I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are not conducive to a functional society.
Cable theft is particularly destructive because it's so value-destroying. $100k of cable destroyed for a maximum profit of $1k.
Or in this particularly egregious UK case, a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-m...
I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural crime. There may not be a lot of people, but the per capita crime rate can be just as high as urban areas, and the under-reporting issues can be worse. Lots of invisible drug trafficing or manufacture/growing. Lots of thefts of ag equipment. Even the occasional theft of livestock, a crime from pre-history.
Then there's the both essential and illegal use of immigrants who have been imported for the purpose without work permits and may be held in coercive and unpleasant conditions.
I think a more apt comparison would be the retail value of the metal compared to the scrap value, since the "multimillion" is more of a subjective artistic value. Egregious nonetheless.
Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners.
People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning.
It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them.
They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that.
I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community.
Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people.
I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.
Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.
Diamorphine is cheap, cheaper than methadone. It has no real health effects, beyond the obvious suffocating-to-death-from-an-overdose. You can take clean high-grade heroin pretty much indefinitely without doing yourself any harm, if you've got a supply of it.
It's the stuff that's been stepped on with washing powder or flea powder or Shake'n'Vac that's the problem.
Here in the UK there was a doctor in Newcastle who just simply gave heroin addicts a shot of nice clean safe heroin, for free, in his surgery. Come round, get your dose, off you go to work. Every single one of them was able to hold a job, keep a family together, be a functional member of society, and with that stable background they were able to get off the smack and stay clean and sober, surprisingly quickly.
Imagine taking that pressure off opiate addicts, to go out and score, interact with criminals, steal to get money, and imagine it being actually cheaper and more effective than anything we're doing right now.
Imagine if we just did something that worked.
Methadone (and Suboxone) is slow releasing so your brain is kept satisfied but without the massive high that a needle of heroin gives you. And because of that, taking other opioids at the same time blunts their effects. Since you're in a treatment program, you also aren't trying to figure out how you're going to make more money that day for heroin than you'd reasonably make at a job, your income can go towards supporting your well-being.
It turns out that this is not actually a problem, particularly when you are using diamorphine to control people's street smack addiction. They want to get off the gear anyway.
> Since you're in a treatment program, you also aren't trying to figure out how you're going to make more money that day for heroin than you'd reasonably make at a job, your income can go towards supporting your well-being.
It turns out that this doesn't actually work. Methadone is completely ineffective at reducing cravings and most people on methadone programs go out to steal things for money to buy street heroin. That coupled with the massive health problems that methadone causes makes it an utterly useless thing for solving the problem. It also is massively physiologically addictive, so you've now got the problem of getting someone with failing health and no teeth and a roaring heroin addiction off of methadone as well. Good work.
It is really expensive though, so it's great for funnelling public money from the NHS into the pockets of drug companies, who generally have a few relatives of prominent politicians on the board.
Speaks volumes to the local economy and support networks.
At least with heroine, they tend to just keep to themselves. Meth makes sure they have the energy and drive to really fuck with other people.
I think it’s more because it’s a simple task that feels productive. It satiates the desire to be doing something without introducing the added frustration of failing at a more complex task.
I lived in an apartment for a while and the upstairs neighbor decided to get addicted to meth and vacuum their floor every 30 minutes for a few days, both day and night.
The problem with policing scrap yards is you can't prove anyone stole anything. You could limit who can drop off scrap but then you create incentives for those people to purchase illicit scrap and pass it off as legit.
This was put in place after the Nth theft of railway cables.
What a place to live.
> for some reason
>Do the perps get prosecuted?
Pretty often, but drug addicts are rather senseless and do stuff anyway.
>Do the places that buy stolen copper?
Sometimes. Like any criminal enterprise there are groups that launder stolen metals and turn them into 'good' metals.
> Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment
Depending on what you do, it can be a felony, which in this case is likely 1-5 years, with each repeat offense adding more.
https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-mayor-signs-new-ordinan...
the TL;DR here is the theft is a second order effect that you're not going to stop because the people that are doing it are horrifically addicted to meth which overrides any idea in their brain but doing something to get them more meth.
The link between poverty and crime has been a stab listed for centuries
Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.
Meth.
To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative.
For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix.
Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.
The drug users stealing copper can only be helped if they truly want the help. A great many are not ready for that help yet. As San Francisco has amply shown, no amount of money poured into the existing homeless industrial complex will change that fact.
Meanwhile, there is actually (probably? It won't show up in the data) organized crime doing shoplifting now, and that's pretty shitty. But cops just aren't doing their jobs. They need to investigate, and they have that authority, they just choose to not do it because it's boring and there's zero penalty for police department that doesn't do it's job.