While copper may not be considered a precious metal, that by no means declares it as a useless metal.
So much of modern society relies on the element whether it’s anything electronics, engines or even your own body needing it to make red blood cells.
The simple fact is that we need it.
But need creates demand and that demand creates an opportunity for a quick buck.
Stealing copper is nothing new — countless criminals have taken advantage of unattended construction sites or remote telephone poles to acquire the metal illegally.
But now there’s a new source of copper for these opportunist thieves – electric vehicle charging stations.
Countless charging ports across the country, typically in more inner-city areas, are getting their cords cut off.
VANDALS STRIKE TESLA SUPERCHARGERS IN BAY AREA
Vandals severed every charging cable at a Tesla Supercharger station in Vallejo, California, leaving the facility completely inoperative.
Thieves are likely targeting the copper within the cables.pic.twitter.com/wgPXFHAxod
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 14, 2024
Will copper theft continue to rise in America?
According to Inside EVs, Fresno, CA has seen over 50 of the 88 total charging stations ransacked for their copper wiring, with some being struck multiple times after their repair.
Thieves in Houston, TX, snipped 18 of one station’s 19 charging cords in a single weekend, per Click2Houston.com.
A location in Vallejo, CA, had cables from nine of its charging ports stolen in one night with the thieves netting just shy of twenty cables, per NBC Bay Area.
In all these cases, criminals managed to walk away with thousands of dollars worth of copper and cities were left with tens of thousands of dollars in damages.
While of course liberals and electric vehicle enthusiasts such as Inside EVs claim some of the thefts have been tied to an anti-EV agenda, the simple reality is that criminals see a chance to walk away with a little bit of cash at someone else’s expense.
Interviewed by NBC Bay Area, former investigator Josh Beckler suggested the thefts are a sign of how desperate people in the Bay Area have become. The super rich have crowded out middle class people and skyrocketed real estate prices, while employees at some of the richest companies on earth sleep in their cars.
Another circumstance likely compounding the issue is that San Francisco is notoriously lax on crime and has been getting worse for decades. Blights of open air drug markets and homelessness beset the city, while sidewalks collect human excrement at a stupefying rate.
Remember that this is happening in one of the most supposedly socially consciously liberal cities in the world. That raises the question of whether kind, soft-on-crime, easy-on-addiction policies are actually kind at all to so-called victims of society.
The answer, of course, is that policies like those have the exact opposite effect of their stated intent. Instead of providing a hand up to lift people out of squalor, blue city policies actually drag people deeper into the mire of drug use, homelessness, and ultimately untimely deaths by refusing to punish activity that is even more destructive to the self than it is to society as a whole.
Consider another location hit hard by this crime – Houston. For years the Texas city has been run by Democrats. Recently the city’s police chief resigned after thousands of thousands of backlogged criminal cases going back years surfaced.
As long as cities and towns are populated by fallen people, crime will continue. But there are things we can do – easy things that require little more than common sense and hard work – tough on crime policies, police who enforce the law, and prosecutors who ensure that criminals end up isolated from the society they harmed.
Doing those things wouldn’t be a problem except that those voting from the left have a tendency to worry about the oppressed, and modern leftists increasingly insist that much of the criminal class exists because of oppression from “normies” like you and me.
There’s a lot of irony in this. The same liberals and leftists pushing endlessly for EVs are the ones also creating an environment where pillaging EV chargers becomes a criminal pastime.
Good luck to them all – the rest of us will take our inexpensive internal combustion engines, inexpensive rubber-hosed gas pumps, and red cities and states where crime is punished and normies are welcome. They can have their 1970s New York. We’ll take our 1950s suburbs.
