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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.