In the news: A recent in-depth story by the New York Times reports on rising cargo theft incidents impacting hazardous and non-hazardous shippers alike. According to the story, some 20 million containers move through Los Angeles and Long Beach ports yearly, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia.
- Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing.
- The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops, and parking lots.
- Cases of reported cargo theft in the United States have nearly doubled since 2019, according to CargoNet, a theft-focused subsidiary of Verisk. This multinational company analyzes business risks in the insurance sector.
- On CargoNet’s map of cargo-theft hot spots, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, and Memphis appear as distinct, high-incident areas. But the biggest area stretches out over the Los Angeles Valley.
Piracy is an age-old occupation, but this modern-day resurgence in cargo theft stems in no small part from the extreme ways the internet has altered the buying and selling of things.
- When the United States Census Bureau began collecting data on e-commerce in 1998, online sales amounted to some $5 billion.
- Now, that figure is upward of $958 billion; e-commerce revenue is forecast to exceed $2.5 trillion by 2027.
The need to get packages to consumers quickly has reshaped the infrastructural landscape, changing how freight moves worldwide through more warehouses, distribution centers, modes of transport, trucks, trains, planes, and delivery drivers. This ever-quickening tangle has opened new vulnerabilities to be exploited by supply-chain thieves.
Go deeper: On the website of Operation Boiling Point, which the Department of Homeland Security recently created to go after organized theft groups, the agency states that cargo theft accounts for between $15 billion and $35 billion in annual losses.