Copper wire thieves have damaged the LA Metro system, darkened swaths of neighborhood streetlights, and swiped cell phone towers for years.
Now, L.A. City Councilmembers Traci Park and Kevin de León are calling for a new LAPD task force to fight back against the spike in copper crime that’s costing the city millions of dollars each year.
“The city, quite literally, is being stripped for parts,” de León’s motion said.
About the issue
Park, whose 11th district includes West L.A, Venice, and Brentwood, told LAist copper wire theft is one of the most serious problems the city is facing.
There’s been nearly 400 thefts reported using the MyLA311 app since 2020 in her district alone, Park said, and that doesn’t include the number of reports to the LAPD or other agencies.
“Thieves and vandals have tampered with traffic signals in our intersections, with rail crossings, and other infrastructure that actually puts people’s lives at risk,” she said. “So this is something that we just simply cannot tolerate.”
Miguel Sangalang is the director of the Bureau of Street Lighting, which handles all of the streetlights for the city of Los Angeles.
That includes roughly 250,000 streetlight assets, connected by about 9,000 miles of underground conduit and 27,000 miles of copper wire, which covers two-thirds of the city.
Sangalang told LAist it’s not unheard of to have these kinds of thefts because the components in an electrical system are valuable, but the pace of the problem has reached a level they’ve never seen before.
He said they’ve dealt with a tenfold increase in repair reports over the last five years — from about 500 to 700…
Read the full article here
