Once the sun sets in the Pico-Union area, workers and residents head out into the streets in fear. Here and elsewhere in Los Angeles, copper wire thieves have robbed them of their sense of security.
“One night, a guy pulled a gun on me,” said Albert Robles, owner of Robles Carburetors, at Hoover and West 18th Street. Emboldened, he believes, by the darkness, the man got into a car and didn’t want Robles to interfere.
At the Domino's across the street, Luis Rojas has been working as a pizza deliveryman for three years. These days, he says, pizza deliverymen are often afraid to leave their cars to go knock on doors in the dingy South Union Avenue corridor between Washington and Venice boulevards.
“I used to walk to work,” said Rojas, who lives a 10-minute walk from his workplace. Now, it’s scary. “People can follow you.”
This new layer of fear has become a daily occurrence in Pico-Union, said lifelong resident Aurora Corona. According to locals, entire blocks go dark at night in this Los Angeles neighborhood just west of downtown. It is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, home to about 40,000 people in a 1.67-square-mile area.
Lack of lighting is an issue that concerns Corona and part of the reason the retiree joined the Pico-Union Neighborhood Council; she serves as secretary and chair of a committee on quality of life and safety.
Pico-Union and the Westlake neighborhood have been hit hard by the outages, he said, but noted that “it's a citywide issue.”
An NBC4 investigation found that of the 223,000 streetlights in Los Angeles, 25,000 (or more than 1 in 10) are broken. Vandalism is a problem. Homeless people sometimes divert electricity from streetlights to encampments.
“I understand their situation,” Corona said. On Venice Boulevard, he’s seen people living on the streets struggling to stay warm when temperatures drop at night. But the power rerouting has caused streetlights to go out, he said, or even catch fire.
But the problem of copper wire theft has skyrocketed. Thieves steal copper to resell as scrap metal. The Bureau of Public Lighting said copper wire theft from streetlights increased 800% between 2017 and 2023, NBC reported.
Los Angeles City Council members have been grappling for months to address copper wire theft and debating whether to impose harsher consequences to deter the crime. Last month, thieves made off with seven miles of copper wire — worth about $11,000 — from the newly rebuilt Sixth Street Bridge, plunging the so-called ribbon of light into complete darkness.
Meanwhile, in the Pico-Union area, Rojas said he's seen someone, in the shadows, trying to break into a car. And he's noticed that families are no longer walking their children to nearby Toberman Park and Vest-Pocket Park in Pico-Union after the sun goes down.
The Olympic community police department did not respond to The Times' request for comment on whether crime had increased in the area because the lack of street lighting had plunged the streets into darkness. However, studies have shown that well-lit streets can reduce criminal activity.
However, local residents and business owners have had to wait months for repairs to be made, according to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, whose district includes Pico-Union. There have been “delays of more than six months for broken streetlights,” she said in a statement.
According to Corona, the city has already spent millions on repairing damage to LA’s streetlights. But Hernandez says more needs to be spent to “better fund neighborhood services so our constituents don’t have to wait months for well-lit streets.”
The Public Lighting Bureau has already tried different methods to deter theft, such as camouflaging or better securing electrical panels. There is also the option of transitioning to solar power, but those changes “will take at least five years,” Corona said. And in a year when the city is facing a budget shortfall and cutting municipal programs, there are many problems that officials are trying to fix.
“I commend the city for trying to resolve the problem,” Corona said.
Meanwhile, Pico-Union residents who are in the dark continue to wait.
“Right now,” Rojas said, “it’s a little scary.”
