https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-jersey-police-9-11-memorial-bronze-plaques-stolen I believe I would have mounted them with a stud THROUGH the rock to a plate on the back with the hardware welded for good. Thieves aren't smart and wouldn't figure that one out.
People are fundamentally Good. It is the wildly rare exception/often drunken act that tend to get noticed. I have been the victim of kind acts, some small and some significant countless times and only rarely have had someone "do me wrong." If people weren't basically good and law-abiding we would live in apocalyptic chaos. We don't. https://nypost.com/tag/good-deeds/ Denis
You're right. The guy that culturally enriched himself by ripping off this plaque donated the 6bucks he got for it to help his fellow neighbor get a crack fix. There was a rash of plaque thefts around the Dallas area a few years ago. I hope the cops caught up with them. The scrap yards won't touch this stuff with a 10ft pole. We had a yard here that slipped up once and told me they just unloaded a bunch of bronze plaques. When I pushed them a little harder, they clammed up REAL FAST. A dozen phone calls later to my local funeral homes turned up nothing. My last call was to the cops. That scrap business is strangely gone these days.
It is, just sad. About a dozen more measures could have being taken to prevent the (about $500) plaques from being stolen. They were probably done for free. If it was pocketed with close tolerances, and if two sprues were left on the backside, drilled and tapped and threaded through with two nuts and thread rod welded to prevent the nuts from being removed... From the sounds of it it was epoxied or construction adhesived into place... It is nice to hear that there is a $5000 bounty on the heads of the thieve/s. Scrap and heirloom price dropped to less than $1.50 a pound and a lot of court costs if caught with... The worst part is, it’s probably just a local (16-25) kid with no clue on how much trouble he is in.
Or how much WORK and hours it is to make another. Mid east countries that remove fingers and hands for stealing might be on to something.
I work with troubled kids now. And I love working with the ones with ambition to break the mould. I was the bad, really bad kid... but society never let me down. I went into a trade, that was literally bootcamp. Give me 20 of your worst kids and I will make 18 to 19 join society. Not everybody’s going to be a engineer, Dr., astronaut. But there is thousands willing and able to support.
That's the solution matt. Just locking the little shits up doesn't work. They come out really pissed off. If jail was bread and water, no air con, no internet, no tv and just books and hard labor... things might be different. These punks aren't afraid of jail any more. It's become a badge of honor to them.
Not all of them! I personally like to motivate or to give ambition to! Or burn out with a day job. My door is always open. One of my top students is making is making almost 200 grand 3 years in. Last year I had 18 students that will get cut off social services unless they passed my course. I teach a Home maintenance course. Electrical, drywall, Doors, windows, Building maintenance... I don’t want to use the term Street junkie, because these are the students that don’t want to be on the street! Last year I had for single mothers looking to improve themselves. My goal is I don’t give up on them if they don’t give up on me. I get them a job making two or three times what they would make on social services if they are willing to apply themselves. But I also teach at a university/college with students that have crazy ambition. Keep them busy! Idle hands are the devils playground!
Do you want a mandatory Scrap buy back? bu only after you have completed your registration, so that you can be compelled to turn in your scrap. In fear that your neighbor might turn you in over your scary looking pile. I had too.
If you jump the fence at the junkyard expect to be bitten every time. You can blame the dog if you want to but it's your fault.
Where i moved from there were people who made a career out of stealing metals and cashing it in for scrap. The same person stole the iron storm grate from in front of my house 3 times. he had been busted by the scrap metal yard but that didnt stop him, he just started going to another yard. Now if they had to be licensed to sell scrap, thier license could be revoked for such offenses, and if they had no way to sell their pilfering they would probably quit stealing shit for the easy money...
Poachers always come and knock on my front door when I leave a pile of crap on the small trailer in my driveway. It's so bad, I can't leave anything on it anymore. It is however a great way to capture faces. They walk up to the trailer and look at the house RIGHT at my video cameras. If I was really bored, I'd leave a BIG FAT PILE OF COPPER on there. It'd be fun yelling at them over the ring doorbell to leave my stuff the hell alone! Kinda like couch fishing for bums.
its the Law in Texas I have not seen if it it is effective. no idea what the Northeast Scrap laws are like. But in all the states I know of there is no way you could sell those Plaques , so it's much more likely to have be a domestic terrorist group like Antifa and the Plaques are swimming with the fishes already V/r HT1
I've also considered the laminate approach. Define laminate as two sheets of copper with an insulating material between them wired up to 240 V
I used to laugh at Tweaker stories I saw on forums until I saw one shirtless, barefoot, skinny guy trying to steal an empty 44 gallon drum out the front of a workshop building. He was having a hard time of it, grunting and groaning before giving up and shuffling down a busy street in the oncoming lane with cars swerving around him as he moved like a zombie. A Tasmanian copper thief was badly burnt cutting live cables and spent time in hospital getting skin grafts and recovering. A day after his release he was found dead at the exact same spot cutting the exact same copper power transmission line. The first time he was arrested, he'd told police that he had the ability to "sense" if a power cable was live......maybe like Spiderman's danger sense. At lease he improved the gene pool by getting out of it.
Youtube is littered with videos of burnt crispy critters hanging from power poles and transformers trying to enrich themselves. I have more respect for beavis and butthead couch fishing. We have a SCUMBAG right now in our town hitting parked cars in the middle of the night. There are several videos on our RING neighbors app of him hitting peoples cars and pulling door handles. I called the cops last night at 4am to give them the BOLO for the vehicle he drives. Hope they catch this mother. Today it may be cars, after that, they end up in your living room at night. Talk about stupid, this is Texas, most of us are heavily armed. I want to know how many weapons he has stolen out of vehicles? Most people I know here keep a pistol in the glovebox. HT is right, we have a mandatory scrap seller ID card you have to show when you haul your crap in. I don't know if it helps. Stuff still goes missing out here.
Probably said this before but here we have to show ID (proper ID not your last paper bill) and the payment from scrap has to go directly into a bank account, no cash. Every transaction has to be recorded by the dealer including address, car reg etc. As for stealing cables, just put the low life in front a couple of regular train commuters that are pi$$ed with endles delays from signal cable theft, that should work! I truly admire the work you are doing OMM, must be very rewarding to see the changes.
That's a pretty damn good track record. I work with guys in state prison and in halfway houses- usually under felony drug related contract, or chronic alcoholism, etc. The recidivism rate is somewhere around 95%. Pretty much last graspers. Alot of them die or spend a lot of repeated prison time, or at least flounder through the system over and over. Unfortunately their lives require the kind of crap we're talking about here. They're not victims of anything but their own choices (mostly). A vast majority of these guys are grown-ass men and a very common denominator is that they have virtually no skills or work history. Keep getting them when they're young! Pete
The metal thefts seem to run in waves around here, with lots of theft, and then crackdown. I can only guess that the crack epidemic drives much of this. The crackheads seem to be willing to steal anything regardless of it having much value; I think they would steal a package of gum. I don't think there is much logic to a crackhead's reasoning, other than find some way/any way to get to the next high. It only takes a few individuals to create a big problem, especially if you try to ignore the problem. We have had waves of storm grates and manhole covers go missing, along with wire and air condenser coils getting chopped up all over the city. Like the crack epidemic, the material theft epidemic follows along. The end result is that the good taxpayers move out of the City, and the City begins to degrade. In this City, corrupt officials in the past have actually been part of the problem. The City workers were running an auto parts theft ring at the auto compound lot. If your car got towed, by the time you got down there to pick it up, it was just a bare frame. The manager got caught on camera directing it all after hours. Its the "broken windows" thing. You can deal with a City's problems while they are small, and have no tolerance for petty crime, or you can ignore things like the progressives in the big citys tend to do these days to score political points, and then the problem becomes an 800 lb elephant in the room that nobody wants to address, and the City declines and/or goes bankrupt relatively quickly. They had New York under control for a long time, but the progressives are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory on that city. When the progressives move in, cities die; its just that simple. I am all for anything that helps people and cities function, and makes things better, but it seems like politicians go out of their way to destroy cities these days. .
