Neighborhoods across the country are falling dangerously dark at sunset — and staying that way overnight — as cities from Philadelphia to Los Angeles struggle to deal with a staggering increase in the theft of copper wire from utility poles and street lights.

The thieves are selling the increasingly valuable copper wire for cash.

“This is a really challenging thing to deal with, because it’s not a traditional form of crime that most people understand,” said Ben Stickle, a former police officer and now a criminologist at Middle Tennessee State University who specializes in metal thefts.

Mr. Stickle said copper theft is widespread enough to be a growing national problem, but it’s still a black-market-fueled crime that most police departments, to this point, are unsure how to tackle. 

“We have an idea in law enforcement as to say, ‘Hey, this is what shoplifting is. This is how it works. I find the goods, give them back to the store and take the person to jail,’” he continued, “It’s a little bit more challenging for the theft of metals, because, again, you just have to have some basic knowledge of what’s going on.”

Some of the more sophisticated crooks have caught police and local officials flat-footed. Last year in the Bucks County suburbs of Philadelphia, the “Get Money Squad” pretended to be part of a search party looking for missing children during a flash flood while lopping wires off utility poles. 

In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz — now the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee — signed off on tighter regulations on copper resales after repair bills for street lights skyrocketed in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Electric vehicle stations in Seattle have been knocked offline. And in Louisville, Kentucky, motorists have little more than headlights to guide them along Interstate 71 and Interstate 64 exits after thieves yanked wires out of 1,400 poles this spring.

Frustrated officials in Oakland, California, gave up fixing one frequently-hit intersection, replacing overhead stoplights with stop signs instead.  

But no city has been hit harder than Los Angeles, where streets go dark faster than crews can make repairs, with more than 11,000 reported thefts in the first three months of 2024; according to Crosstown, a California news site. 

The city responded to the crisis by creating a special Los Angeles Police Department unit, the Heavy Metal Task Force, that last month arrested 82 people in connection to copper thefts.

Deputy Chief Michael Oreb said 60 of those suspects taken into custody were charged with felonies, and authorities seized nine guns during their crackdown.

The unit was created earlier this year after the Sixth Street Bridge near downtown was completely blacked out due to rampant copper theft.

But LAPD officials think they may have turned the corner on the thefts.     

“Today you see a clean alley, an alley that is free from debris,” Chief Oreb said during a recent press conference. “Not so long ago, this was a location of a wire-stripping group of individuals that would process the stolen wire from here and bring it to salvage yards to sell for pennies on the dollar.”

Copper goes for just over $4 per pound, so thieves who abscond with hundreds of pounds from big targets such as substations can make more than pocket change with their hauls.

Police said suspected burglar Alejandro DeJesus posed as a construction worker in order to steal nearly $100,000 worth of copper pipes from the Fontainebleau Las Vegas until his March arrest.

Mechanical companies told local NBC affiliate KSNV that, in combination with other metals that were stolen, the theft cost the luxury hotel about $200,000 in materials and $350,000 in labor.

Mr. Stickle, the metal theft expert, said the financial damage done by criminals often dwarfs the money thieves get from reselling the copper.

And while bandits sometimes use aggressive methods to access copper — such as tearing into the walls of abandoned buildings — Mr. Stickle said most burglars are skilled tradesmen who know how to deftly pluck their desired metal from a source.

That’s a double-edged sword for the scrap yards where criminals go to cash in on their copper.

Mr. Stickle, who embedded himself with thieves while writing a book on metal theft, said he met an electrician who made regular trips to a scrap yard.

The scrap yard required the electrician to show a letter from his employer stating the copper wasn’t stolen. Six months later, he said that same electrician was swiping copper and using his employer’s letter to sell the illicit goods.

Some states, such as Illinois, have tried to curtail metal theft by requiring scrap yards to make a copy of a seller’s ID and take a photo of the person so they can have a file on them. The new law in Minnesota requires resellers to get a license. Multiple states have also enacted laws that specifically penalize copper thefts.

But many jurisdictions are focusing more on hardening their infrastructure to stop thefts in the first place.

It’s why the hand hole cover offered by the aptly named company, End Metal Theft, has been such a hit around Phoenix.

Co-founder Chad Ridenour said cities in Arizona have been seeking out his services over the past 18 months to protect public light fixtures from crooks.

Mr. Ridenour said the hand hole cover requires a specialized key to unlock the panel rather than the simple flathead screwdriver that most people have in their toolbox. 

“In 2010, I asked one of the cities here in Arizona, ‘What are you doing to prevent this [theft] from happening again? And they said, ‘We got nothing — what do you got?’” he said. “I couldn’t find anything, so I developed something that worked. As of a few months ago, they’re still in place, so 14 years later, they’re still holding.”

Mr. Ridenhour, who is an electrician by trade, said the company can fit the hand hole cover on street lights, stop lights and even stadium lights to protect the poles from crooks.

Mr. Stickle said the best way to hold burglars accountable is to be more diligent about tracking the metal thefts.

Having public and private companies tell police when and where they’re being plundered will allow law enforcement to start seeing patterns, the researcher said. Some watchdog groups also developed a technology that alerts companies when their copper wire has been cut.

Still, Mr. Stickle said thieves seem to be one step ahead of authorities. And that lag is often leaving victims in the dark.

“The best thing you can do is prevent it, but that’s really hard as well,” he said.

• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.