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Comment by helge9210 | Hacker News Reader

Don't try to catch thieves. Go for the scrapyards/recycling companies buying the metal.

I work with a lot of scrap and scrappers. they did this at the local scrapyard, and indeed they stopped accepting anything from anyone without a city-issued business license.

now the tweakers sell directly to scrappers with a business license, that take a 25-50% cut.

That's how it works in the UK, following too many thefts of copper cables for railways which are at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude more expensive to repair than highway barriers.

You must show identification when selling scrap metal, and the scrapyard must record that for a period.

Railway cable theft is still relatively common in the UK

Don’t worry, the police definitely aren’t trying to catch thieves.

In addition to basically no consequences for US police breaking the law, there are actually zero consequences to them not doing their jobs.

Yep, they only care about crimes that earn them bonuses either financially or materially. And drug crime lets the courts rake in fines and fees which filter down to cops too and many police also seize all sorts of material goods that disappear both legally and illegaly into their personal possessions.

The numbers just don't seem big enough. Repair costs of $62,000 over two years in LA and Ventura counties - an area with 10 million people. The savings from 100% enforcement at the scrapyard level would pay for what, one full time employee inspector for the state of California?

It would be cheaper all round to add a $100 yearly registration fee to every scrapyard, rather than give them an extra compliance burden.

The guardrails aren't the only things being stolen for scrap, they're just what the article focuses on. There's a link included to an article about streetlight copper theft which probably costs even more, and another about telecom theft.

According to https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/la-city-council-copp... :

> In the [2023] fiscal year, that number skyrocket to a staggering 6,842 cases, with repair costs exceeding well over $20 million.

That's all there is to it. All these scum know they are buying stolen items, but they do it anyway. Same thing for catalytic converters and copper stolen from just about anywhere.

Drop long prison sentences and massive fines on these people, and this problem would vanish in short order.

You honestly believe a scrapyard owner should go to jail for buying metal that might be stolen?

Fines, sure. But "long prison sentences"?

> this problem would vanish in short order.

Anyway that's worked well for drug abuse/sales, so it should probably work here too

Once pharmacies and drug manufacturers in the American legal system started getting held liable for excessive opioid prescriptions and pushing, it became less common. So yeah. It might work.

Same with pawn shops.

> Same with pawn shops.

Isn't America experiencing absurd amounts of petty theft right now? Maybe pawn shops are no longer in the equation (doubtful, though. Any data on this?) but did it actually help alleviate the problem?

As for the opioid crisis... well, I don't want to open up that can of worms.

Criminal charges generally require proving intent. It's very hard to prove what somebody knew.

What you can do is make it illegal to buy particular materials, and then the intent to break that law becomes obvious.

As I understand it after having been informed by authoritative sources over a significant period of time, they should just say "no".

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