A few weeks ago, on a disturbingly pleasant winter afternoon where the temperature flirted with 50 degrees, I took my 2-year-old daughter to a campfire picnic at Como Park. Naturally, we soon found ourselves on her favorite Como playground. The delight of a warm swing set in midwinter is hard to overstate.
But the sun sets early in February, and it dawned on me as dusk settled that there wasn’t a working streetlight anywhere in sight. The dark park gave me an eerie, unsettling feeling.
As the song says, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” and light is certainly one of those things. Over the last few years, more and more streetlights throughout the Twin Cities have been vandalized and put out of commission, stripped of the copper wire that keeps the thousands of bulbs lit. In many parts of the metro, the streets have gone dark.
“It’s a frustrating problem,” said Andy Rodriguez, director of the St. Paul Parks & Recreation Department. “Como has been hit pretty hard this winter. For parks, all the regional parks and trails, trying to cover all that acreage is challenging. How do we get the lights back on, and what is the patrol or monitoring method after this?”
As a lamppost aficionado, the ongoing epidemic of streetlight vandalism is something I take personally. It’s seems like another dispiriting reminder of our post-COVID urban life, when public trust and basic amenities seem to be under threat. For years now, an escalating wave of destruction of public property has been quietly waged on urban lampposts.
It turns out there’s not much cities can do about it. Police can’t possibly patrol tens of thousands of lampposts. Instead, it’s a classic case of the importance of “eyes on the street,” Jane Jacobs’ commonsense term to describe the origins of public safety. But on many St. Paul streets, the building blocks of public safety just don’t seem to exist.
“Every single idea that people have brought to us, saying ‘have you tried this?’, we have tried it,” said Sean Kershaw, the director of St. Paul Public Works. “It’s not because they’re not good ideas, but every single one, the thieves have thwarted. We’ve banded them. We’ve welded them. We’ve got a list of 15 things that we’ve done.”
The situation resembles nothing more than a classic Wile E. Coyote cartoon, with ever more outlandish and elaborate traps and schemes deployed that all inevitably fail. In this case, the city is playing the the role of Wile E. Coyote, and the vandals are speedily bypassing every new hurdle.
(Meep. Meep.)
The end result is dark streets, and it’s not sitting well with people who have noticed the absence. One Como resident, Bob Spaulding, made a crowdsourced map of the outages, and it’s bleak. All through the park, there’s little light to be found. Other neighborhoods around Como Park have created personalized street signs warning of surveillance, which is a lot to ask of concerned citizens.
Where there isn’t a critical mass of neighbors watching their lampposts like hawks, the vandals strike. It used to be it was only remote parts of the city where this was a problem, places where onlookers are few and far between. But the gaps in public safety seem to be spreading. I saw one stripped lamppost on University Avenue the other day, on one of the busiest streets in town.
It doesn’t take very long for a small crew equipped with basic tools to pull up, pry open the utility access panel on the base of every one of St. Paul’s 30,000 street lamps and relieve the pole of its 10 feet of copper wire. Depending on the price of scrap copper at any given time, the end result can be worth over $20. Do that enough times in an hour, and you’re stealing decent money.
“It wasn’t a problem until the price of copper went up to $5 a pound,” Kershaw said. “The peculiarities of our light posts are all designed with these access panels at the bottom. They’re all made of aluminum, so they’re not projectiles if they’re hit by a car. They’re all breakable.”
On a few occasions, police have successfully apprehended groups of thieves, but not enough to make a dent in the escalating cost. The annual amount that Public Works spends to fix lampposts has escalated from a few hundred thousand to almost a million dollars over the last three years. According to city officials, the vandals are either drug addicts or organized gangs, and most likely somewhere in between.
Taking light for granted
There’s not many things people take for granted as much as light. For decades, you only noticed the lamps when something went awry (for example the conspiracy-laced purple LED lights or the kerfuffle over LED color temperature in 2017).
In one example on the East Side, the city received complaints about streetlights on the block being vandalized and dark for weeks on end. When city staff looked it up, it turned out that Public Works crews had been there nine times to fix the lights. The copper was removed almost as fast as crews could install it. It turns street lighting into an expensive, Sisyphean endeavor.
It’s getting worse in other ways too. Parks Director Andy Rodriguez told me about how the air conditioner at the Linwood Rec Center had been stripped of its cap metal in the middle of the summer, leaving sweltering kids behind. Elsewhere, thieves have stolen the charging cables from new EV charging stations (perhaps thinking they were copper), or even set the dangerous precedent of stealing the wire from stoplights.
Meanwhile, it’s not just a St. Paul problem. Minneapolis and many first ring suburbs and regional park districts have the same issues. Copper thieves don’t recognize boundaries, which is why the only real solution is state intervention.
A demand-side problem
The scourge of catalytic converter theft that swept through town a year or two ago is the strongest analogy for the copper situation. Just as with this problem, petty thieves began using saws to detach the valuable metals from underneath people’s cars, often in broad daylight. In one particularly horrible incident, a St. Paul man who attempted to interfere with converter thieves was shot in the city’s St. Anthony Park neighborhood.
The good news is that state policy, passed in 2023, has reduced the problem by focusing on scrap metal dealers purchasing the converters. It’s meant a huge decrease in converter theft in the Twin Cities.
“We need a statewide strategy that makes it difficult for people who shouldn’t be selling copper wire to sell it,” explained Sean Kershaw. “If you look at the stats on catalytic converter thefts, they’re a fifth of what they were 2 or 3 years ago. This isn’t a maintenance problem, it’s a demand side problem.”
That potential solution is exactly what’s happening at the State Capitol right now, where DFL legislators Athena Hollins and Sandy Pappas are hashing out legislation. Given the way copper theft is spreading throughout the entire region, it seems a critical step.
For me, it’s personal. I’ve loved St. Paul streetlights for decades. You see them all throughout the city like a visual welcome mat. Their profile offers the ideal height and balance, not too tall and gothic like the gaudy Minneapolis posts. I’ve seen many cities’ decorative lampposts, but none so consistently and elegant as St. Paul’s array.
To watch the city’s lights go dark is like death by a thousand cuts, the deformation of wires sticking out the base bottoms like unhealed wounds. Along with bus stations, stop signs, smoke-free air on the light rail train, coworkers, all-night diners, bus routes, and a dozen other things, it seems like public life is under attack. Unless something major changes, only a regional solution is going to bring light back to Como Park.
Hopefully, in a few years, we can take our streetlights for granted again.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
