Cape Town’s Copperheads recover 1.7 t of stolen metal

The City of Cape Town (CoCT) says it recovered more than 1.7 t of stolen metal in the nine months between July last year and March this year.

This effort was led by the city’s Metals Theft Unit, also known as the Copperheads, following a wave of cable theft, particularly linked to streetlights.

More than 53 000 m of stolen cabling was recovered over the period, with the unit making 115 arrests. It also secured a 12-year prison sentence for a metal thief.

The city says it is repairing and replacing stolen cables and vandalised streetlights “at record pace”, with 1 120 streetlight cable replacements recorded in April alone.

In some parts, however, these repaired lights suffer repeat cable theft almost immediately.

CoCT says its policing operations have responded to 70% more metal theft complaints than the previous year, which means that the public is becoming more involved in helping to combat this crime.

“The city received 519 reports of metal theft from the public in 2023/24, compared to 304 in 2022/23.

Over the past nine months, officials also conducted 1 715 inspections of scrapyards and bucket shops, and completed 2 145 hotspot patrols.

A total of ten vehicles were impounded, with 2 382 fines issued for various by-law transgressions.

“The confiscations are an indication that we are not dealing with just small operators,” says CoCT Safety and Security MMC JP Smith.

“In fact, some suspects are being caught with considerable amounts of stolen goods, and that leads to bigger questions about the level of organisation involved, and also the continued vulnerability of critical infrastructure.

“The city is throwing many resources at this problem, but we can’t do it alone. Something has got to give at a national level, to tighten the screws on cable thieves, and take the shine out of the illicit scrap metal trade.”