STATEMENT

SCRAP METAL YARDS SOUTHWESTERN DIVISION

ROYAL BAHAMAS POLICE FORCE INSPECTOR WARREN JOHNSON

During the next few minutes, we will seek to shed some light on some of the challenges we have experienced, and continue to experience as it relates to the theft of copper in the Southwestern Division.

In September of last year we were faced with the theft of copper from the ZNS transmittal site, which resulted in the corporation losing its ability to transmit.

Since then, we have had a number of other reports of persons removing B.E.C. wires from lamp poles, wires recently laid in open trenches, and even persons going into grave yards and removing copper plates from tombstones.

We had an incident several weeks ago where a church bus, was parked outside the yard by one of our churches was stripped of its wire harness in the name of scrap.

In all of these incidents we found that not only has these actions resulted in some form of major disruption and losses in the thousands of dollars, but the monies paid for the purchase of these items extremely low.

In an effort to discourage this practice and identify the persons responsible for committing these offences, we met with the operator of a scrap metal yard and expressed our concerns.

We were able to assist him with identifying and installing a system that we felt would be very helpful in discouraging the sale of stolen copper and other property.

The system included the weighing and photographing of all items as they were brought to the yard and presented for sale. Also, it required the seller to produce a photo ID each time they brought items there for sale which was also copied.

I am advised that this immediately resulted in a large reduction in the sale of suspected stolen items at the mentioned establishment and increased our ability to identify persons responsible, and to recover a substantial amount of suspected stolen property.

I am further advised that this also resulted in an increase of business from Family Island operators. This is the direction we would like to see all legitimate scrap metal dealers headed in.

We are presently in talks with all of the relevant government agencies with respect to them providing us physical samples and photographs of all raw materials they presently use for future reference and identification purposes.

These samples and photographs will be made available to each of the scrap metal dealers so they would know exactly what to look out for.

In addition to that, we are encouraging them not to accept any copper wire that has already been cleaned. The reason for that is, because the protective covering on the wire is similar to that of the serial number of a car, once that is removed from it, it is almost virtually impossible to tell where it came from.

In the not too distant future, we would like to see all of the scrap metal yards networked in such a way where they can be monitored fully by the police at anytime.

In this way it would also allow us to put out “LOOK OUT” notices immediately to all of them for stolen items.

We have to draw the line somewhere.

Warren Johnson

Inspector of Police Crime Manager Southwestern Division