Los Angeles' 6th Street Bridge is wired to glow with colorful lights celebrating the spirit of the city, but the bridge, known as the “ribbon of light,” now goes dark at night, along with portions of the busy 405 Freeway and dozens of other streets across the city.
In St. Paul, Minnesota, a man was recently hit and killed by a car while crossing a road near his home when the street lights were out.
More than 970,000 feet (184 miles) of electrical wiring has been lost in Las Vegas and the surrounding area. It's from street lights from the past two years.
A brazen, opportunistic crime is taking out street lights in American cities. Thieves are stripping thousands of street lights of their copper wiring and selling it to scrap metal recyclers for cash. While the wiring typically sells for a few hundred dollars, out-of-service street lights pose a safety hazard to drivers and pedestrians and cost cities millions of dollars to repair.
Metal theft has been a plague in cities for decades and often rises alongside soaring commodity prices, but the prolonged economic downturn and social unrest since the pandemic, combined with a surge in demand for metals, particularly copper, has pushed the street crime to new levels.
Some of the thefts have involved critical city infrastructure and public artworks once thought to be immovable: Across Los Angeles County, more than 290 fire hydrants have gone missing since January.
And in Denver, two men were arrested this winter for removing bronze artwork from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, causing about $85,000 in damages, after police said they received $394 for the metal they salvaged from a local scrap company.
Other thefts have been personal: At Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery in Carson, California, next to Compton, a mausoleum plaque and a monument dedicated by boxer Joe Louis were stolen, according to Aisha Woods, a volunteer caretaker at the cemetery. The thieves even stole a metal pipe used to water lawns.
Lincoln Cemetery was founded in the early 20th century by African-Americans who weren't welcomed in many other cemeteries, said Woods, whose mother is buried there. The theft unsettles many who visit the cemetery, Woods said. “It's like opening up a new wound. It's a disrespect to a sacred place.”
Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon's district, which includes downtown, saw 6,900 copper wire thefts last year, up from 600 five years earlier. He said some of the thefts involve sophisticated criminal gangs that hire people struggling with drug addiction to steal wire in exchange for drugs.
“Huge swaths of the city are left in the dark,” said de Leon, who recently created a task force to combat metal theft.
De Leon said the city has begun taking precautions, including removing and storing public statues, including one donated by the Mexican state of Veracruz, a decision he made after someone tried to cut off a statue's ankle with a saw in a Lincoln Heights park.
The Los Angeles Department of Street Lighting couldn't say how many of the 225,000 streetlights it manages citywide were out because of wire theft, but a department spokesman said in a statement that wire theft began increasing just before the pandemic and is “the most dramatic increase we've seen in recent memory.”
The theft comes amid soaring demand for copper and other metals, which are at the heart of our evolving economy and a key component in battery-powered cars, modern power grids and the giant new data centers that power artificial intelligence and other technologies.
“The world can never have enough copper,” said Kartik Barul, global leader of the materials and processing industries practice at the Boston Consulting Group. “Copper is the most important metal in the energy transition.”
Walrul predicts a global copper shortage of as much as 10 million tonnes over the next two years, but developing new copper mines could take more than a decade, making scrap copper more valuable.
In the early days of the pandemic, many recycling facilities closed, disrupting the supply of scrap metal. Around the same time, demand for the metal increased as the Biden administration began pumping billions of dollars into construction of huge infrastructure projects.
Metal theft is rife. Automobile catalytic converters, which contain precious metals such as platinum and palladium, are frequent targets.
In interviews, elected officials and police officers across the country said they could never remember a time when public property, including bridges, communication cables and fire hydrants, had been the subject of such a brazen theft.
“It seemed like a little weird issue when it first came up,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in an interview, “but it's costly and it's disruptive.”
St. Paul's streetlights are popular targets for wire thieves: For safety reasons, many of the poles are hollow and easily broken when hit by a car, making it easy for thieves to cut the poles or pry open a small panel at their base to pull out the wires.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said he takes his nightly jog around Minnesota's capital city and notices many of the street lights are out.
“The minute we fix it, people come back and buy it again,” Carter said.
Late April, Six people have been charged with plotting to steal thousands of pounds of copper wire across St. Paul, with one member of the copper wire “cutting squad” collecting $12,169 from recyclers between November 2023 and January 2023, according to police reports.
Many metal thefts require a level of expertise: Some thieves targeting hydrants in communities South Los Angeles appear to be using tools that allow them to shut off the water before disconnecting the hydrant, said Kate Nutting, southwest regional general manager for Golden State Water Company, which manages the hydrants.
Nutting said the thieves may have stolen the necessary tools from a utility maintenance truck. Fire hydrants weigh about 100 pounds each, are made primarily of steel and cost $4,000 each to replace. Nutting said some areas have had as many as 10 hydrants stolen at one time.
Scrap dealers in many cities have told police that they screen people bringing in materials, ask for identification and record purchases, but they continue to find buyers for stolen materials.
Last month, Gov. Walz signed a new law requiring people selling copper scrap in Minnesota to get a license from the state and certify that the material was obtained legally. The state has a similar law regulating the sale of catalytic converters to recyclers.
Some Los Angeles officials have urged the city to focus on prosecuting the scrap dealers who buy the stolen materials, rather than the people who steal the wiring, who are likely to be impoverished and cash-strapped.
De Leon said the Los Angeles Police Department's metal theft task force, which includes officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, is investigating scrap dealers as well as street-level thieves, and his office expects the task force to announce several arrests this month.
That doesn't solve the problem. Late last month, thieves struck Lincoln Cemetery again, stealing more of the mausoleum's metal plaque and smashing the door to the chamber where the burials are. Woods, a volunteer cemetery caretaker, covered the entrance to the chamber with plastic bags and tape.
“They say there's honor in thieves,” de Leon said, “but when you steal a headstone, it's even more despicable.”