for which people were arrested even though tales of the Western U.S. abound in murder and shooting. In North Platte, 64% of all prosecutions were for property crimes during the ten years the city was a Union Pacific town. (Histories indicate that people did shoot at each other a lot, but this was often considered self-defense and not criminal.)
Most of the business of private security (many of which, like the Union Pacific police operate in a quasi-public way because they can enforce state laws) is to protect corporations and shareholders from liability, either in the form of stolen goods (including intellectual property), rebellious workers, or deaths on the job. One of the biggest differences between private security and public police forces is, in fact, the desire to recover stolen goods. Police detectives, even good ones, take reports for thefts that will almost never get solved. The missing goods are sort of beside the point as the idea behind public policing is that goods are fungible and that what’s done is done. Police don’t look back.
Private police, however, have a vested interest in returning goods to their corporate employer, largely because if they don’t, the insurance company (which also has a stake in the outcome) will pressure them to figure something out. (In that vein, most of the stories mention groups of workers hired to basically reclaim materials that may be on the ground around railroad tracks.) Plus, private police have no requirement to be transparent with journalists or politicians. They don’t need to answer FOIAs. (See here for reports that Union Pacific intentionally destroyed records of investigations into deaths and injuries at train crossings.) They report to no one but the corporation, and why would a corporation want anything public?
But still, why the crush of stories now?
Union Pacific, in the tradition of Walmart, appears to have entered a time of austerity and, according to one story, fired an “unspecified” number of train cops even as, the company claims, they experience 160% increase in cargo theft over the past year. (Walmart, similarly, “downsized” their workforce and placed the burden of preventing and punishing thefts on the local police.) Those “savings” pass along the cost of protecting railroads to public police and the district attorney of Los Angeles County, George Gascon, who pointed the finger back at Union Pacific for its own problems after the railroad wrote Gascon a letter complaining that his prosecution policies are harming business. I have yet to see one article about one specific arrest or prosecution (or non-prosecution) that matches any of these claims.
Here it seems worth noting that Union Pacific is liable for a lot. Worker deaths. Train crashes. Train derailments. Crossing accidents. Pollution that is killing people. Blocking roads. In Bakersfield, a body was found on the train tracks and Union Pacific police investigated – but no one knows why. In 2007, Union Pacific police ran a “sting” operation in which they ticketed 24 people for things like crossing railroad tracks not at a crossing or going around blockades. Such “safety” violations are all misdemeanors.
Look, I’m not the first person in the world to point out that capitalism and corporate supremacy have had a huge impact on law enforcement and have largely led to private-public partnerships that are entwined in society. (And, I have written about shoplifting and the policing of it as a particular nexus of this public-private enforcement partnership.)
I am fascinated with the idea that private and public policing grew together. Some academics have theorized about the role of private policing in the criminal legal system as well as the role it plays in complicating reform efforts.. Just as early sheriffs in the U.S. were a pay-for-service model (and still are), it seems natural that private policing would develop alongside public policing and, as a result, there is no eliminating or controlling one without the other.