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argo theft has been a perennial problem for the trucking industry, resulting in losses of at least $12 billion a year, according to industry experts. And the word coming out of a Washington, D.C., conference last week held little relief for carriers.

On the one hand, an official of the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that the agency was too busy trying to counter terrorists to offer much assistance to carriers that suffer cargo thefts.

And at the same time, shippers told attendees that they should get tough with their carriers and hold them responsible for averting cargo thefts.

Don Wright, chief of the FBI’s Major Theft Transportation Crimes Unit, told the Cargo Security Forum that fleets need to “clean up your own business.” He said, “Don’t rely on the government to handle all the problems.”

Rather, Wright said, fleets need to pay more attention to the people they hire. And he said the FBI wanted more of the investigative work to be done by private firms hired by the fleets, in order to reduce the bureau’s workload.

The FBI is shifting much of its resources to fighting terrorism. “When we handle cargo theft cases now,” Wright said, “we look for terrorist funding” behind the crime.

Meanwhile, the global security manager for Motorola Inc., Robert Bullington, urged shippers to demand that their carriers invest in expensive security systems in order to protect their cargo.

“Make contractual language so they are responsible if they lose your stuff,” he said of carriers. And Bullington urged shippers to shift to other fleets if they don’t get cooperation.

He said that when he visits freight forwarding companies he “counts their cameras, counts their locks,” to ensure that the companies are serious about preventing cargo theft.

The good news for carriers came in a lesson from another session at the conference: the most effective solutions to preventing cargo theft are often simple and inexpensive.

Unlocked doors, unattended entrances and simple mistakes lead to many of the thefts, participants said. “Ninety-nine, point nine percent of the time somebody did something stupid” that allowed a major cargo theft, said Will Urban, director of security for Expeditors, a logistics firm.

The Department of Transportation’s Transportation Safety Institute will be conducting a series of training seminars to teach motor carriers how to prevent cargo theft. The first session will be on Jan. 20.

Clearly, more needs to be done to combat cargo theft, and the message is just as clear that trucking needs to lead the way.

This story appeared in the Oct. 13 edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.

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