Copper thefts! Copper thefts!

From Hawaii - http://www.khnl.com/Glob... How did these cops manage to interrupt the thieves while in the act and still not arrest or able to identify them? Sounds fishy!

Lieutenant Daniel Ford emerges from an evidence storage unit at the Kapolei police station, and shows us the 353 pounds of insulated copper wire recovered Wednesday. Investigators say two men are seen behind the Hawaiian Cement plant at Campbell Industrial Park, loading the copper wire into an SUV. But the thieves are forced to leave everything behind, including the get-away car, when officers converge. "According to HECO, this is underground cable," Ford said. "So with all the new subdivisions that are coming up, once you lay the cable, unless you tie into the system, you wouldn't even know the cable was gone."
"Copper thefts are up all over the island," Ford said. "Any public assistance we can get would be greatly appreciated." Investigators say the registered owner of the SUV has become unreachable.

And in Alamance County, North Carolina - http://www.thetimesnews.com/artic... Sounds like a job for Danger Dog! just kidding.. he'd likely be of no reasonable assistance. But what is good is seeing LE starting to go after the recyclers who allow these criminals to fence their stolen wire.

The high cost of salvage copper has led thieves to steal electrical wire picking from constructions site, junk yards and anywhere else they can find it.
Alamance County Sheriff’s spokesman Randy Jones said that copper theft is an ongoing problem. Battery Warehouse and Recycling Center in Greensboro sees an average of about 75 customers each day, an employee said.
“It’s hard to pinpoint when a legitimate plumber sells his leftover copper between someone crawling under a basement and bringing it in,” he said.
Many recycling centers work with police daily to catch people who are selling stolen copper. They require sellers to show a driver’s license or other type of government identification, and sometimes they videotape every transaction.
Allen Baucom, a Union County commissioner who farms near the Carmichaels, said his farm near the Scotland-Robeson county line has been hit four times by copper thieves.
The scrap yards need to be monitored where they’re not accepting products from individuals who have no reason to have (copper),” he said. “If these idiots couldn’t sell it, they wouldn’t steal it.

In the fine city of Detriot as well - http://www.dailytribune.com/sto... Sounds like China is to blame!

"The theft of copper is a booming business in Detroit and our area," Celletti said. "Copper is in great demand from China and other fast-growing Asian countries, and this has cause the price of copper to skyrocket way up."Fraser police arrested two suspected copper thieves because a neighbor living across the street from a construction site at Eisenhower Elementary School called police when she them loading the material into a truck.
The woman called police, but the suspects left before police arrived.When the pair returned at 8:35 p.m., officers were called again, and found the suspects filling a pickup truck with copper.

This scourge strikes in Germiston, South Africa - http://www.int.iol.co.za/ind... Unsurprisingly they blame China as well, I'm starting to see a pattern here.

Business Against Crime (BAC) investigators have uncovered links between Cape Town crime syndicates and scrap wholesalers in Gauteng, who pass the stolen copper onto international buyers from countries such as China. Recently, copper cable theft has been blamed for a number of high-profile blackouts, the latest of which plunged 16 suburbs in Ekurhuleni into darkness last week. The cause of the power outage was a fire, allegedly caused by an attempted cable theft at the Witkoppie substation in Boksburg. In some rural areas, sometimes as much as 8km of cable can be stolen at a time. It has been reported that the recent surge in copper theft is a result of higher copper prices and the demand for the metal by rapidly industrialising countries like China and India.