On this day in 1899, The Bee (KY) reported that two small boys were detected stealing copper wire from the track of the Hecla Coal Company. “The wire is in short pieces and is used to connect the rails together in order to complete the trolley circuit for the electric locomotive used for hauling coal from the mines. The line was disabled and a considerable quantity of wire carried away. Ernest Rash got hold of one of the boys and captured his hat, but the boy got away and carried his sack of wire, which Ernest says was as big as the boy. When last seen Ernest and John Hogan were on the boys trail with blood in their eyes.” Add Comment On this day in 1911, the Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch, reported on the sentence of a convicted copper thief. Leslie Maitland, having been found in possession of 130 pounds of copper worth $15 (about $350 today) by Patrolman Waymack, was sentenced to one year “on the roads.” Next, “George Williams, a white man laboring under the influence of drink, who was arrested for annoying Miss Lizzie Crawford was fined $10 and costs and required to put up a $150 bond for his good behavior.” On this day in 1911, The San Francisco Sunday Call ran a two-page diatribe “Flake, Hop, and Dope among our Respectables,” about the more than five thousand drug fiends in the city (roughly one drug user for every one hundred people). Worse, “Out of that number nearly one-third come from the decent portion of society.” Describing the indecent other two-thirds, the author writes: “As the morphine has become impotent for him, he buys cocaine. He loses his syringe and cannot afford to buy another. He uses a pin to make the puncture and a medicine dropper for the injection. He sleeps in a nest of rags under the sidewalks. He earns money by carrying what scrap iron he can find to the junk dealer: or by selling what brass or copper he can steal. He does not buy food with this, for food is expensive. He purchases cocaine. And he forages for his living. There is no need to tell how he forages. If you are out at night sometime you may see one of these ragged, stooping, gaunt eyed beings flitting by you into an alley. He is looking for crusts of bread.” The City of Perryville, Missouri recently released a statement regarding metal theft by employees of the Public Works Department. According to KFVS12.com, “After an investigation into alleged stolen city property, the City let go four employees of the Public Works Department in March. Perryville Fire Chief Charlie LaRose lost his job due to an investigation into stolen property. Mayor Debbie Gahan said at the time that LaRose sold scrap metal, which was estimated at around $6,500. When the investigation began, she said he lost his job as the superintendent at the Public Works Department after 35 years working there. She said three other workers were also fired at the Public Works Department in connection to the scrap metal theft.” Click here for the city’s statement, which seems to indicate personal scrapping of city metals by employees for personal profit was rather common prior to a 2007 crackdown. Perryville joins the company of other cities, such as Augusta, Selma, Newport News, Nuangola, Stamford, Houston, St. Clair Shores, and Topeka with employees and/or administrators arrested for stealing metal. MetalTheft.Net once again urges city administrators to assess their public works departments for theft opportunities, risks, and prevention measures (such as clearly established recycling/handling policies for city [i.e., taxpayer] owned scrap and other metals). The Local Government Association (UK) has "put together this toolkit to help councils and partners to understand what powers already exist to reduce the attractiveness and profitability of metal theft. The toolkit also examines developing practice by councils such as Forest of Dean and Kirklees as they work to better regulate their local scrap metal dealers." A link to the report is available through the Law Enforcement/Prevention page. The newest installment of MetalTheft.Net's Interview Series has just been posted on the Interviews page. An interview with Brian Ashby, Ben Kolak, and Courtney Prokopas, co-directors of Scrappers, explores the growing popularity of an American post-industrial aesthetic, the blurring distinction between documentary film and social science, and the recent trend of metal theft. The interview also appears, with photos, in a forthcoming issue of Crime, Media, Culture. MetalTheft.Net has added two new YouTube videos to the Videos page. One, from the Georgia Farm Monitor, involves a poultry farmer discussing the costs of copper theft. The other, from Al Jazeera, is about the economic costs of copper theft in South Africa. On April 1, 1903, The Republic reported that two boys (pictured here), aged 12 and 14, stole $10 worth of copper from a display fixture company and did more than $1,500 (about $3,600 today) in damage in the process. According to the paper, the company’s plant looked as though “it had been visited by a cyclone.” Police searching a local junk shop recovered much of the stolen items, except for brass bearing boxes needed to run a lathe. The company offered a $25 reward for their return. The paper reported, “their intrinsic value is small, but as it will take fifteen days to secure new bearings, the loss to the company will be large in proportion.” The paper went on to report the two boys “are regarded as bad boys and have been in trouble before.” 1899 - Schoolboy Arrested for Copper Theft 03/23/2012
On this day in 1899, The Seattle Star reported "Willie Plum, a schoolboy, was arrested this afternoon as being probably being connected with the theft of some copper wire belonging to the Grant Street Railway Company, and which was stolen yesterday." On March 15, 1915, The Washington Times reported that “Dina, the police dog, owned by Policeman Matt Orr, arrested two men unaided. The two men…are charged with stealing copper telegraph wire. The men were tracked in a wood where Dina threw one prisoner and guarded the second until aid arrived.” |
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