I want to show you something: have you seen this story about the railroad tracks in Los Angeles?
"Tonight, a derailment of 17 train cars in Los Angeles
Saturday leaving crews to clean up the mess. "See what everybody's seeing and asking myself
what the hell is going on?" "And on and on."
"Thousands of empty or damaged packages lining the tracks along the Union Pacific LA railway."
I don't really want to focus on that or the big political debate around it — I
want to focus on this thing: "the railroad is responsible for policing the tracks."
Why is that? Why do we have a special railroad police?
"We've amped up the number of our own special agents, our police force,
that are present in those areas." Right up there.
I'm on the tracks. I could be arrested right now.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics highlights a little more than 650 railroad police officers.
Real police officers! Why is that?
Why do we have a special railroad police, hired and paid for by railroads,
with a jurisdiction that usually includes the states they operate in, but also the rails?
The really weird story of railroad police is a history story, and it's one that says a lot about
the way we should think about policing even today. Okay, so the truth is the railroad is right over
there, but i've been doing so much research about railroad police that I am suddenly a
little too scared to trespass on their property, something i've been doing since I was, like, six.
But that brings me to the first question that you probably have:
is this a Paul Blart: Mall Cop situation? (Blart Blarts)
Now I realize how deeply offensive that probably would be if you're a railroad police officer,
and I'm sorry. But it's a natural question, with campus security,
mall security — is railroad security the same thing? And the answer is a definite no.
These are real police officers who carry real weapons — sorry, Paul.
"Giving the illusion that you have a gun, which of course we both know—you don't."
I mean look at this badge. How did this happen?
This is President Abraham Lincoln and Allan Pinkerton in 1862.
Pinkerton protected Lincoln en route to Baltimore
and worked for him during the Civil War. Pinkerton's detective agency,
later known as the Pinkertons, were a big part of the railroad police.
But there's a broader history here. I found this paper to have a helpful
super brief capsule history — basically, that in the 1850s large cities might have police
forces that look familiar to us, like this picture of a DC officer from 1871.
But for the most part, things were really underdeveloped in this period of time and
there was a lot of territory to cover. Look at this chart—that crest is all before 1910.
That is a lot of mileage to enforce. This 1860s map of Union Pacific Railroad lines
shows just how much space railroads had to watch out for in undeveloped areas, and these 1860s
stereographs nicely capture the vibe of "there is not a local police department in this place."
So in 1865, Pennsylvania passes a law that sets a precedent that cascades state by state:
"any corporation owning or using a railroad in this state may apply to the governor to commission
such persons as said corporation may designate to act as policeman for said corporation."
Today, every state but Wyoming and Minnesota basically does that.
Railroad police can make arrests on the line and usually throughout the state too.
Let's go back to Pinkerton. This move to railroad police was portrayed by some
authors at the time as a Pinkerton policy, and it expanded to include other industries soon after,
like the Coal and Iron police. But with that, you have the railroad police
a legit thing with state powers but privately employed. How did they keep it going to today?
Okay, so according to the Department of Transportation Safety Map,
this line right over here, the one that i am hiding from like a very very scared little boy,
that line is owned by CSX Transportation. "We are CSX. A team on the move."
That means that if I trespass here, CSX officers, who have jurisdiction over 21,000 miles of track
in the states they operate in, could straight up arrest me.
I have a life to protect, people. I can't give it all up for this video.
Also, I couldn't figure out how to get my camera high enough off the ground
so it would still point at me. How did all this stick around,
even as the country developed? This 1970s summary by a Union
Pacific police guy helped me think about it as two big unique threats that the railroad police
force was best equipped to handle: robberies and transients. The Wild Bunch, one of the
most active gangs in history, was active in 1899, and gangs continued throughout the 1920s.
Train heists were a real thing, and an onboard police force made the most sense for that.
Imagine having individual police forces track down trains and just imagine the paperwork.
Around the same time, large transient populations rode and occasionally robbed the rails.
I thought this was a purely Depression era thing, but basically as soon as trains were going, people
were riding the rails. And just think about it, you've got the same problem you do with robbers:
how do you enforce any of these rules across jurisdictions and state lines?
Soon, you had songs dedicated to the railroad police. This one embodies a rail rider asking
to be dropped off in a convenient location: "Special agent, put me off close to some town."
I gotta start walking home. So since World War One, the
number of railroad police has greatly diminished. So why should anybody actually care about this?
"Union Pacific says they've increased the number of special agents on site."
On the one hand, reformers want more supervision for private police departments,
since they're practically on their own. At the same time, some people who see that footage of
looted cars want more funding from railroad companies, a bigger private police force.
It kind of scrambles the politics of policing, like a thought experiment.
It is a weird thing that happened because of an historical holdover that goes all the way back
to Abraham Lincoln and Allan Pinkerton. And conflicts like today's in Los Angeles,
between public and private law enforcement arms, are easier to understand
if you know the weird history of the group doing the arresting. The question
that emerges is not just why do railroads have police, it's what should the police be?
So I was legitimately here for an hour and i didn't see a single train.
Uh, if you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel where I do history videos,
personal stuff like that. Um I'd love it if you stuck around and subscribed and let me know what
you think. Curious if you have thoughts on the weird history of railroad police,
stuff that I left out, and also if you just want to chastise me for being too scared
to do this whole video on the tracks with a little bindle over my shoulder. Yeah that's pretty much
it for this one, thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one. All right, bye.