HOUSTON—With copper prices hovering near all-time highs, thieves are targeting newly built subdivisions throughout Houston to steal air-conditioning units from homes before the houses are even sold to their first owners.
Mark Stephens, a former Houston cop who specializes in surveillance and theft recovery, works with several different local developers to catch the thieves in the act.
"It’s a huge problem now," Stephens said. "It seems like the first of the year it’s ballooned and it’s starting to get out of hand. The copper theft itself I’ve never seen this high."
Although copper theft is a constant problem in the Houston area, the price for a pound of scrap copper was as little as $1.25 two years ago. Right now, a thief can get as much as $4. A copper coil from an air conditioning compressor can yield a thief up to $100. Repairs for the homeowner they ripped off can run into the thousands.
At the request of homebuilders in Harris, Galveston, Montgomery and Fort Bend counties, Stephens has been trying to fight the crime wave with hidden cameras. His surveillance systems helped capture Genaro Villareal, 33, after the theft of three air-conditioning compressors in Kingwood. The intact air conditioners were recovered and Villareal was sentenced to seven months in jail.
But most thieves spend as little as five minutes ripping the copper coil out of the units. Stephens showed us a cul-de-sac off the Northwest Freeway where three homes for sale lost their air-conditioning units to thieves in just one night.
"The fact of the matter is they are getting filthy rich off of someone else’s pain and suffering," Stephens said of recyclers who are paying thieves for the stolen copper. "And I don’t care how you look at it that’s just wrong."
"If you’re a crook and you plan on doing this kind of thing you better get used to looking over your shoulder," he said of the hidden camera effort to catch the crooks in the act.
The increase in theft of copper wire from electrical systems, telephone grids and highway lighting recently led the Coalition Against Copper Theft, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., to call the trend a "rampant" problem and an issue of national security.
