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Slim profits in parking meter thefts Besides, it's a lot of work to bust out a few coins Friday, March 16, 2001 By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Breaking into a parking meter takes a sledgehammer and a crowbar, and the time and sweat to pound and pry through a quarter-inch of iron. Another method is to melt off the meter's glass dome with a blowtorch, and then shake it upside down like a piggy bank while jiggling open its coin slot with a knife.
All that for as little as $1.14 per score, or $16 tops.
Meter theft has to be one of the dumbest existing urban crimes, combining maximum effort with minimum payoff. Yet, over the last six months, there's been a surge in stolen meters across city neighborhoods, mainly in the East End, leaving parking officials and police scratching their heads.
"It's insanity," Pittsburgh Parking Authority Director Ralph Horgan said yesterday of the crimes, "which is why this has been so vexing."
Since September, 214 meters have been stolen in Bloomfield, East Liberty, Oakland, Shadyside, the South Side and the Strip District. But they mostly carried chump change, since they were largely neighborhood meters with less turnover than those in bigger business districts.
The payoff is a crapshoot for thieves, depending on when the meters were last emptied by parking authority collectors.
According to parking authority statistics, each meter stolen from East Liberty held an average of $1.14 daily and $6.84 weekly, the low end of the scale. The biggest per-meter payoff was in Shadyside, where each carried an average of $2.63 daily and $15.78 weekly.
The largest number of meters have been taken from Oakland, where the 75 meters stolen from the area held about $2.35 daily or $14.10 per week.
It's impossible to tell exactly how much money was in the meters when they were stolen, but the parking authority figures it has lost $2,525 overall from the thefts, or an average of $11.80 per meter for the 214 stolen.
Material losses to the parking authority for replacing the $350 meters with new ones is nearly $75,000.
In January, parking authority workers found 32 stolen meters in a storm sewer in Garfield. The glass at the tops of the meters had been melted down and pried off. Eight meters were found in Schenley Park that month and another 18 were found in Frick Park in January and February. All had been pounded with sledgehammers and pried open, some of them out in the open on a Frick Park parking lot, leaving marks on the asphalt.
To steal a meter, they have to be yanked out of the ground, usually by breaking through the bolts fastening them into metal sleeves embedded in concrete.
The quarter-inch thick iron housing of the meter itself -- with a pick-resistant coin box inside, for which there are only two keys citywide -- remains connected to a 4-foot-long, 2-inch wide steel pipe when it is stolen.
That means thieves are not only working the meters over with sledgehammers, crowbars, blowtorches and knives, but they're dragging along unwieldy steel pipes besides.
The meter theft industry could really use a union.
To keep up with the $19.07 per hour -- not including benefits -- earned by laborers in Local 1058 of the Laborers International Union, who also use sledgehammers and crowbars on construction sites, the thieves would have to open up two of the average $11.80 meters per hour. If they steal the $1.14 East Liberty meters, they would have to clear more than 16 meters per hour to keep up with the union pace.
Police have been working on the cases since October and have made three arrests. Those included a February arrest in East Liberty, in which a man was charged with breaking into 96 meters and had $26 in quarters and dimes on him when police stopped him -- that's an average take of 27 cents per meter.
Yet the crimes have continued, driving police nuts.
"You wonder what's the bang for the buck of this? Where's their heads?" said Hill District Cmdr. Commander William Valenta.
Valenta and Cmdr. Dan Quinlan have set up a joint four-detective team to investigate the crimes. In the meantime, the parking authority is studying other responses.
The parking authority board yesterday agreed to pay up to $5,000 in Pittsburgh Police Bureau "Crime Stoppers" rewards leading to conviction of the meter thieves.
The best defense has been welding the steel posts to the metal sleeves holding them in the concrete.
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