The Los Angeles City Council has allocated an additional $200,000 to the copper wire task force, tripling funding intended to reduce metal theft from public infrastructure.
Peter Brown, communications director for Councilman Kevin De Leon, said the initiative, called the heavy metals task force, is the “most aggressive and proactive effort” to crack down on the thefts that have left predominantly working-class communities without adequate streetlights and internet service and cost the city at least $17 million in repairs.
The money, which comes from De Leon's discretionary funds, brings the total funding for the initiative to $600,000. It will go to the Los Angeles Police Department, whose officers from the Central, Newton and Hollenbeck divisions have led 26 operations in recent months, resulting in 82 arrests, 2,000 pounds of recovered copper wire and the confiscation of nine firearms.
Of the 82 arrests, 60 people face felony charges.
“This additional funding will enhance our ability to combat these destructive crimes and ensure our neighborhoods can be safe and secure,” De Leon said in a statement Tuesday. “The success of the heavy metals task force sends a decisive message to criminals: Los Angeles will no longer allow them to use our city assets as ATMs. This ATM is closed. While we have had success with the results of the task force, we still have much more to do.”
Council members Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez voted against the motion, which passed 12-2 on Tuesday.
Power outages on the streets are a “serious problem,” Soto-Martinez told The Times in a statement Thursday, but the problem may not necessarily be due to the theft of copper cables.
“We have found that about 70% of those outages are due to lack of maintenance,” Soto-Martinez said. “While we have not seen any data to suggest that this task force will actually prevent future acts of vandalism and power outages, our limited funds should be better spent supporting the Office of Public Lighting to repair lights that are currently not working, while also supporting proven preventative measures such as hardening streetlights and installing LED lights, which do not use copper wires.”
Hernandez agreed, saying he would prefer to have resources dedicated to efforts that “actually prevent thefts from happening in the first place,” such as the solar-powered streetlights that were installed on the streets of Van Nuys earlier this year.
Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon holds a copper wire while giving interviews on July 30.
(Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times)
Instead, he said in a statement, the city has been “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results when it comes to copper wire theft.”
“Streetlights are out across the city and it currently takes almost a year to fix them, only for the cycle to repeat itself again,” Hernandez continued. “The Bureau of Public Lighting has begun testing solar-powered lighting that eliminates the problem of copper wire theft and brings us closer to our renewable energy goals, but the city has only installed a few hundred of these lights. It’s time to make investments in solutions that will get the lights working again for good.”
Hernandez and Soto-Martinez also voted against the formation of the task force in February, arguing that the effort focused more on punitive measures than prevention.
De Leon referred to the July 30 meeting at a press conference announcing the task force’s findings, saying the robberies “were not a victimless crime.”
That same day, De Leon and Councilwoman Traci Park filed motions to order the Bureau of Public Lighting to mark its copper wire as city property and to have City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto draft an ordinance prohibiting the possession of telecommunications cables by any person or company not affiliated with telecommunications companies.
The council has not yet voted on those motions.
