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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

Wow.

My feeling is that metal theft is getting out of control. If the news reporting on it is to be trusted, cases are in fact rising. Thieves have probably always hit junkyards and stolen wire, but now there seems to be more and more infrastructure hit as well.

The oddest aspect of this is that scrap steel isn't even worth that much. How many tons could that be? Let's say it's 400 tons, that's maybe $100k. And it seems like extremely high risk, because they're going to be looking for this everywhere now. Why would they not just steal two or three cars, which would never make the news. They must be skilled to pull something like that off in a night.

Edit: Another user linked the street view, apparently the article image wasn't the actual tower. So based on that it's much less metal even.

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Criminals don't make sense to you because you're trying to explain their behavior with your own thought process. You're likely much smarter than they are, with a better understanding of risk vs reward and lower impulsivity. Also you can't explain criminal behavior with purely financial motivations. Car thieves are not making $33k per car. A lot of them don't even sell them, just steal what's inside and use them for a joy ride (ask me how I know). Lots of petty criminals and drug dealers are not making very much money, especially for the level of risk. But compared to a traditional job it's much less restrictive, fun and exciting, lets you hang out with your friends most of the time, and has a lot more social clout with their peers than traditional employment.

IMO, they should be playing games or sports instead. Give people more opportunities to do just what you said (instead of working supposedly boring (at least to them) jobs), instead of hurting people/property to achieve that.

How do you know?

Seconded! Sounds like interesting stories.

Our local metro area has had a problem with copper thieves for a few years now, cutting open and stealing the wiring from street lights.

People are why we can't have nice things, apparently.

when the price of copper went through the roof a few years ago the local drug houses in Dallas started accepting it as payment for drugs. They would then sell the metal to scrap yards at a profit. Once that was up and running any copper left unguarded was gone instantly. Air conditioners were gone, wiring in new construction was gone, wiring in rent houses was gone, any copper anywhere was stolen constantly. I remember seeing people pushing shopping carts in Old East Dallas filled with copper cables, pipes, and other stuf.

There was a story probably once a month about someone breaking into a power substation or some other high voltage area to try and steal copper and electrocuting themselves.

My local scrapyard requires a photo ID before they will pay for anything other than aluminum cans. Doesn't seem like a complicated solution.

that's what started to turn the tide (along with falling prices) the police started cracking down on scrap yards buying obviously stolen property.

Around here most of them require an electrical or plumbing contractor's license to sell that stuff. There's an online system to verify the license, and one of the conditions of the license is purchasing a bond and insurance.

And it's a good thing that fake IDs are illegal so criminals can't circumvent that kind of thing.

Metal thieves who are exchanging wiring for cash for drugs are even more impulsive than other street criminals. Sometimes raising the bar a bit can make a big difference.

They're targeting rail infrastructure here, but a lot of copper there is being replaced with cheaper materials like aluminium.

And signalling with fiber.

In an area around nearby, years ago (in the sticks...) someone went up the power lines through the woods and clipped all the bare grounding wire from miles of poles from about 8 feet up to the ground.

Seems like a lot of work for low money.

> People are why we can't have nice things, apparently.

Always has been. With that said, this is incredibly impressive from a logistics perspective. Hire these folks for demolition and salvage work.

Or arrest them, convict them, and make them pickup garbage on weekends.

Good luck with that. You can’t even arrest people who break into vehicles in broad daylight.

Good luck with that, someone will have to supervise them. And supervise the supervisors.

Humans will always be the problem, because there is one immutable fact about humans that history has proven too many times to list.

There. Is. Always. An. Asshole.

Always.

'People' is a remarkable way to misspell 'poverty'.

Poverty is not itself a reason to commit crime. Some people steal whether they are poor or rich, others don't, whether they are poor or rich.

Around here, it's mostly organized gangs doing the stealing, not random poor people... If that were the case, the city wouldn't have a single light fixture left unscathed.

> Poverty is not itself a reason to commit crime.

Of course not. It would be absurd to assert otherwise. You always get some scofflaws, but I don't see a reason to assume you get more scofflaws in a weak economy than a strong one. More lawbreakers, yes, but breaking laws for economically rational reasons isn't the same as doing so for its own sake.

I would be curious to know where the people who join such groups come from, and what other prospects they might have had such that difficult, dangerous, and illegal work still ends up looking preferable.

Limited experience based on what my friend told me (I grew up in a rural community, so very different dynamics): it starts in schools.

Gangs start recruiting young. It's a fast way to get "friends" who have more than you do- the illusion of power, material wealth, so on.

Furthermore, attempting to do well in school means your fellow students will bully you for "acting white".

If your parents didn't do well in school, they are less likely to pressure you to do well. They might be working long hours to make ends meet, or living on disability or either form of welfare. This will exclude you from many extracurricular activities which require parental support as well.

If you see your parents barely making ends meet, and gangbangers offer you the illusion of more, and everyone around you says you'll never amount to anything by studying or trying to get good grades, it isn't hard to see the allure.

So, for these students at least, poverty is a culture and the trap becomes lifelong once you get a record and can't get a job anywhere that pays better than minimum wage. Rinse and repeat with the next generation.

My friend was fortunate enough to have a father who pressured him to do well in school, and to go on to secondary education. He escaped the trap, but few of the people he grew up with did the same.

And if you tell anything of the above on a public forum, you'd be immediately canceled and branded a "racist". It's amazing how the current progressive elite is undermining themselves.

You read this comment on a public forum.

Sorry, I meant to say on an official forum, where speakers are identified by name.

Plenty of us are identified by name.

Can you name an example of this happening? Because OP's narrative is very common in a lot of "progressive" places in in the media. It's one of the core ideas of progressivism that poverty is a trap and that people need help from the government to escape it.

I can think of some other less mainstream news sources that would have a problem with that idea.

It's probably the part where I mentioned the cultural aspect of my friend's experience, including trying hard in school resulting in being scoffed at or bullied for "acting white".

Also, the "people need the governments help to escape it" was very much not the moral of this particular parable. All it took was a father who gave a damn.

> Can you name an example of this happening?

Easy. Ann Hsu, a school board member in SF: https://sfstandard.com/2022/07/19/racially-insensitive-schoo...

Here are her exact words: "Especially in the Black and brown community, I see one of the biggest challenges as being the lack of family support for those students... Unstable family environments caused by housing and food insecurity along with lack of parental encouragement to focus on learning cause children to not be able to focus on or value learning"

> It's one of the core ideas of progressivism that poverty is a trap and that people need help from the government to escape it.

Except that somehow it also adopted a notion that certain groups are forever victims. Black communities are struggling? That's because of white supremacy and systemic racism. So we need to double the struggle against the white supremacy.

Investigating the causes of Black struggles? That's racist.

That's a really good point right there.

In the broad I agree, but in this specific case, I don't think poor people can dismantle a 200' steel radio tower without anyone noticing. I'm guessing that would require some heavy, expensive equipment.

To do safely, sure.

i blame it on culture

> Why would they not just steal two or three cars,

Is this a real question? You're coming at this with the position that car theft is so easy because it's easy to get away with and has a high rate of return. That only works if you have the connections with chop shops or exporters to be able to get money for that car. You also have to have the skills/tools for being able to steal the car in the first place. To flip that, the people that do steal cars would probably have no clue on how to dismantle a steel structure, have the means to load/haul that steel, or know what recycling places will even buy from them without immediately reporting it to police.

Reminds me of sand theft. Apparently, sometimes even an entire beach gets dug up and stolen.

Planet Money did an episode on it.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/628890875

The tower can get some stub legs welded on and it'll be good as new, at least $10,000 worth, maybe as much as $15,000. The 200' self supporting tower I've been eying is $11,000 used.

100k between 4-5 people, is a lot of money for a lot of people. Especially metal stealing ones

I highly doubt it's worth 100k as scrap. The "6 figures" price tag was to replace it. Maybe they have some way to sell this equipment for its original purpose, but if they are selling it for scrap it'll go for a tiny fraction of what it would be worth in working condition.

also, if the scrapyard suspected it was stolen they probably wouldn't buy it. I bet it's at the bottom of a river somewhere.

Nah Jasper is that kind of place in Alabama where even a stolen 200’ tower can be fenced

400 tons?

As a reference: A 10-foot section of Rohn 45G weighs about 70 pounds. 200 feet of 45G is thus about 1,400 pounds -- less than a ton.

(I do not know if this particular tower was Rohn 45G or something else that may be heavier -- I only know that it was a guyed tower, and that (when guyed) 45G can be stacked beyond 200 feet.)

~5 years ago when I was driving back and forth to an adjacent state to work on our house to get it on the market, I discover my ground wire had been stolen. It was no more than 2' long and was the only exposed wire outside. The house was on a very rural 2 mile road with only 7-8 other houses. They had to be desperate.

400 tons is 800k pounds or 10 fully laden semi trailers of material, it’s definitely not anywhere near that much. I bet you could fit the whole thing on one flatbed with room to spare.

It's definitely not that much, as the yard near me pays $0.60 a pound and that tower is not worth $500k.

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