[silisili]

Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of.

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.

[pjc50]

> people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else

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.

[expedition32]

The Netherlands had a lot of problems with people stealing copper lines. Eventually the government made a deal with scrapyards- they were traditionally run by somewhat shady people.

[wildzzz]

We had an antenna range built inside of a shipping container. We had some pretty fancy copper cladding that had some pricey dielectric inside of it. Somehow, a copper thief found it and stole all of the cladding. That stuff was probably worth 1000x its copper scrap value. I'm sure the thief was expecting to find some equipment to pawn but instead opened up a treasure chest.

[stronglikedan]

> a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value

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.

[CaptainZapp]

Sure, art is subjective to some extent. But reducing the value of a Henry Moore piece to the value of the material is, well, not very insightful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore

[pixl97]

Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.

[picofarad]

Didn't we use to hang cattle rustlers?

[ncr100]

Anecdotes, observation, and a wish:

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.

[WorldPeas]

The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.

[LorenPechtel]

Actually, the other way around. Cheap drugs would mean the addicts didn't have to steal as much.

Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.

[ErroneousBosh]

> However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario

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.

[wildzzz]

Your body builds up a tolerance to opioids. If you can receive a constant dose of heroin every day, your body will eventually want more of it to chase the high. For people that already have an addiction, how are they going to manage these cravings? They'll look for it elsewhere and the problems come back.

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.

[ErroneousBosh]

> For people that already have an addiction, how are they going to manage these cravings? They'll look for it elsewhere and the problems come back.

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.

[burnt-resistor]

It seems to happen most in economically-desperate areas or where there are drug addicts. It's the same sort of shit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like when live power lines were stolen in Moscow. A whole family watching TV and suddenly the lights go out unexpectedly... but it's because someone has taken the power lines for money. Infrastructure cannibalism seems to happen whenever there's insufficient security/prosecution and/or excessive desperation.

[ProAm]

It's meth.

[Loughla]

We live in a very rural, incredibly safe area. You can always tell when someone else gets hooked on meth. Their place goes to shit, step 1. Their kids get dirty, step 2. You start to see things like car batteries or tools disappear from nearby farms, step 3. They die or go to jail after trying to steal something big, like electric lines or even train rails in one instance, step 4.

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.

[phainopepla2]

My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)

[onemoresoop]

What do you mean by color coordinated the closet?

[j-bos]

Not op, but meth is like, amphetamines the thing that drives people to do boring pointless work, like organizing clothes by color.

[onemoresoop]

Thanks for the info, I had no idea about this meth behavior.

[Insanity]

+1, and how does that relate to meth?

[cjbgkagh]

It’s a cluster of behaviors, like excessively brushing their teeth. "just meth things" is a meme referring to these behaviors.

[pixl97]

In the way that meth is kind of like Adderall for addicts.

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.

[pjc50]

This reads like one of those jokes about "my car is so bad that when someone crashed into it they caused thousands of dollars of improvements".

[FatherOfCurses]

It's a mystery to me why the scrap metal industry doesn't have more scrutiny given how much copper is stolen.

[MisterTea]

Years ago we were cleaning out our shop and had to scrap a lot of metal. At the scrap yard in Brooklyn there was a separate line for copper and aluminum vs iron and steel which was mostly a bulk dump job. Seemed like half of the line were homeless and destitute people. Many had shopping carts full of various pieces of aluminum and whatever, lots of AC condensers and copper tubing. There was a couple ahead of me, skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine were holding a few bundles of AV cables and an old extension cord in their hands - a scene of desperation.

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.

[Symbiote]

I think in the UK the scrap yards can only pay electronically, with a delay of several days. They must also record photo identification.

This was put in place after the Nth theft of railway cables.

[pixl97]

In the US you typically have to give identification to sell scrap, so it sets up a chain of evidence against you. Still doesn't stop methheads.

[testing22321]

Should we police the scrap yards, or help the fellow citizens who are “skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine”

What a place to live.

[MisterTea]

What have you done to help your fellow citizens? I've been down the path of helping deeply addicted people and learned many hard lessons. Some people can be helped more easily than others. Some are almost impossible without constant professional help that is financially impossible to afford by 99% of the population.

[trehalose]

Some nonzero percentage of these people could have been helped cheaper and more easily earlier on to prevent them from getting to this point in the first place.

[Psillisp]

Cope that you called out. May your house always smell of roses.

[btreecat]

I'd wish they'd focus on the problems leading to folks feeling that copper theft is a better source of income than other more legitimate routes.

Speaks volumes to the local economy and support networks.

[dmitrygr]

  > for some reason

Do the perps get prosecuted? Do the places that buy stolen copper? Is it publicized? Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment? Are repeat offenders properly contained long term? No? Well then ... it's a mystery

[pixl97]

The for some reason is a meth epidemic.

>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.

[testing22321]

> Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this

The link between poverty and crime has been a stab listed for centuries

[dmitrygr]

https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-...

[casey2]

Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege.

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.

[fred_is_fred]

"Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this."

Meth.

[Schlagbohrer]

Upping the severity of punishment will be as effective as the war on drugs was, that is to say not one bit. You'd need to reduce poverty to prevent this kind of thing.

[4gotunameagain]

This is not true, it is a false analogy. The war on drugs has been a definite failure, but we can see the effects of lower punishment for low hanging crimes in the decriminalization of shoplifting in california.

[Ylpertnodi]

Isn't the cali-decriminalization of shoplifting designed to avoid people going to jail.....for the health care they'll receive?

[mrguyorama]

The "cali-decriminilization" of shoplifting is entirely a lie. It's based on shoplifting not being a felony in California for less than $1k, but plenty of other states have higher thresholds for felony shoplifting.

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.

[browsingonly]

That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings.

To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.

[pixl97]

I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container.

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.

[browsingonly]

I find it bizarre you imagine a world where immoral or amoral persons are somehow not at fault for their own behavior. When some turd goes into a Walgreen's on Market St. in SF and fills a bag with goods to resell, they aren't doing it because society made them do it. They aren't stealing to feed themselves or their kids. They're doing it simply because they can and they don't find anything wrong with it.

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.