Metal thefts nag at rural law enforcement

"We don't see a whole lot of serious crime," said Jeff Jacobson, city administrator for the Arrowhead city of Biwabik. "What we've really been seeing, due to economic factors and the price of the materials, is a lot of scrap metal and wire theft. Copper wire is a big one now."

Recently, Jacobson said, a group of people stole the cables that power the snow-making equipment at nearby Giants Ridge ski area. The enormous extension cords were loaded with copper. "We recovered quite a bit of it," he said. "The people who were stealing it got spooked and hid it in the woods and ran and were going to come back for it. The police found one of the people and he spilled the beans on the rest and led them to it."

Overall, crime rates in rural Minnesota have declined in recent years, as this chart derived from FBI uniform crime reports indicates. The numbers aren't perfect due to the way the agency parses urban and rural, but they show a clear trend downward.

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Burglaries and metal theft remain nagging issues, however, complicated by the fact that more outstate cities have disbanded or shrunk their police departments because of budget constraints. As MPR News' Elizabeth Baier reported on Monday, "Law enforcement officials are grappling with a new wave of copper thefts across Minnesota," whether from recycling centers, empty storefronts, cemeteries or foreclosed homes.

High copper prices are driving the trend, but scrap is also conveniently hard to trace, unlike, say, a television set or car. Reports of metal theft stretch from the Cass County area--where stolen goods include buckets of scrap, copper wire pulled from walls and copper and brass (which contains copper) taken from propane companies--to Isanti County, where brass stars reportedly were taken from veterans' graves, to Mankato, where the city has seen its highest burglary rate in years.

Of course, when overall crime numbers are small, one active band of thieves can wreak havoc on statistics. "When you look at the numbers, they are really impacted by individuals," said Todd Miller, Mankato's director of public safety. "We had a group that was arrested in our area, three people responsible for a lot of the burglaries." He thinks the thieves were inspired by the television show, "Storage Wars," which features people who buy the contents of storage lockers and find treasure. "They think there is a lot of stuff in these lockers," he said.

"We had a few instances where commercial was broken into because people were stealing copper and aluminum," Miller said. "That is a trend because of the ease of getting rid of that stuff. Over the winter, the numbers were up because of the mild weather. It was easy for people to get around. I think the metal thefts have come down a little bit, but the prices are still high."

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Copper wire pulled from the wall of a home in Alpha, Minn/Photo by MPR News' Nikki Tundel

According to Joseph F. Donnermeyer, a professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University, unwatched farm sites are a common target for metal thieves. "There have been enough farm crime studies that indicate the burglary rate to a homestead farm is probably one-fifth what it would be in Columbus, Ohio," he said. "Somebody is always there. Farmsteads are still someplace where a family lives. But farms are three times larger than they used to be. And burglary rates to barns and storage facilities where there is no oversight are twice as high as for a home in Columbus, Ohio. With industrialization of farming has come more crime."

The areas with the highest poverty rates tend to have the fewest resources for law enforcement, which creates a "global effect," Donnermeyer said. "Those two factors are moving together and you can see an increase in crime, but it's hard to indicate which is more responsible. I would tend to attribute poverty as the stronger factor and then see the lessened presence of law enforcement as a tipping point factor."

Of the thieves themselves, Donnermeyer said they tend to be local. "Every community has a pool of potential criminals that have to be activated."

Rock County Sheriff Evan Verbrugge's department patrols the entire southwestern Minnesota county, including Luverne, which hasn't had its own police department since 1998. Verbrugge said, "We have 500 complaints a year and 50 percent are animal complaints." Rather than violent crimes or meth busts, which he said have declined, "It's more cows in the road."

Yet Verbrugge said the county has seen a steady stream of metal thefts, especially on large farms. "I think copper has picked up in the last year or so," he said. "Last winter, it was really prevalent. We noticed they were going out to the bin sites, where all they have are corn bins and dryers on an acreage. The farmer doesn't go out there and check. They go out and take that stuff. It's in the electrical. They're taking the metal from the dryer and parting that out, too. The mom and dad are moving into town and getting rid of the acreages and the son or a conglomerate is buying the land and tearing down the house and there is nobody to keep an eye on things."

Sparse populations mean fewer eyes on dubious behavior," Verbrugge said. And a small staff of deputies doesn't help either. "It's easier to do burglaries in a rural area because of the staff," he said. "We have one person on for the whole county at a certain period of time. Your visibility is going to be smaller. With technology the way it is, people can say, 'Here comes a squad,' and they just hide. And then they do their thing."

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