By KEVIN NEVERS

The best way to prevent metal theft, Porter County Sheriff Dave Lain says, is the same way to prevent any theft: secure your property.

Lock garages, sheds, gates, doors.

Invest in exterior illumination, especially motion-sensitive lighting.

Watch your neighbor’s property and ask him to watch yours.

Nevertheless, Lain says, metal thieves do pose a special challenge to property owners. “How do you secure an air conditioner?”

(In fact you don’t. “It’s not doable,” says Randy Doler of Doler Plumbing & Heating. “Anything that would in essence make it thief-proof would restrict the air flow.”)

So Lain suggests a “little more creative” approach. “Put some sort of a unique marking on big components,” he says, “paint or stamp some sort of identifiable mark in an inconspicuous place that would typically be overlooked by someone who walks away with it. Because we don’t have serial numbers to trace when investigating metal thefts, that sort of mark could be useful in identifying a piece of property as yours.”

Lain does concede that construction and commercial sites—heavily targeted by metal thieves—are much harder to secure than residential ones, since they lack the “built-in network” found in neighborhoods. “It would be nice if contractors could leave a big dog at their sites,” he says. “I know it’s been suggested that builders in a subdivision chip in for private security patrols. That’s not unusual for large construction jobs. I don’t know if it’s practical for home builders.”

“We’re constantly harping on our patrol division to watch these construction areas,” Lain adds. “But there are so many of them and police are trained to look for something suspicious. A pickup truck at 5 p.m. at a work site is not necessarily suspicious.”

High-Tech

One company which is trying to address the problem of work-site thefts is ConstructionCam.com (CCC) of Crown Point, which offers a variety of wireless surveillance and alarm systems specifically designed for builders. Mark Carroll of CCC says that his firm has generally catered to “large-scale sites and high-rise buildings in Chicago” but is now “working on a different system to make it more affordable”: a “small discrete system, all self-contained” and self-powered, which will transmit live video to the Internet for real-time monitoring. That technology should be available in a month or so.

Currently available from ConstructionCam.com is a motion-sensitive mobile alarm system activated by a mercury switch. “If anything is moved,” Carroll says, “an alarm goes off and the owner is notified by cell phone.”

“We’ve been getting involved in a lot of developments lately,” Carroll adds. “A developer calls, says he’s putting up 50 homes, and wants to protect all his subs.”

Paper Trails

Metal theft is a particularly hard crime to investigate. A person who steals jewelry or guns, for instance—easily identifiable items, serial marked, or both—often sells them to pawn shops, which under state law have “procedures and regulations to create a paper trail,” Lain says. But Indiana statute does not similarly regulate recyclers, so there’s no paper trail by which to trace stolen metals.

And any legislation intended to regulate recyclers, Lain feels, would need to be statewide—not merely local—to be effective. “It’s a noble idea if it’s universally implemented,” he says. “Now and then you’ll find stolen property locally pawned but usually they try to put a few miles behind them.”

Posted 3/20/2007