_ A guest-post by Luke Bennett, Senior Lecturer, Department of the Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University

Metal theft fascinates me as an academic, because it raises some odd questions about how we think and act towards our built environments and, frankly, why this form of theft isn’t even more commonplace. There has been surprisingly little academic engagement with the practical and policy-based attempts to eradicate the latest upturn in metal theft. This comment piece sketches out a handful of themes that might prove fertile ground for engaging the social sciences and humanities beyond criminology.

Let me state clearly at the outset: I find metal theft to be abhorrent (as well as strangely rational if viewed from a resources perspective). I would like it to stop, and regard it as a particularly anti-social crime. Elsewhere I have tried to explain what I mean by ‘rationality’ and I will not re-run those points here (Bennett, 2008).

Metal theft and materiality

In Being and Time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1927) provides a story to illustrate his argument that much of human existence takes place at the level of the un-noticed. He describes a workman using a hammer. He uses it every day and never thinks about his tool. He uses it with skill and produces goods with it that are noticed and appreciated, but the hammer is largely invisible to him. But the day he bangs his thumb with the hammer he is violently and painfully reminded of its existence, and of the embodied danger and power that that device, as a composite lump of metal and wood comprises. I see a parallel with metal theft here. The things that are being stolen—the infrastructure—of the built environment, are vital to our health, comfort and social functioning. Yet, we only notice them (and perhaps only fully appreciate them) when they are snatched away from us by metal thieves. The valuable contribution of copper to our transit systems is only revealed when that copper cabling is ripped out and thousands of commuters face hours of travel delay. If we listen to these effects and how people make sense of them we will see how infrastructure temporarily irrupts into consciousness. Perhaps through doing so we will reconnect to the material basis of contemporary world. We characterise pre-history by its material technology (stone, bronze and iron ages) but generally don’t follow that through into the present: the steel age. We seem to think of ourselves, and our worlds, as oddly mass-less.

There is something of a ‘material-turn’ at work in social theory at present. The domination of textual and discourse based studies is subsiding, with a renewed focus upon ‘things’ and their social and cultural lives. A good entry point to this area is Daniel Miller’s (2009) Stuff. Here and elsewhere Miller presents a theory of consumption and commodification that stresses the circulation of both ideas and physical things-in-themselves. Metal theft, as a warped subscription to the (ethically positive) notion of recycling could be profitably investigated through Miller’s lens.

Metal theft and bereavement

I first investigated metal theft here in the UK in the Spring of 2008. At that time there was no interest from the politicians and little public discourse about it. Insurers, church owners, and infrastructure owners were calling for action, but there was little acknowledgment in policy circles that the issue called for a national, strategic response (with the exception of the British Transport Police, perhaps). However, the terrain has now changed dramatically. Proposals for reform of our existing laws regulating scrap metal dealers are now being developed by the UK Government, and on a daily basis the media is permeated with outraged depictions of metal theft. This heightened level of public ‘noticing’ of metal theft is relatively new and seems to have coincided with  thefts of metal plaques from war memorials around the date of our national wartime remembrance day (11th November). Many media debates on the topic are framed by reference to the ‘desecration of war graves’ trope. This powerful cultural totem has given metal theft the ‘push’ it needed to lodge in public consciousness and become a ‘national’ rather than a ‘local’ issue.

This mix of patriotism and the protective urges of the bereaved make for a powerful counter-force, and one which seems to have an enduring resonance. In short, the metal theft debate now has something to latch on to. In a separate study of the power of the bereaved, I found grave owners to be a particularly powerful counter-force to the tightening of cemetery health and safety rules (Bennett & Gibbeson, 2010). It seems that community may have an important role to play now in countering metal theft.

Metal theft and pillage studies

Metal thieves are often likened to Vandals. This invokes the imagery of the Barbarian hordes sacking Rome and bringing on the Dark Ages. Yet the comparison is unfair to the Vandals – for the sacking of Rome (and there were various) was an orderly affair, with the Barbarian chieftains negotiating with the Pope what buildings could (or could not) be stripped of their elements.

But it would be helpful to see metal theft as part of a wider study of pillage practices, rather than regarding it as wholly without precedent or analogue. In this regard, I think there is much to be gained by looking at ways in which previous episodes of material extraction from the built environment have been organised (something now called, where done with permission, ‘urban mining’). I have in mind here tomb raiding (for treasure), grave robbing (for bodies), and wartime scrap drives.

As I wander around my home city of Sheffield, I am reminded at each house frontage of a prior wave of urban mining that took place during the Second World War. Each house I pass shows the stump remnants of the former iron fencing removed and sent for conversion into armaments (a reversal of the more commonly referenced ‘swords into ploughshares’ metaphor). This wave of part-voluntary, part-mandated surrender of a nation’s railings reminds us of the scale to which metal is embedded within our built environment, and the power of the state to requisition and extract it in extremis.

I have commented briefly elsewhere on the links to tomb raiding, so let me here focus on body snatching. The theft of cadavers from fresh graves became a pressing policy and public-outrage issue in early Victorian Britain. The growth of medical schools and the shortage of lawfully available bodies for dissection provoked a (very) black market in grave robbing by the (so called) ‘Resurrection Men,” such as the famous Burke & Hare (who took the ‘rational’ next step of not troubling to exhume bodies from graves, but adopted the more direct body-supplying method of murder). At the height of the body snatching crime wave citizens fearing for the fate of their mortal remains devised a variety of technological and locational solutions to thwart would-be grave robbers. After much parliamentary debate, the Anatomy Act 1832 increased the lawful supply of corpses for dissection and the lure of the illegal trade faded away (for a fascinating study of body snatching and the rise of the 1832 Act see Richardson [1989]). To see a human body as a pillageable commodity is an extreme (but familiar) logic that we see in metal theft, as is the public outcry now attendant to it, and the groping towards legislative and market-changing solutions.

What we see in metal theft is an inversion of normal regard of ‘things in use’. To return to our example of earlier, a hammer is normally regarded as tool (if it is thought of at all). It is a single ‘thing’ and it exists to be used on occasion as a device. It has value derived from its functional utility that is greater than its component value. Only when it falls out of use – i.e. when it becomes worn out or broken – should any attention turn to its other value, its commodity (i.e. exchange) value. Karl Marx (1867) saw the tension between use-value and exchange-value as a fundamental problem within Capitalism. In short, Capitalism’s tendency to focus upon the saleable (i.e. exchange) value potential of a commodity may lead to the under appreciation of its use-value. If we apply this to metal theft, at times of high metal prices, the hammer’s parts might become sufficiently attractive for it to be viewed as an assemblage of valuable commodities—some steel, some wood, rather than as a tool. In metal theft, we see the raw ascendancy of an exchange value mentality, and in the public backlash (and glimmer of an enhanced appreciation of use of metallic elements in infrastructure) we see (hopefully) a re-assertion of use-value.

References

Bennett, L. (2008) ‘Assets under attack: metal theft, the built environment and the dark side of the global recycling market’ Environmental Law & Management 20, 4: 176-186 and Bennett, L. (2008) Metal Theft: anatomy of a resource crime (unpublished – draft available at http://shura.shu.ac.uk/4125)

Bennett, L. & Gibbeson, C. (2010) ‘Perceptions of Occupiers’ Liability risk by estate managers: a case study of memorial safety in English cemeteries’, International Journal of Law in the Built Environment 2, 1: 76-93.

Marx, K. (1867; 1990) Capital: Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, Penguin, London.(See chapter one ‘commodities’).

Miller, D. (2009) Stuff, Polity, Bristol.

Richardson, R (1989) Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Penguin, London.

-------
Luke Bennett
Senior Lecturer
Department of the Built Environment
Sheffield Hallam University
Email: l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk
Twitter: @lukebennett13
Web: http://shu.academia.edu/lukebennett

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Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the theft of bronze vases from cemeteries, with the unfortunate title “Sky-High Metal Prices Lead to a Grave Situation.” This is hardly a new problem, but it was the readers’ comments that struck me.

The first comment remains the most insightful: “Bad ju-ju stealing from the dead…”

That, I can get behind. But then things took a strange turn:

“My Father survived the Battle of the Bulge, at one time being trapped behind enemy lines for days. His military grave is in Chicago and I live in Dallas. When I visited his grave one business trip, his vase had been stolen. Some sorry-a** b*st*rd stole the vase from his grave. If I had caught him in the act, at least one of us would be going to the hospital or worse.

And Obama wants to give him medical care on my tax dollar? As far as I am concerned, that might be the only time I am in agreement with Islamic law ... thieves lose a hand. Don't even try to excuse the theft with "well he's only trying to get food" or any such nonsense. Can you tell I am still quite angry over the matter?”

The next commentator followed up with:

“Sounds like these thieves have the same mentality as OWS protesters...if they can't get something with no effort they resort to stealing it.”

Someone then asked for clarification:

“I'm sorry for the loss of the vase, but I don't understand what this has to do with Obama. Can you explain?”

“Same question -- What does this have to do with OWS?”

The response:

“Taking someone else's property is a sure sign of Socialism…hence the reference to Obama and OWS protesters. If they can take things from the living then what chance does a dead person have? How can you read the Journal everyday and be so ignorant?”

How, indeed.

Had they done a little research, however, the commentators might have known the United Kingdom’s Socialist Party had already beat them to the punch and in fact blamed capitalism for metal theft. In a September article entitled “Metal Thefts – The Hidden Crime of Capitalism,” they argued:

“Licensing won't stop the thefts. And would a government such as Cameron's, so deeply wedded to deregulation, contemplate it? Will cash-strapped councils take on the issuing of licences, inspections etc? Or maybe a new quango? Unlikely.

This is really just one more hidden cost of 'free enterprise'. Capitalism creates 'boom and bust' - wild oscillations in prices, super-profits one minute, bankruptcy the next.

If we had an international plan of production, there would be no world markets where speculators could operate. Instead, copper-mining countries could see planned growth in the prices they earn, enabling improvements in copper miners' wages and conditions.

A state monopoly of foreign trade would ensure that no international 'black market' in copper could spring up. The scrap metal industry would be in public hands, with workers' management and control of any dodgy former owners, not least because a socialist government would want to manage all aspects of recycling for the sake of future generations.

So next time someone tells you 'socialism wouldn't work' or is 'inefficient', point out the deaths, thefts, losses, repair bills and disruption that we have to contend with under 'free enterprise'.”

But all of these folks, capitalist and socialist alike, seem prudish compared to the list of comments following a story on CBS Sacramento’s website about wire thefts shutting down street lights, which the county can’t afford to repair. Here’s a sobering sample:

“Guess who’s stealing the copper wires? The illegal Mexicans. They don’t even have street lights in the neighborhoods in Mexico where they are from, and this is one reason why, the people would just steal them. How’s that Open Border working out for you California?”

“Californians!!! Arm yourselves now!!!”

“The citizens shuld [sic] be getting angry, mad, hostile, at the left wing, Marxism loving morons in government. Deport all of the copper stealing thieves! Or better yet, foloow [sic] “G”’s recommendation mentioned above”

“G”’s recommendation was “Treat them like the Taliban: Night vision. Snipers. Problem solved.”

And finally, the coup de grace:

“It is leftist and semi-Marxist and Third World style California, so what do you expect? There is no doubt that with the massive invasion of illegal Mexicans, black and Mexican youth gangs, the welfare set, the hordes of dopers and deadbeats, the Marxist style state government, and volumes of street crime, that California is going down the toilet fast.”

I’m not sure how they would blame the huge metal theft problems in Indiana and Ohio, two decidedly un-Socialist states. Meth-heads most likely.

Blaming metal theft on the group or groups one finds most annoying is nothing new. During the last metal theft wave one hundred years ago, commentators were doing the same thing. In America at the turn of the last century, the thieves of most concern were not meth-heads, Mexicans, or socialists. They were scrap dealers and children.

In the introduction to the 1919 report for the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, the authors explain, “In the course of its 18 years’ experience the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago has received so many complaints concerning junk dealers whose acts contributed to the delinquency of both boys and girls, that it decided to make an inquiry into the relation of the junk business to juvenile delinquency.” The report concluded, “The retail junk business in Chicago is a most serious factor in juvenile delinquency.”

Earlier, in 1907, a San Francisco newspaper ran a story about a junk dealer who “tempted small boys to steal by agreeing to buy their plunder.” More to the point was another San Francisco paper’s 1903 article titled “Junkman an Alleged Fagin: San Francisco Man Accused of Enticing Boy’s to Theft as Did Character in Oliver Twist.” The junkman had set up the boys with a horse and carriage to facilitate transporting their stolen goods. 

And much earlier in England, Colquhoun’s 1795 tome A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis reserved a special antipathy (and many pages to express it) toward junk dealers. In fact, the vehemence against scrap dealers was so great and wide spread in the past that historian Carl Zimring notes, “Attitudes toward scrap dealers since the nineteenth century have been frequently negative, xenophobic, and cause for the industry to respond with aggressive public relations efforts that have never eradicated the stigma.”

But it was young boysblamed for most of the actual stealing, so much so that it was illegal to buy metal from minor boys in many jurisdictions. In 1873, for example, the New York Court of Appeals heard a case in which the defendant, iron-works operator Stephen Coleman, was arrested for knowingly purchasing stolen pig-iron. A witness, who was a manufacturer, testified:

“I said to Coleman that he and I ought to know that when pig-iron was brought and sold by boys they must have stolen it in all human probability, lying around the streets; that we ought to be careful about buying of boys; he said he was in the habit of buying iron and he did not know where it came from, and did not think it his business to look around and find out where it came from… I also advised him to quit the business of buying iron of boys, and he said he would, as it was a plaguy business. I advised him as a friend and neighbor to quit it and go out of the business of buying iron of buys, and he said he would” (Stephen Coleman vs. The People of the State of New York, 1873, 55 N.Y. 81; 1873 N.Y. Lexis 138).

Jacob Riis, Jane Addams, a Chicago Gran Jury, and others all agreed that stealing metal was the gateway crime for youth headed to worse things, and that metal dealers held out the carrot to motivate these would-be thieves. Coincidentally, the Progressives’ “child-saving movement” was in full swing at the exact same time, which led to, among other things, the juvenile court system.  

Metal theft, and crime generally, has always served as an excellent Rorschach test of one’s politics, a big ink blot to which anyone can ascribe the characteristics they desire and fix the blame as they wish. For liberals crime has been the result of social economic conditions and disparity. For conservatives it has been individual moral depravity and maladjustment. Ideology is great, because it provides easy answers to complex problems. This frees up more time for blame, hostility, and self-righteous indignation, which each has its own immediate internal rewards. Sadly, this also moves us further away from the ultimate goal of creating safer communities. 

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As part of MetalTheft.Net’s one year anniversary festivities (mostly my wife and I having some beers), I will, in this blog, share my own story of how I got into studying metal theft and eventually started MetalTheft.Net. 
 
In Fall 2007, I was a couple of months into my new job teaching at the University of Indianapolis, and David, a sociology graduate student in the research methods course, came into my office to chat about research. He was a Captain in the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD), with over 30 years on the job, and he had enrolled in grad school to get his masters in Applied Sociology with the hope of teaching a few college classes.

David was writing a literature review on hate crimes for the class, and he started telling me about this guy who was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood and had been stealing scrap metal in the area. After a scrapyard reported him to the police for trying to sell stolen cable, the police searched his house and storage facility. They found a safe in his home containing more than a dozen guns, including the equipment to make a shotgun automatic and a bulletproof vest. After reviewing records from local scrapyards, the police discovered this guy had, for a while, sold thousands of dollars worth of scrap metal each month. They confiscated five vehicles from him, presumably purchased with cash earned from metal theft. In court he testified he was indigent. (It is interesting to note that currently similar claims in the U.K. tie metal theft to Ukrainian organized crime and human traffickers.)

Though he was already on probation and was charged with multiple counts of felony theft and a driving offense, the Aryan metal thief managed to plead it all down to a D Felony and was sentenced to 180 days time served, meaning he already served his sentence in jail while awaiting trial and was released from custody upon conviction.

Metal theft, David told me, was becoming a big problem and not just in Indianapolis but worldwide. Skyrocketing prices for copper, platinum, aluminum, and other metals had suddenly made it profitable to steal things like air conditioners, electrical wires, catalytic converters, aluminum gutters, and just about anything else made from those metals. So, people were increasingly stealing all kinds of stuff and selling it to scrap yards for pretty good money. 

In fact, in the summer of 2007, only a few months before David and I met, two thieves stole copper pipes from Indiana’s largest food bank, resulting in the loss of 82,637 pounds of perishable food worth $142,085. The pipes were part of the food bank’s massive cooling system, and the theft shut down the organization’s 30,000-cubic-foot cooler room and two 40,000-cubic-foot freezers. According to surveillance cameras, on a Friday night two men rode in on bicycles, cut through a chain-link fence, and then ripped out the copper tubing from the cooling equipment’s compressors. The pantry’s alarm system malfunctioned and did not alert the alarm company, though it did sound in the building. Worse, this was the third time the food pantry had been robbed of copper pipes in two months. The first two times shut down the pantry’s produce room.

The next day IMPD’s spokesman told the local paper, “It’s on a personal level now,”  for whatever that was worth. 

Local businesses, organizations, and the citizenry stepped up to aid the pantry. Local shopping mall magnate and co-owner of the Pacers, Mel Simon, and his wife donated $20,000 needed for building repairs. OmniSource, a giant metal recycling company based in Fort Wayne with several scrap yards in Indianapolis, pledged 5 cents for every pound of empty cans it purchased in the month of August. “We want to be a good neighbor,” said Matt Carrell, OmniSource’s marketing director.

Later that fall, thieves stole more than 100 bronze flower vases from a local cemetery. Each vase cost about $240 but fetched about $6 as scrap. The following spring someone broke into the parking lot of an “ice cream distribution business” one night and stole the catalytic converters from 44 ice cream trucks. A few local scrap yards even reported being repeatedly burglarized for their scrap.           

Indy (and much of the rest of the country) seemed awash in metal theft. The problem was that although everyone knew these crimes were on the rise, few officials anywhere in the country actually had any real numbers. We thought, why not keep track of metal thefts in Indy? The Indianapolis Metal Theft Project was born.

What we found was shocking. In the first six months of 2008, just before metal prices plummeted, we counted 1,520 metal theft reports in Indianapolis, or about 8 metal thefts each day. On average, 1.5 catalytic converters were stolen daily during the six month time period (interestingly, almost a quarter of the vehicles were Jeeps). Aluminum siding was stolen off a house once every four days. Copper was the most stolen metal, however, in the form of air conditioners coils, wiring, and plumbing. We estimated victims lost more than $7 million in metal theft in the first six months of 2008.

Meanwhile, we hosted with OmniSource personnel at the University of Indianapolis a day-long metal theft training seminar for Indiana law enforcement. We presented our findings at a national conference. Then everything fell apart. OmniSource was raided in February 2008 for allegedly knowingly purchasing stolen metals. Much was made of the discovery that about 50 IMPD officers worked part-time security at the scrapyard. And a political fiasco ensued.

I was approached by class action lawyers looking to sue the scrap metal giant on behalf of victims of metal theft. They wondered if I might work with them as an expert. Then I was contacted by lawyers for the scrap giant to see about serving for them as an expert. Finally, undercover cops approached me to see about the same thing. In the now absurd-seeming quest to remain a neutral observer and objective scholar, I offered to help the defense as best as I could without remuneration, which they declined, and I offered to help the undercover cops, which they accepted. This led to our study, finding a surprisingly strong correlation between the number of scrap yards per capita in a city and that city's metal theft rate. I did not offer to help the class-action lawyers.

Nevertheless, despite my lofty goals, rather than the stately Switzerland in whom people felt trust and a willingness to invest their offshore money, I somehow came off as the self-preserving French officer in Casablanca, Capt. Louis Renault, who does the right thing in the end, but who no one ever really trusts. If I wasn’t with them, they figured, I was against them, and I was with no one – except perhaps David. For his efforts, David, who had been promoted to Major, was demoted back to Captain, apparently due to his association with OmniSource. We were all associated with OmniSource, though, as they seemed at the time to be the only folks trying to do something about metal theft. Eventually, after a grand jury indictment, all charges were dropped. For my trouble, I was cut off from IMPD’s data on metal theft reports, thus ending a very promising project.

After a couple years of more intrigue and indigities, which I won’t bother rehashing here, I finally decided to hell with it, I’m going rogue. And one year ago, I started MetalTheft.Net to disseminate existing research on the problem, foster a constructive conversation about metal theft, and find new ways to approach it through those conversations. The site has managed some progress toward those goals to different degrees, and the folks I have contacted from law enforcement, the scrap industry, “victim industries,” and prevention companies, have been more or less willing to contribute to the conversation to very different degrees.

And so here we are - my wife and I marveling at the spectacle, drinking a beer to celebrate the website’s first year, and looking to the coming year.
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The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for 2010 show the recovery rate of stolen cars is down again for the sixth year in a row. I mentioned in the last blog, "Metal Theft Revolution," that a buddy who is a cop told me they seemed to be recovering fewer stolen cars than in the past, and he felt it was related to the overall increase in metal theft and the ability of giant shredders to break down an entire car into small chunks in less than a minute, making it hard to recover.

There is certainly ample anecdotal evidence of the possible trend, such as this August 9, 2011 News Story from FOX 9 News (www.myfoxtwincities.com):

     “Ramsey County Attorney Jon Choi announced Wednesday that charges are being filed against ten people in   
   connection with a three-month car theft and metal scrapping investigation.
     The charges involved the theft of more than 50 vehicles that were sold for scrap at Metro Metals, a St. Paul   
   recycling facility.
     St. Paul Police found three different schemes during the course of their investigation:
   1. Thieves used spotters to identify vehicles to steal. These individuals then called tow truck drivers and ‘sold’ them 
          the identified vehicles that were towed away for scrap metal.
   2. Tow truck drivers stole vehicles directly off streets or parking lots and sold them for scrap.
   3. Thieves stole vehicles and drove them straight to the scrap yard.
   Only one scrap yard in West St. Paul is alleged to be involved. No charges have been filed against the recycler yet. 
   ‘In some cases, the stolen vehicles were crushed in a matter of hours after being stolen,’ said Choi.”

And this August 14, 2011 report in the Burlington County Times (www.phillburbs.com) by Matt Chiapardi:

     “While scrap metal theft usually involves stealing wire or metal left lying around construction sites, [Burlington City] 
   has been experiencing a particularly brazen form of the crime.
     About 20 full-size cars have been reported stolen since February, and police believe the vehicles were taken for their 
   scrap value.”
                        
Auto theft has by far the highest recovery rate of all property crime categories recorded in the UCR. In 2010, for example, the value of cars stolen in the U.S. was about $3.97 billion. Police recovered $2.23 billion worth of those stolen cars, for a 56 percent recovery rate. Among the other UCR property theft categories, the next highest recovery rate is 12.8 percent for stolen livestock, and recovery rates for the rest of the property types are even lower: 4.2 percent for jewelry and electronics, 8.4 percent for firearms, and 11.5 percent for clothing and furs. 

This is likely because many cars are stolen for a joy-ride or a G-ride rather than for resale or chopping into parts. In the case of joy-riding, kids steal a desirable and/or available car, cruise around in it for a bit, then leave it somewhere. In the case of the G-ride, they steal a car, go commit another crime in it, such as a burglary, then dump the car (it’s not good practice to use one’s own car for such activities). Either way, recovery of a stolen car is more likely than not.

(A detective working in a vehicle theft division broke it down for me differently, “I look at vehicle theft as being two parts. The straight steals; she’s mad at him, reports vehicle stolen, leaves the car running, wakes up and car is gone, etc. That is typically what people think of when they think of VT. The other part, the career and professional people. The ones that are doing bogus paperwork, altering vehicles, cutting them up, towing them to be shredded, etc. This is the true auto theft problem. These are the cars that are not meant to be found.”)

Higher recovery rates do not mean that actual clearance by arrest is any higher, just that the car is recovered. In fact, despite its high property recovery rate, auto theft actually has one of the lowest arrest rates. According to the UCR, just under 12 percent of auto thefts were cleared by arrest in 2010, compared to 21 percent for larceny and 47 percent for all violent crimes combined. Burglary, however, does have an equally poor clearance rate at 12.4 percent. 

So, even though the police won’t arrest the people who stole your car, they will find your car—56 percent of time anyway. My buddy was right, though. The recovery rate for stolen cars has been steadily, if not steeply, declining since 2005 and likely before. In 2005, the recovery rate for auto theft was 62.1 percent. By 2007, it dropped to 57.9 percent, then to 56.8 percent in 2009, and finally 56.1 percent in 2010. Clearance rates, meanwhile, have remained relatively stable (dropping only slightly from 13 percent in 2005 to 12 percent in 2010).

Whether or not the drop in recovery rates is related to metal theft is another question. Maybe thieves are getting better and/or cops are getting worse. There seems to be at least two problems with the argument that decreasing recovery rates are the result of thieves outsmarting cops and/or the system:

1) Recovery rates for most other property crimes have not dropped. A few other property categories have seen decreases in recovery, such as clothing and furs (down from 13.4 percent in 2005 to 11.5 percent in 2010). And recovery of jewelry and precious metals, which should also be somewhat subject to the problems of metal theft, also dropped a little, from 4.5 percent in 2005 to 4.2 percent in 2010, but to the extent that precious metals are targets of metal theft proper, a slight drop should be expected. Recovery rates for other property crimes, however, have not dropped, and some, like livestock and televisions and stereos, have even increased. So we would have to assume that car thieves have gotten better at their craft (or car theft detectives worse), while all other thieves have stagnated in their professional development.

This also assumes that criminals specialize to a much higher degree than might actually happen. Research generally demonstrates most property crimes are crimes of opportunity, and most criminals engage in a wide spectrum of crimes. Certainly, there are “professional,” or highly specialized, car theft rings, and there is evidence of criminal organization and specialization in metal theft rings. But the specialist is still a relatively rare bird. That might be changing, however. The vehicle theft detective explained, “Thieves have learned how to make their own VINs and other stickers in order to conceal a vehicle’s true identity. Some have learned to cut out frame numbers and replace them. They are getting better at exploiting the loopholes in the titling systems and playing one jurisdiction against another since vehicles are mobile.”

2) Arrest rates for auto theft have not gone down over the last six years, so police work is yielding the same level of arrests, while recovery of stolen cars has still been dropping. Arrests arguably take more police work than recoveries, which can involve just finding a car abandoned on the side of the road or receiving a phone call from a resident. So cops aren’t necessarily getting any less effective. They’re making the same rate of arrests. The cars have just gone missing more often.

Unfortunately, none of this really answers whether metal theft is the cause of declining recovery rates of stolen cars. But it does  suggest the hypothesis is worth investigating, and it casts doubt on the easiest rival explanations. Next semester, a student research assistant and I will try to test this hypothesis as best as we can given the available data (or lack of it), and we’ll let you know if we find anything. 
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A few years ago, I submitted the following snippet to Wikipedia’s “metal theft” entry:  

“Other researchers have defined metal theft more specifically as ‘the theft of items for the value of their constituent metals.’ The defining characteristic of metal theft (besides being limited to items containing or made entirely from metal) is the motivation for the theft. Whereas items are generally stolen for their intrinsic value (e.g., stealing an iPod for its value as an iPod), items stolen in metal theft are stolen for their more or less extrinsic value as raw material or commodities. Items stolen in metal theft are ultimately scrapped, or recycled, to provide material for making new products.”

It was my first-ever submission to Wikipedia, and I submitted it partly because Wikipedia’s definition was pretty weak and also because our research project was dealing with the problem of distinguishing between metal theft proper and the theft of an item that just happens to be made of metal. If I steal a toaster made of metal, take it home, and make toast, I have not, by this definition committed metal theft. This is because I stole it for its value as a toaster not for the value of its constituent metals. If I steal a toaster and sell it to a scrap yard or to someone who does so for me (or I bale it with other metal objects myself and ship it to a foundry) I have committed metal theft. I felt our definition helped maintain that important distinction.

That definition also alludes to a new sort of theft; one in which the item is not as important as the stuff from which it is made (see MetalTheft.Net’s interview with Aiden Sidebottom for a brief discussion of this). Going back to Steffensmeier, before the Industrial Revolution, thieves generally stole for their own immediate consumption. Thus, an item’s vulnerability to theft had been limited by the thief’s ability to use the item or sell it on a very limited market, given the relatively unique and easily identifiable nature of pre-industrial goods. After industrialization, an item’s vulnerability to theft expanded along with the growing market for mass-produced, anonymous, and identical secondhand goods. So, more modern thieves have still stolen things for immediate consumption but also, and more importantly, for selling on a vast black and gray market for secondhand goods, consisting of pawnshops, flea markets, bars, sidewalk stands, etc. (and more recently internet sites like Craigslist and eBay). The market for any one item, however, has still been constrained by the demand for that item. If no one wants a Ford Pinto or its parts, then stealing one simply doesn’t pay off.

Thus, all things equal, a cheap car stereo is at a lower risk of theft than a really expensive in-demand car stereo. My cheap cellphone, which doesn't have a camera or anything else really, is at less risk of theft than the newest i-Phone. And so on. All other things (like portability, absence of onlookers, etc.) equal, an item’s risk of theft is limited by the demand for that specific item. I don’t have to worry too much about theft, because I don’t own too much worth the risk to a potential thief.

But has metal theft changed that, as we enter post-industrialization? With metal theft, all that matters is what the item is made of. My cheap car is worth the same as a luxury sports car, if it’s going to the shredder rather than the chop shop or for a joyride. In fact, my cheap car is likely now more at risk, since I am less likely to have security for it. Awhile ago, a police officer friend told me that fewer stolen cars were being recovered, and he suspected it was because thieves are no longer joyriding select cars, but instead stealing them to be scrapped in shredders (auto theft recovery rates will be the topic of the next post).

An item’s risk of theft is now limited only by the value of its constituent parts and its exposure. And a lot of things are both made of metal and exposed to potential thieves. So, we keep seeing metal theft news stories that roll out laundry lists of stolen items, all unrelated except that they contain metal. Here is a recent story from Journal-News.net about the problem in Martinsburg, West Virginia:

“Deputies with the Berkeley County Sheriff's Department have been overwhelmed with the reports of metal items of all shapes, sizes, dimension and weights in residential, commercial and industrial areas. These items include storm drainage grates, car wash grates, manhole covers, salvage automobiles, automobile radiators, wheels, car batteries, copper wiring, copper plumbing, electrical and cellular cables, residential and commercial air conditioning units and heat pump units, which are being sold as scrap by thieves” (“Police Overwhelmed by Metal Thefts” 8/31/11). 

John Seabrook’s excellent 2008 New Yorker article about the scrap industry, “American Scrap,” included its own two-paragraph laundry list (or scrap pile, if you prefer):

“Earlier this year, police broke up a scrap ring in Albany: five men were stealing wire out of electrical substations and suburban railyards, and selling the copper. In May, 2006, a huge fire at the Greenpoint Terminal Market, on the Brooklyn waterfront, was caused by homeless men who were burning the plastic coating off copper wires; the plastic-free wires earn more in the scrapyard. In graveyards around the country, the metal plaques marking graves of Revolutionary War soldiers are disappearing, because a pound of bronze goes for a dollar eighty cents. (In a scrapyard in Vancouver, an undercover officer was given five dollars for a bronze marker for a four-year-old child.) A metal street sign might fetch a dollar; a manhole cover fetches about five. Beer kegs, swiped from behind an Applebee’s, bring upward of forty dollars each. A phone booth will net fifty dollars or more. A condenser unit from a central air-conditioning system is worth about a hundred dollars. Aluminum bleachers, guardrails, streetlight poles, storm-drain grates, copper flashing, and the nozzles of fire hoses are also popular among metal thieves.

In the U.K., lead theft from church roofs is rampant. Bronze statues have been sawn off at the ankles and carted out of public parks. The former Olympic running champion Steve Ovett suffered this indignity in September, when a life-size bronze replica of him, in full stride, disappeared from Preston Park, in Brighton. (Police recovered a leg from a nearby bonfire.) In the U.S., a seven-foot bronze statue of the Buddha was recently stolen from an outdoor temple shrine at the Thai Buddhist Center, in Elk River, Minnesota. The problem is even worse in Eastern Europe, where, in Ukraine, scrap thieves stole a thirty-six-foot metal bridge from the Svalyavka River, in 2004. Who is buying all this hot metal?”

Importantly, all things are not equal, and a potential thief’s choice of target is still constrained by many other factors besides metal content, such as the presence of surveillance, the thief’s technical skills and know-how, size/transportability of the target, and more. We can identify locations and specific items that are especially susceptible to metal theft. We can “harden” those targets to reduce the chances of theft (see MetalTheft.Net’s interview with Brandon Kooi for a discussion of this approach). 

On the other hand, I have been tangentially involved in a recent research project mapping metal theft locations in one city, and the results show that metal thefts do not clump together as tightly into "hotspots" as other thefts. This suggests that metal theft targets are far more widely dispersed than other types of theft, which makes sense since objects containing metal are so widely dispersed. It also highlights the much wider diversity and number of possible targets. Now theft is constrained by a new kind of demand based in scarcity and global commodity prices. The item itself takes back seat to the material from which it is made. This model could take on increasing importance as speculation continues to affect prices for all sorts of commodities, and increasing materials, like rare earths, become more scarce. Or producers might just switch to plastics, fiberglass, and other composites.   
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Gutting for Export
In Part 1of this blog ("Something Old"), I wrote how metal theft is an old crime that seems to be tied closely to industrialization. England saw a spike in metal thefts with their industrial revolution (as well as a whole new evolution in property crime caused by shifts in demographics and new modes of production). America's metal theft spike seems to have come later, along with its post-Civil War industrial expansion. Today, observers generally agree that new industrialization in developing countries, especially China, and the substantial rise in metal prices has led to the current metal theft problem. So what's new?

There seem to be at least two significant developments associated with the new metal theft wave. It is no longer limited to the country that is industrializing, and it may even be redefining property crime in a way not seen since England's Industrial Revolution.

The earlier industrial revolutions in the U.S. and U.K. increased metal thefts in the industrializing countries themselves. England's metal theft problem coincided with its own industrial revolution, and then America's happened later with its own. They were victims of their own industrial success.

Now, however, the U.S., the U.K., and a host of other countries are victims of a metal theft wave precipitated by another country's industrial revolution. In their current post-industrial phase, western economically developed countries now have loads of metals that can be potentially scrapped (whether the owner of the metals wants to or not), while the capacity for building new products with those metals has been moving offshore to China and other industrializing countries. Supply chains for exporting and importing "scrap" metals across far distances also obviously operate at a whole different level than 100 years ago, making it quite efficient to scrap then ship metal from one place in the world to another.

Earlier metal theft waves led to a country's goods and infrastructure being stolen only to go back into that country's goods and infrastructure. Now countries’ goods and infrastructure are being scrapped and sent abroad. (On a side note, this would seem to pose a host of potential problems involving economic and national security, which we’ll address in a later blog.)

And it's not just developed economies in the west that are feeling the sting. South Africa, Eastern Europe, and even Fiji, to name a few, have reported significant metal theft problems. A recent article from StaebrokNews.com reported the current plight of Caribbean countries that never enjoyed the fruits of the early western industrial revolutions and are now victimized by the current industrialization elsewhere:

"The huge demand in the major industrialized countries for recycled metal has given literal meaning to the saying 'one man's meat is another man's poison.' If recycled metal has become critical to the accelerated production in the world’s major producers of industrial goods, that demand has set in train a level of lawlessness which, in developing countries, threatens, in many cases, to seriously undermine development. Here in Guyana as in the rest of the Caribbean, the demand for recycled metal has spawned a regimen of metal theft which the authorities, having endured it for a time, have been unable to ignore. The cost is simply too high" (from "CARICOM Countries Read Riot Act Against Scrap Metal Industry," 8/5/11).

In response, Caribbean countries like Guyana, Jamaica, and the Bahamas have imposed bans on the scrap export trade, and other countries are reportedly considering similar actions. It will be interesting to see how that all pans out.

It is possible that ten years from now China will produce enough of its own scrap to ease pressures on our metals and infrastructure. This could even lead to a potential glut in American scrap. Right now, however, scrap metal represents one of our biggest exports and also one of our fastest growing crime problems.  

The second new issue raised by the current metal theft wave involves the possible shift in the very nature of theft itself. We will address this in the next blog.

by Kevin Whiteacre
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Something Old
Metal theft is an old crime. In 1756, Great Britain’s George II refined existing laws against receiving stolen goods to explicitly include lead, iron, copper, brass, bell-metal or solder  stolen from “buildings, or from ships, vessels, wharfs or quays.” A conviction meant transportation to the colonies for 14 years. That same act allowed judges to grant search warrants when possession of stolen metals was suspected “as by the oath of one witness.” Even purchasing metals at night “between sun-setting and sun-rising” could get the buyer transported for 14 years. And if someone was offered suspect metals for purchase the law required them to apprehend the suspected thief. Failing to do so was a misdemeanor with a 20 shilling fine for the first offense. 


Patrick Colquhoun’s 1795 classic A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis reserves a special vitriol for “Receivers of stolen Goods, under the denominations of Dealers in Rags, Old Iron, and other Metals” and their “evil tendency.” He also seems particularly bothered by dairy farmers fraudulently skimming milk and keeping the cream for resale, in addition to a host of other crimes.

Later, as American industrialization cranked up after the Civil War, the theft of metal, particularly copper and iron, grew along with it. There are hundreds of short newspaper blurbs about petty thefts of iron and copper wires and cables and longer stories detailing infrastructural and communications problems caused by metal thefts. The news stories on metal thefts are surprisingly similar to today’s stories. Like today, railroads, ports, and communications companies were the most common victims. (You can receive regular updates on metal thefts that took place on “This Day in History” by subscribing to MetalTheft.Net’s News and History blog or following us on Twitter.)

Each metal theft wave, however, was the result of new developments, whether in general theft trends, markets for metals, or other related factors. Undoubtedly, industrialization has consistently served as the primary catalyst for increases in metal theft. The basic demand for metal resulting from industrialization raises its price, making it worth the effort for some folks to steal and some others to “receive.” So that’s nothing new. But early industrialization also changed the very nature of theft and receiving (also known as fencing) well beyond metals. 

In his introduction to The Fence (a great book for anyone seeking a more in-depth understanding of theft generally), sociologist Darrell Steffensmeier notes that though thieving has ancient origins, the Industrial Revolution made it possible for thieves to really make a living from stealing. Prior to the Industrial Revolution and mass-production, Steffensmeier argues, personal property was rarer, more individualized, and easily identifiable. This greatly limited the market for stolen goods to the thief’s inner circle or own immediate consumption. Demographic and economic growth associated with the Industrial Revolution coupled with an abundance of mass-produced identical goods, however, led to an evolution in property crime as we know it.

“The growth of mass-produced and mass-owned consumer goods, of which there is little chance of being traced or recognized by the owner, paved the way for “receivers” who on a large scale buy stolen property to resell it, often at a distance or after a time has elapsed, for a handsome profit. The development of this specialized role of receiver, who buys and sells stolen goods and who acts as a ready market enabling thieves to convert goods into unidentifiable cash, was an escalating feature of the eighteenth-century underworld” (Steffensmeier, 1986, p. 10).

Theft as we have known it may not be all that old. It could have been the product of social and economic changes brought about by the first Industrial Revolution. Perhaps this current wave of metal theft also represents uniquely modern economic circumstances and maybe portends another contemporary evolution in thieving.

We will consider this possibility in the next installment.


by Kevin Whiteacre
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I follow the news on metal theft regularly and have been disappointed by the easy and limited explanation for the rise in metal thefts regularly proffered by officials and others: illegal drug use.

That's not to say I disagree, just that knowing this doesn't do much to help us formulate new policy or practice to prevent metal theft. Many of the thieves stealing metals and selling them to scrap yards are drug addicts (certainly the ones most likely to be caught and arrested are), and doubtless many are not (just look at all the recent theft scandals involving city officials and employees). So what?

“Rational Choice" criminologists emphasize the important distinction between criminality and crime. Criminality is the concern with identifying what factors make an individual more or less likely to commit crime, such as one’s parents, neighborhood, socioeconomic status, drug addiction, etc. Criminologists Derek Cornish and Ronald Clarke call this the "initial involvement model." Crime, or the "criminal event model," is the concern with the event itself and the circumstances under which it occurs or does not occur.

One of the problems with focusing on criminality rather than the crime is that criminality generally fails to explain why the criminal engages in any particular type of crime. Why is the meth head stealing copper wires leading to transformers instead of rose bushes out of yards or power tools from hardware stores or other metals from other spots? Why is metal theft even such a big issue all of a sudden? Well, the rise in metal prices has made it more economically beneficial to take the risks associated with stealing certain metals from certain locations... That, at least, starts to bring us closer to concerns with the crime rather than the criminal, but crime policy can't really do much about world metal prices, so that explanation is of limited practical use as well. 

Another problem with criminality in terms of policy is that the propensity to commit a crime is mediated by the opportunities to actually do so. A person may want to sell counterfeit purses, for example, but if no one will buy them, he's out of luck no matter how strong his pro-crime proclivities. On the other hand, someone else might not be particularly criminal, but if she walks by an unguarded wallet lying in full view on a beach towel, she just might take it. Everyone's tendencies toward prosocial or antisocial behavior are ultimately decided by the circumstances in which those tendencies are tested.

This leads to a third problem with focusing on individuals' criminality: it has not produced a whole lot of effective crime prevention measures. Social learning theories are fascinating, and they have held up to many decades of hypothesis testing, but the effectiveness of policies actually generated from the theories is dubious. Or in the case of metal theft and drug use, even if drug use causes other forms of criminality, such as metal theft, new drug policies or drug enforcement practices are not likely to appreciably reduce metal theft. Addressing criminality rather than the crime just might not be the best means of understanding and reducing the metal theft problem.

Most of the thieves caught and arrested for metal theft likely use illegal drugs, and many undoubtedly stole the metal to pay for their next party, but that does not mean drug addiction is a useful explanation for metal theft in terms of moving us toward effective, practical policy to reduce the crime. For that, we need to look more closely at the crime itself and its many forms (aluminum gutters, beer kegs, copper air conditioner coils, catalytic converters, etc.) rather than the criminals. Motivated criminals abound. It is the form their crimes take that changes, and that is what we must address to reduce crime. 
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