It's even more strange than that when you consider that the UK hasn't been any sort of industrial manufacturer for many decades. What is it that is supposedly being shipped? Granted, some British auto manufacturers might be shipping those, but why should containers full of phones ever leave the UK? Every ship leaving their ports is leaving with stolen goods.

If anyone cared, this problem could be ended even without the cooperation of the destination countries. But no one hurt by this has enough political sway to do anything about it.

Indeed. If the UK can do something as wild as ChatControl, why not ShippingContainerControl?

From the article:

> Fourth, police forces largely remain in the dust. NaVCIS has enjoyed some success, intercepting 550 cars in the past year. But that is a small fraction of what gets through. Mr Gibson is one of three officers on the whole south coast. Britain’s police have yet to catch any high-ups in the business. European forces do not even have dedicated investigation teams. Across the rich world, police resources tend to be directed towards “higher harm” offences.

There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.

Also in the article, they mention at the time of theft cell phones are wrapped in foil, and GPS jammers are installed on the car.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Expensive luxury cars are one big pain for society. Draining the economies and fuelling organized crime.

A new aluminium iMac or MacBook Air, or MS surface for 200 dollars?

Those are the prices of stolen goods. A lot of people want a metal computer instead of a plastic one, but don't want to pay for it.

I was offered stolen goods at those prices and passed. A friend of mine took the bait as was super happy for a month or so until police took his new adquisition from him. Of course he received no compensation as it was stolen and they could prove it, so in the end it was expensive.

How Kadyrov came into possesion of multiple Cybertrucks must be an interesting story, probably revealing entire supply chains of few crime organizations.

Crime statistics are difficult.

England & Wales (because policing is a devolved matter in the UK) have very robust crime recording rules. Consequently, the detection rates are low because you record and close crimes where there is literally no prospect of a conviction.

You compare this to, say, Japan, where an investigation only starts if it’s likely that the crime will be solved, and you have an explanation for why detections seem comparatively poor.

There is also the fact that, despite TVs assertion to the contrary, that solving crime is not easy and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.

As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.

> Idk how this is acceptable at all.

Because the only society with a high clearance rate for crime is a police state that is very good at finding someone to blame, but not necessary the guy who did it.