Comment by dylan604
2 hours ago
Several years ago one of the local youth sports complex was limited to daylight use because the copper would get stolen from the light poles. This was a large complex with many light poles. Within a week of them being fixed, they'd come and steal the new copper. I never did follow up to see what they ultimately did to discourage the thieves.
Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns. I had the gas tank in my truck drilled. I doubt they got even 5 gallons worth of gas, worth about $25 at the time. The fix cost me $2500. I found out from the shop that there had been a string of these going around town. After some digging, I came up with an order of magnitude estimate of somewhere around 50 such instances. So, what was undoubtedly just a couple of people at the most had done probably over $100k in damages to get maybe $1200 worth of spoils. Even if caught, unless they confessed to more, they’d probably only ever risk getting linked to a single one of these crimes and face a tiny fraction of the consequences they deserved. Such a drain on society.
There are large, large stretches of highway near me that’re all but pitch black at night because people have stolen copper from the light poles. It’s only getting worse.
Is this in California? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in Texas.
> what they ultimately did to discourage the thieves.
https://youtu.be/PfHu-UJaK0Q?is=bp0HygfjqBJBDpoO
In a just society the penalties for that behavior would be commiserate with the societal costs. Even if the single act is relatively low cost, the societal-wide implication means no one can reasonably do this at a small scale without losing their investment. Therefore the penalties should be harsh, widely publicized, and extreme
This I believe is part of why forgery is dealt with so harshly, copying a few thousand bucks isn’t a big deal but destroying the integrity of hard currency is.