By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

Patrick Barber, president of the Charleston Motor Carriers Association, said one of the positives to come out of the 2002 cargo container thefts was a closer working relationship with the Charleston Police Department.

“Perhaps the biggest surprise to come out of that experience was how little the police department understood the maritime and affiliated trucking industry at the time,” he said.

“Now, that’s no slight to them. Through sharing information and explaining the realities of our world, we wound up building a wonderful relationship with them.”

Barber recalled that a question from officers responding to the scene raised a red flag.

“They asked, ‘When a container leaves a port, who knows where it’s going and when it’s going there?’” he said. “Of course, the answer was, dozens of people do, anyone playing a role in the logistics chain.

“Until we told them that, I don’t think they realized the potential for information being misdirected to a criminal element.”

Police’s growing understanding of the possibility of misdeeds led to a meeting between police department representatives and members of the trucking community at Superior Transportation’s former facility on Milford Avenue.

The one sticking point during the discussion was a suggestion by one of the detectives that trucking firms hire off-duty police officers to serve as guards when trucking facilities and freight yards are closed.

“We had been hoping for beefed-up patrols or perhaps the creation of a special investigations unit, and a lot of us took exception to the proposal,” said Barber, who at the time had just paid the city $13,000 in licensing fees.

“A lot of people felt we were paying for a level of service through our licensing fees, and then being asked to pay extra to city employees—albeit off-duty (employees)—in order to get that level of service” was unacceptable, he said.

Some five years later, Barber said, he’d still like to see a special investigations unit formed, but on a much broader scale than he had sought in 2002.

In Barber’s view, only such an entity would have the jurisdictional muscle to get a handle on a moving target that manifests itself strictly in the dead of night. At the same time, he said, such a task force could serve as an invaluable source of information.

In the absence of such a clearinghouse, the motor carrier’s association established a listserv through which members can report missing containers, report abandoned containers they’ve found left on or near their properties, and provide fair warning to their colleagues that the thefts are on the rise again.

“It’s crazy how frequent these incidents have been,” said Keri L. Hill, who maintains the listserv. “Fortunately we have been able to recover some through e-blasting our CMCA members, but others are not so lucky.”

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@setcommedia.com.

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