Thieves Targeting Copper

Teenagers banned from malls without chaperones. Streets flooded with cameras to watch everyone while criminals go unprosecuted. People forced to take their tacos to go so employees don’t get assaulted. California is a bastion of wacky crime stories.

Each time one of these stories rolls by, it is hard to imagine it being topped. And then it is. So we go to Oakland, where, due to crime, Taco Bell has closed all but one dine-in location. That seems like a hard story to top, but Oakland found a way. The city has replaced the traffic lights for at least one intersection with stop signs, hanging overhead as if they were traffic lights, because why?

Because criminals are stealing copper wires from the lights and homeless people are leeching electricity from the electric boxes for their own use. Apparently, city officials had even tried to put cement blocks on top of the boxes to prevent them from being tampered with, but people just dragged them off and continued their criminality.

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You can take the Raiders out of Oakland, but you can’t take raiders out of Oakland, at least when you are handing control of the city to pro-criminal “leaders” who would rather see restaurants closed and gas stations avoided than put a criminal in a jail cell. Oakland may well be the softest of California’s big cities when it comes to crime, which explains why even the local chapter of the NAACP is pushing back on the pro-criminal policies that use race as a justification for their existence.

In the meantime, we can all look forward to what wacky crime story California’s cities can offer that can top Oakland’s stop signs hanging from light poles. The ball is in your court now, Los Angeles. Or, at least, it is until it gets stolen like the copper wires at a traffic light.