Rampant thievery of copper wiring around Long Beach is taxing the city’s ability to repair streetlights and plunging more neighborhoods into darkness — or dimness. Frustrated by mounting public ire, the city’s elected officials are demanding a solution.
In the span of just two years, the amount Long Beach spent on streetlight repair rose 724% ($37,000 in 2022 to $305,000 in 2024), with the number of requests to fix them quadrupling in the same period. In 2025, the city went about 500% over budget for repairs, according to a city spokesperson.
In the last three months of that year alone, the department was slammed with more than 400 work orders for streetlights, 385 of which have since been closed. About one-fifth of those were linked to copper wire theft, which can cause massive damage and require full-circuit rewiring.
Residents across Long Beach say broken streetlights, some out of service for months or years at a time, have left their neighborhoods pitch dark and unsafe to walk in the evening.
Resident Jennifer Carey, in a public statement to the City Council, wrote that one light on her street has been out for more than a year, while others are incredibly dim. “Reporting them has not resulted in Action,” she wrote.
Tatiana Williams, representing the homeowners association for Olive Court homes, said she has complained about the corner strip of East Dayman Street and Long Beach Boulevard for months.
“If anyone hasn’t walked that at night, it’s something that I recommend everybody try to do — not alone obviously, but just to see how dark it is,” she said.
Public Works officials attribute the problem to a citywide rise in copper wire theft, where thieves strip it out of streetlights and sell it to scrap metal recyclers for cash.
It’s an opportunistic crime that requires some baseline electrical education. One must pry open a box at the pole’s base, exposing a stretch of copper wire that connects underground, then snip the wire and pull it out from one end.
The wire can take hours to haul out of the streetlight — 10 feet weighs about a pound and sells for up to $4.60 as scrap. The amount of copper stolen from a single streetlight can weigh up to 25 pounds.
Aggravating the situation is a feverish demand for copper, which is a key component in electric vehicles, electrical grids and data centers for artificial intelligence.
The wiring typically fetches only a few hundred dollars, but blacked-out lights pose safety hazards to drivers and pedestrians and are costing cities millions to repair.
The difference has stretched the city’s budget and prolonged service requests from a couple of weeks to several months at a time, a spokesperson said.
There are long-term plans to eventually switch the city’s lighting system to LED bulbs — which use cheaper, thinner wires — or solar-powered streetlights, which do not use any copper, but the City Council wants quicker solutions as well.
On Tuesday, they told staff to return in 90 days with, among other asks, a map and inventory of its lighting system, an explanation of its repair process, a list of its areas with the greatest lack of proper lighting and data on both its response times and current backlog of service orders.
“We know many residents ask (and) don’t really care about the why, sometimes,” said Councilmember Megan Kerr. “It is ‘how soon can it be fixed?’ That’s what they’re really focused on.”