[antonmks]

It is pretty strange that a country doesn't control what is going in and what is going out. In a small European country I'm most familiar with, everything is checked by customs officers. Dogs, x-rays, customs declarations, import taxes.

[nikcub]

You can't inspect everything without creating a huge friction on trade. Australia is well known for it's tight borders - not just for security but for quarantine as well. It only inspects ~5% of containers and ~80% of interceptions are driven by intelligence.

The later is how you solve this. The stolen goods trade described in the article is likely centred around a few key networks that could be taken down with resourcing intelligence and law enforcement.

The article itself states that the UK has failed to arrest any top-level members. Cut the head off and you'll see the pull factor of street-level thefts removed, or at least disrupted.

[yelling_cat]

The article covers this:

> Around the world, border agencies overwhelmingly focus on imports, hunting for people and drugs. In many countries, exports are hardly checked at all. Anyone can book a container.

[MattGrommes]

The incentives just don't seem to be there. This boggled my mind:

> For each container Mr Gibson holds up and searches, the police must pay the port a fee of £200.

[dghlsakjg]

That caught my attention too.

A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.

Congratulations: the port is now a crime scene, its gonna take hours or days to process this. I'm going to need you to remove all containers from this shipper from the stacks for further inspection. Please stop all movement of containers. I'll need to interview all longshoremen who came in contact with this container. Please begin filling out these 17 forms to recover your inspection fee.

[mindslight]

You need to think of the containers that are stopped, inspected, and found to have nothing illegal. £200 would seem much less than the costs the police are causing by holding a container [0]. You're actually arguing for the government to cause even more damage, in retaliation for one small instance of the government having to partially compensate the victims of its actions. Frankly we should be moving in the exact opposite direction where the government correctly accounts for the harms it causes, instead of externalizing them in a reverse lottery.

[0] I welcome corrections on this, but I would think the commercial per-day storage fee is higher than £200

[RandomBacon]

And then their boss gets mad at your boss's boss, then you find yourself doing the midnight shift in the area where police get shot at daily.

[dghlsakjg]

I was operating on the, perhaps faulty, assumption that the police higher ups are interested in stopping this sort of crime.

[rfwhyte]

They are far less interested in stopping crime than they are in ensuring the wheels of the capitalist world-eating machine remain sufficiently greased.

The primary role of the police after all is to protect capital, not people.

Shutting down a port would cost the billionaires (who donate to the politicians who are in charge of the police) money, so its much preferable to the police and those in positions of power over them to let the crime run rampant so long as the ports keep operating so that the billionaires profits can flow unimpeded.

[dghlsakjg]

I assure you that the people having their supercars, million dollar farm equipment, and other goods stolen and shipped overseas are also capitalists, and consider their stolen assets to be capital as well.

[GJim]

> A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.

Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.

Here, we prefer our police to be beholden to the public and obey the law; the spirit as well as the letter. It creates a trust that is clearly lacking with the (frankly thuggish) American police. To their clear detriment.

[MagicMoonlight]

The ports are always corrupt. If we were serious about drugs we would just lock down the ports

[dmurray]

The image seems to show him cutting the container open with an angle grinder. Do you want the police to be able to destructively enter any property without making the owner whole?

Yeah, in this case there was a stolen Porsche in it, but most of the time it's likely to be an innocent shipment.

[dghlsakjg]

They were cutting the tamper seal off. That is a disposable metal part that sells for a few cents. It is supposed to be removed destructively, and authorities do it all the time for inspection purposes, document the serial number of seal they removed, and tell the shipper what the new seal is. Sometimes its a lock, but most shippers don't do that since it is a hassle to get the keys to the receiver, and customs will cut your lock off. The act of sealing the container after inspection makes the owner whole.

While it is "destructive" in a very strict sense, it damages no property in any relevant way.

Any shipper anywhere on earth is well aware that their container can be opened by the authorities at any time.

[immibis]

That's a thing in the USA. The police bulldozed someone's house and didn't pay a dime. The family sued the police and lost, because the law says the police can just do that - bulldoze your home "to catch a criminal" - and they don't have to compensate you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPLvSYJvSkw

You don't want this. As long as the police are actually catching criminals, the fee shouldn't bother them. It's probably not that much compared to the rest of the cost of the operation.

Sibling comment says the seal is worth a few cents, but ignores the inconvenience of someone having to go to the port and replace the seal, plus the possible delay in getting it loaded. These containers and their contents are worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. A $200 fee to be able to mess with one is not unreasonable.

[dec0dedab0de]

T̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ The more shipments you have, the more officers you need. The more officers you have, the better the chance one of them is working for organized crime.

[bee_rider]

Although, your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter, while your population to pull agents from should scale like your area, so unless you have a very weird geometry this should get easier as you increase in size, right?

Airports not included.

[Terr_]

The main factor is the quantity of goods which need to be inspected, and that tends to scale with the population which is buying the goods.

> your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter

Is that really true? An entry-point is generally something the people choose to create to satisfy the pre-existing need to transport goods, by building roads, rail, harbor-piers, etc.

Border-checkpoint facilities don't spontaneously generate in trackless wilderness or barren coastlines, like some fantasy-dungeon that the Adventurers' Guild must periodically raid in to avert a stampede of monsters.

[bee_rider]

> Is that really true?

Probably not true, but very intuitive!

[mandevil]

Why should population scale with area? The top ten countries in area are:

Russia (#9 in population) Canada (#37) China (#2) USA (#3) Brazil (#7) Australia (#54) India (#1) Argentina (#33) Kazakhstan (#62) Algeria (#32)

There doesn't seem to be much relationship between the two?

[macleginn]

If we believe that Claude pulled correct data: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d74a7c48-b5a1-4d86-acc2-e...

[lifestyleguru]

The scale and logistics of major ports like Barcelona, Hamburg, or Rotterdam are unimaginable.