5 ms·

Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year so

Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of. I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are not conducive to a functional society.

ProAm 4mo ago
It's meth.
- Loughla 4mo ago
  We live in a very rural, incredibly safe area. You can always tell when someone else gets hooked on meth. Their place goes to shit, step 1. Their kids get dirty, step 2. You start to see things like car batteries or tools disappear from nearby farms, step 3. They die or go to jail after trying to steal something big, like electric lines or even train rails in one instance, step 4. At least with heroine, they tend to just keep to themselves. Meth makes sure they have the energy and drive to really fuck with other people.
  - phainopepla2 4mo ago
    My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)
    - onemoresoop 4mo ago
      What do you mean by color coordinated the closet?
      - Insanity 4mo ago
        +1, and how does that relate to meth?
        cjbgkagh 4mo ago
        It’s a cluster of behaviors, like excessively brushing their teeth. "just meth things" is a meme referring to these behaviors.
        onemoresoop 4mo ago
        >excessively brushing their teeth Is that in spite of why their teeth decay so badly?
        cjbgkagh 4mo ago
        The brushing doesn’t help. The teeth decay is from lack of saliva. I think it’s more because it’s a simple task that feels productive. It satiates the desire to be doing something without introducing the added frustration of failing at a more complex task.
        pixl97 4mo ago
        In the way that meth is kind of like Adderall for addicts. I lived in an apartment for a while and the upstairs neighbor decided to get addicted to meth and vacuum their floor every 30 minutes for a few days, both day and night.
      - j-bos 4mo ago
        Not op, but meth is like, amphetamines the thing that drives people to do boring pointless work, like organizing clothes by color.
        onemoresoop 4mo ago
        Thanks for the info, I had no idea about this meth behavior.
    - pjc50 4mo ago
      This reads like one of those jokes about "my car is so bad that when someone crashed into it they caused thousands of dollars of improvements".
pjc50 4mo ago
> people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else Cable theft is particularly destructive because it's so value-destroying. $100k of cable destroyed for a maximum profit of $1k. Or in this particularly egregious UK case, a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-moore-sculpture-theft-reclining-figure https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-m... I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural crime. There may not be a lot of people, but the per capita crime rate can be just as high as urban areas, and the under-reporting issues can be worse. Lots of invisible drug trafficing or manufacture/growing. Lots of thefts of ag equipment. Even the occasional theft of livestock, a crime from pre-history. Then there's the both essential and illegal use of immigrants who have been imported for the purpose without work permits and may be held in coercive and unpleasant conditions.
- expedition32 4mo ago
  The Netherlands had a lot of problems with people stealing copper lines. Eventually the government made a deal with scrapyards- they were traditionally run by somewhat shady people.
- stronglikedan 4mo ago
  > a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value I think a more apt comparison would be the retail value of the metal compared to the scrap value, since the "multimillion" is more of a subjective artistic value. Egregious nonetheless.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.
  - CaptainZapp 4mo ago
    Sure, art is subjective to some extent. But reducing the value of a Henry Moore piece to the value of the material is, well, not very insightful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore
FatherOfCurses 4mo ago
It's a mystery to me why the scrap metal industry doesn't have more scrutiny given how much copper is stolen.
- MisterTea 4mo ago
  Years ago we were cleaning out our shop and had to scrap a lot of metal. At the scrap yard in Brooklyn there was a separate line for copper and aluminum vs iron and steel which was mostly a bulk dump job. Seemed like half of the line were homeless and destitute people. Many had shopping carts full of various pieces of aluminum and whatever, lots of AC condensers and copper tubing. There was a couple ahead of me, skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine were holding a few bundles of AV cables and an old extension cord in their hands - a scene of desperation. The problem with policing scrap yards is you can't prove anyone stole anything. You could limit who can drop off scrap but then you create incentives for those people to purchase illicit scrap and pass it off as legit.
  - Symbiote 4mo ago
    I think in the UK the scrap yards can only pay electronically, with a delay of several days. They must also record photo identification. This was put in place after the Nth theft of railway cables.
  - testing22321 4mo ago
    Should we police the scrap yards, or help the fellow citizens who are “skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine” What a place to live.
    - MisterTea 4mo ago
      What have you done to help your fellow citizens? I've been down the path of helping deeply addicted people and learned many hard lessons. Some people can be helped more easily than others. Some are almost impossible without constant professional help that is financially impossible to afford by 99% of the population.
burnt-resistor 4mo ago
It seems to happen most in economically-desperate areas or where there are drug addicts. It's the same sort of shit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like when live power lines were stolen in Moscow. A whole family watching TV and suddenly the lights go out unexpectedly... but it's because someone has taken the power lines for money. Infrastructure cannibalism seems to happen whenever there's insufficient security/prosecution and/or excessive desperation.
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
Upping the severity of punishment will be as effective as the war on drugs was, that is to say not one bit. You'd need to reduce poverty to prevent this kind of thing.
- 4gotunameagain 4mo ago
  This is not true, it is a false analogy. The war on drugs has been a definite failure, but we can see the effects of lower punishment for low hanging crimes in the decriminalization of shoplifting in california.
  - Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
    Isn't the cali-decriminalization of shoplifting designed to avoid people going to jail.....for the health care they'll receive?
    - browsingonly 4mo ago
      That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings. To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
      - pixl97 4mo ago
        I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container. The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative. For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix. Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.
        browsingonly 4mo ago
testing22321 4mo ago
> Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this The link between poverty and crime has been a stab listed for centuries
- dmitrygr 4mo ago
  https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-cause-crime-or-does-crime-cause-poverty/ https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-...
  - casey2 4mo ago
    Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege. Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.
fred_is_fred 4mo ago
"Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this." Meth.
dmitrygr 4mo ago
> for some reason Do the perps get prosecuted? Do the places that buy stolen copper? Is it publicized? Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment? Are repeat offenders properly contained long term? No? Well then ... it's a mystery
- pixl97 4mo ago
  The for some reason is a meth epidemic. >Do the perps get prosecuted? Pretty often, but drug addicts are rather senseless and do stuff anyway. >Do the places that buy stolen copper? Sometimes. Like any criminal enterprise there are groups that launder stolen metals and turn them into 'good' metals. > Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment Depending on what you do, it can be a felony, which in this case is likely 1-5 years, with each repeat offense adding more. https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-mayor-signs-new-ordinance-cracking-down-on-copper-wire-thefts/article_f24fb5c2-ba24-40c6-b57a-d2c5f4f8b2d1.html https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-mayor-signs-new-ordinan... the TL;DR here is the theft is a second order effect that you're not going to stop because the people that are doing it are horrifically addicted to meth which overrides any idea in their brain but doing something to get them more meth.
ncr100 4mo ago
Anecdotes, observation, and a wish: Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners. People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning. It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them. They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that. I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community. Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people. I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.
- WorldPeas 4mo ago
  The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.
- LorenPechtel 4mo ago
  Actually, the other way around. Cheap drugs would mean the addicts didn't have to steal as much. Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo ago
btreecat 4mo ago
I'd wish they'd focus on the problems leading to folks feeling that copper theft is a better source of income than other more legitimate routes. Speaks volumes to the local economy and support networks.

ProAm 4mo ago

It's meth.

Loughla 4mo ago
We live in a very rural, incredibly safe area. You can always tell when someone else gets hooked on meth. Their place goes to shit, step 1. Their kids get dirty, step 2. You start to see things like car batteries or tools disappear from nearby farms, step 3. They die or go to jail after trying to steal something big, like electric lines or even train rails in one instance, step 4. At least with heroine, they tend to just keep to themselves. Meth makes sure they have the energy and drive to really fuck with other people.
- phainopepla2 4mo ago
  My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)
  - onemoresoop 4mo ago
    What do you mean by color coordinated the closet?
    - Insanity 4mo ago
      +1, and how does that relate to meth?
      - cjbgkagh 4mo ago
        It’s a cluster of behaviors, like excessively brushing their teeth. "just meth things" is a meme referring to these behaviors.
        onemoresoop 4mo ago
        >excessively brushing their teeth Is that in spite of why their teeth decay so badly?
        cjbgkagh 4mo ago
        The brushing doesn’t help. The teeth decay is from lack of saliva. I think it’s more because it’s a simple task that feels productive. It satiates the desire to be doing something without introducing the added frustration of failing at a more complex task.
      - pixl97 4mo ago
        In the way that meth is kind of like Adderall for addicts. I lived in an apartment for a while and the upstairs neighbor decided to get addicted to meth and vacuum their floor every 30 minutes for a few days, both day and night.
    - j-bos 4mo ago
      Not op, but meth is like, amphetamines the thing that drives people to do boring pointless work, like organizing clothes by color.
      - onemoresoop 4mo ago
        Thanks for the info, I had no idea about this meth behavior.
  - pjc50 4mo ago
    This reads like one of those jokes about "my car is so bad that when someone crashed into it they caused thousands of dollars of improvements".

pjc50 4mo ago

> people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else Cable theft is particularly destructive because it's so value-destroying. $100k of cable destroyed for a maximum profit of $1k. Or in this particularly egregious UK case, a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-moore-sculpture-theft-reclining-figure https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-m... I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural crime. There may not be a lot of people, but the per capita crime rate can be just as high as urban areas, and the under-reporting issues can be worse. Lots of invisible drug trafficing or manufacture/growing. Lots of thefts of ag equipment. Even the occasional theft of livestock, a crime from pre-history. Then there's the both essential and illegal use of immigrants who have been imported for the purpose without work permits and may be held in coercive and unpleasant conditions.

expedition32 4mo ago
The Netherlands had a lot of problems with people stealing copper lines. Eventually the government made a deal with scrapyards- they were traditionally run by somewhat shady people.
stronglikedan 4mo ago
> a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value I think a more apt comparison would be the retail value of the metal compared to the scrap value, since the "multimillion" is more of a subjective artistic value. Egregious nonetheless.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  Eh, retail value of the metal doesn't include the hours in shaping it, transporting and mounting it. It's still hundreds of thousands in value versus $1500 scrap.
- CaptainZapp 4mo ago
  Sure, art is subjective to some extent. But reducing the value of a Henry Moore piece to the value of the material is, well, not very insightful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore

FatherOfCurses 4mo ago

It's a mystery to me why the scrap metal industry doesn't have more scrutiny given how much copper is stolen.

MisterTea 4mo ago
Years ago we were cleaning out our shop and had to scrap a lot of metal. At the scrap yard in Brooklyn there was a separate line for copper and aluminum vs iron and steel which was mostly a bulk dump job. Seemed like half of the line were homeless and destitute people. Many had shopping carts full of various pieces of aluminum and whatever, lots of AC condensers and copper tubing. There was a couple ahead of me, skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine were holding a few bundles of AV cables and an old extension cord in their hands - a scene of desperation. The problem with policing scrap yards is you can't prove anyone stole anything. You could limit who can drop off scrap but then you create incentives for those people to purchase illicit scrap and pass it off as legit.
- Symbiote 4mo ago
  I think in the UK the scrap yards can only pay electronically, with a delay of several days. They must also record photo identification. This was put in place after the Nth theft of railway cables.
- testing22321 4mo ago
  Should we police the scrap yards, or help the fellow citizens who are “skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine” What a place to live.
  - MisterTea 4mo ago
    What have you done to help your fellow citizens? I've been down the path of helping deeply addicted people and learned many hard lessons. Some people can be helped more easily than others. Some are almost impossible without constant professional help that is financially impossible to afford by 99% of the population.

burnt-resistor 4mo ago

It seems to happen most in economically-desperate areas or where there are drug addicts. It's the same sort of shit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like when live power lines were stolen in Moscow. A whole family watching TV and suddenly the lights go out unexpectedly... but it's because someone has taken the power lines for money. Infrastructure cannibalism seems to happen whenever there's insufficient security/prosecution and/or excessive desperation.

Schlagbohrer 4mo ago

Upping the severity of punishment will be as effective as the war on drugs was, that is to say not one bit. You'd need to reduce poverty to prevent this kind of thing.

4gotunameagain 4mo ago
This is not true, it is a false analogy. The war on drugs has been a definite failure, but we can see the effects of lower punishment for low hanging crimes in the decriminalization of shoplifting in california.
- Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
  Isn't the cali-decriminalization of shoplifting designed to avoid people going to jail.....for the health care they'll receive?
  - browsingonly 4mo ago
    That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings. To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
    - pixl97 4mo ago
      I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container. The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative. For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix. Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.
      - browsingonly 4mo ago

testing22321 4mo ago

> Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this The link between poverty and crime has been a stab listed for centuries

dmitrygr 4mo ago
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-cause-crime-or-does-crime-cause-poverty/ https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-...
- casey2 4mo ago
  Poverty doesn't mean poor. Poverty is a measure of marginalization. The average Vietnamese in the 80s & 90s isn't as marginalized as the average black, they had transactional support from the US government, US religious groups and from the immigrant community. If you are a nobody and commit a crime you are kicked out of the group, nobody is willing to give you a chance. If you commit a crime as president of the United States are you on the fast track towards poverty? Nope, no matter how many crimes you commit you won't face any consequences even as the group suffers. That's privilege. Blacks in the US suffer structural marginalization due to racist beliefs that model minorities aren't subject to. For 200 years anybody could legally stand on a street corner and sell drugs, but when black people do it it's suddenly destroying the fabric of society and needs to be criminalize.

fred_is_fred 4mo ago

"Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this." Meth.

dmitrygr 4mo ago

> for some reason Do the perps get prosecuted? Do the places that buy stolen copper? Is it publicized? Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment? Are repeat offenders properly contained long term? No? Well then ... it's a mystery

pixl97 4mo ago
The for some reason is a meth epidemic. >Do the perps get prosecuted? Pretty often, but drug addicts are rather senseless and do stuff anyway. >Do the places that buy stolen copper? Sometimes. Like any criminal enterprise there are groups that launder stolen metals and turn them into 'good' metals. > Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment Depending on what you do, it can be a felony, which in this case is likely 1-5 years, with each repeat offense adding more. https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-mayor-signs-new-ordinance-cracking-down-on-copper-wire-thefts/article_f24fb5c2-ba24-40c6-b57a-d2c5f4f8b2d1.html https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-mayor-signs-new-ordinan... the TL;DR here is the theft is a second order effect that you're not going to stop because the people that are doing it are horrifically addicted to meth which overrides any idea in their brain but doing something to get them more meth.

ncr100 4mo ago

Anecdotes, observation, and a wish: Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners. People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning. It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them. They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that. I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community. Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people. I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.

WorldPeas 4mo ago
The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.
LorenPechtel 4mo ago
Actually, the other way around. Cheap drugs would mean the addicts didn't have to steal as much. Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.
ErroneousBosh 4mo ago

btreecat 4mo ago

I'd wish they'd focus on the problems leading to folks feeling that copper theft is a better source of income than other more legitimate routes. Speaks volumes to the local economy and support networks.