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Los Angeles is supposed to be a leading global city. We will host the World Cup opener later this year, and we are the host city for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games.
We pride ourselves on glitz and glamor. The lights of Hollywood fill the dreams of people around the world.
But lately, those lights are going out — thanks to copper thieves stealing the cables.
As The Post reported, copper wire thieves are breaking open lampposts across LA, then cutting out the copper wires, plunging neighborhoods into darkness — from Mar Vista to the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard.
Pedestrians and drivers alike have to brave the darkness — at risk of accident and injury.
It’s a problem straight out of the Third World. The price of copper tempts thieves to steal cables to sell to syndicates. They cannibalize public infrastructure and even private homes.
Take Johannesburg, which was once a gleaming African capital, a symbol of hope and prosperity in post-apartheid South Africa.
Thanks to mismanagement and poor law enforcement, many of Johannesburg’s traffic lights no longer work anymore, because of cable theft.
The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime issued a report last September recognizing that copper theft is a major category in the broader crime of illicit international minerals trafficking.
“Following the surge in copper prices after the 2000s, copper-related theft has become more widespread globally,” it says.
Ironically, this Third World problem is being driven by a First World problem here in California, which is that the electric vehicles (EV) our government wants us to drive depend on copper, among other minerals essential to battery technology.
Copper theft is just one Third World problem in LA. We have shantytowns and squatter camps on our streets, and we have gangs of thieves who target cargo on freight trains.
Even Gavin Newsom himself said that LA had started to look “like a Third World country” in 2022 when he saw the mess of looted packages along train tracks in the city.
There has been good news in the fight against cargo theft in recent months. Police raided a stockpile of stolen shoes and tools worth $1.4 million in October.
That was a welcome start. But we need even more aggressive law enforcement, and more cops on the beat, to stop the Third World problems taking over our beloved city.
Let the lights of LA shine — before the world arrives.