Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown travelled to the Port Newark Container Terminal in New Jersey to meet with U.S. Department of Homeland Security this month.

The terminal covers 272 acres and handles more than 1.3 million containers each year, it says on its website. The trip gave Brown some insight into what American authorities are doing to crack down on organized crime. He learned about their strategies, from stricter rules for shipping container use to high-tech scanners, in order to combat auto theft, which has become a major problem in Canada, especially in Ontario and Quebec.