That caught my attention too.

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

And then their boss gets mad at your boss's boss, then you find yourself doing the midnight shift in the area where police get shot at daily.

I was operating on the, perhaps faulty, assumption that the police higher ups are interested in stopping this sort of crime.

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.

The ports are always corrupt. If we were serious about drugs we would just lock down the ports

They were cutting the tamper seal off. That is a disposable metal part that sells for a few cents. It is supposed to be removed destructively, and authorities do it all the time for inspection purposes, document the serial number of seal they removed, and tell the shipper what the new seal is. Sometimes its a lock, but most shippers don't do that since it is a hassle to get the keys to the receiver, and customs will cut your lock off. The act of sealing the container after inspection makes the owner whole.

While it is "destructive" in a very strict sense, it damages no property in any relevant way.

Any shipper anywhere on earth is well aware that their container can be opened by the authorities at any time.

That's a thing in the USA. The police bulldozed someone's house and didn't pay a dime. The family sued the police and lost, because the law says the police can just do that - bulldoze your home "to catch a criminal" - and they don't have to compensate you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPLvSYJvSkw

You don't want this. As long as the police are actually catching criminals, the fee shouldn't bother them. It's probably not that much compared to the rest of the cost of the operation.

Sibling comment says the seal is worth a few cents, but ignores the inconvenience of someone having to go to the port and replace the seal, plus the possible delay in getting it loaded. These containers and their contents are worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. A $200 fee to be able to mess with one is not unreasonable.