The Los Angeles City Council has pumped an additional $200,000 into the Copper Wire Task Force, tripling funding focused on curbing metal theft from public infrastructure.
Peter Brown, a spokesman for City Councilman Kevin de Leon, said the effort, dubbed the Heavy Metal Task Force, is the city's “most aggressive and proactive effort” to crack down on theft that has left largely working-class neighborhoods lacking street lighting and internet service and cost the city at least $17 million in repairs.
The funding, coming from Governor de Leon's discretionary budget, brings the total funding for this effort to $600,000. The funds will be allocated to the Los Angeles Police Department, whose officers from the Central, Newton and Hollenbeck Precincts have led 26 investigations in recent months, resulting in 82 arrests, the recovery of 2,000 pounds of copper wire and the seizure of nine firearms.
Of the 82 people arrested, 60 have been charged with felonies.
“This additional funding will increase our ability to fight these destructive crimes and ensure the safety and security of our communities,” de Leon said in a statement Tuesday. “The success of the Heavy Metal Task Force sends a definitive message to criminals that the City of Los Angeles will no longer allow them to use city property as an ATM. This ATM will be closed. While the task force's work has been successful, we still have much work to do.”
Council members Eunises Hernandez and Hugo Soto Martinez voted against the motion, which passed 12-2 on Tuesday.
Soto Martinez told The Times in a statement Thursday that the streetlight outages are a “serious issue” but are not necessarily the result of copper wire theft.
“We found that roughly 70 percent of outages are due to lack of maintenance,” Soto-Martinez said, “and since we have no data to show that this task force will actually prevent future vandalism or outages, limited funding would be better spent helping the Street Lighting Department repair lights that are currently out, as well as supporting proven preventative measures like strengthening street lighting and installing copper-free LED lighting.”
Hernandez agreed, saying he would like to see the money used to help “prevent theft from happening in the first place,” such as the solar-powered street lights installed on Van Nuys streets earlier this year.
Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon holds a copper wire during an interview on July 30.
(Michael Blacksher/Los Angeles Times)
Instead, she said in a statement, the city has “done the same thing over and over again when it comes to copper wire theft while expecting a different outcome.”
“Streetlights across the city are out, and after nearly a year of repairs, the cycle is starting again,” Hernandez continued. “The Street Lighting Department has eliminated copper wire theft and begun piloting solar-powered lights that will get us closer to our renewable energy goals, but the City has only deployed a few hundred of these lights. It's time to invest in solutions that will bring our streetlights back on permanently.”
Hernandez and Soto-Martinez also voted against forming the task force in February, arguing the effort was focused on punitive measures rather than prevention.
Governor de Leon referred to the February meeting during a July 30 press conference announcing the task force's findings, saying theft is “not a victimless crime.”
That same day, de Leon and Councilwoman Tracy Park filed a motion to direct the Street Lighting Department to mark the copper wire as city property and to instruct City Attorney Heidi Feldstein Soto to draft an ordinance that would prohibit ownership of communications cables by individuals or companies not affiliated with telecommunications companies.
The council has not yet voted on those motions.
