The backhoe at Desert Rose Adult High School was a sitting duck. Keys left in the ignition made the machine easy pickings for joyriders, who did doughnuts on the pavement and played bull-matador with a classroom portable. That was in July. Ten days ago, Metro police ran up on juveniles taking spins in heavy machinery at a construction site in the southwest Valley. Cops say these are common scenes for a valley that is equal parts developers' nirvana (in a perpetual state of construction with office buildings and schools, homes and casinos, parks and government edifices) and thieves' paradise (losses in the millions).
"You can go on the (Clark) county website and it shows every job site in the county that is under construction," says Det. Tom Riesselmann, part of Metro's two-person Construction Theft Detail, along with Det. Allen Hanners. "Companies also have websites that show what projects they are working on. People have access to this information. So you can have a theft at every site in town."
Insanely busy—Metro is the only police jurisdiction with a dedicated construction theft detail and Metro crime prevention specialist Kathy Ojeda says there are more than 170 under-construction home sites alone—Riesselmann and Hanners are also keenly effective, recovering between $3 million and $5 million in stolen goods last year, arresting more than 20 suspects and reducing construction theft crime by an eye-popping 400 percent.
"We have more work than we know what to do with," Riesselmann says.
All the indefatigable sleuthing paid off recently, as the Construction Theft Detail finished as second runner-up, out of 1,500 entrants, in the International Association of Chiefs of Police and ChoicePoint's Award for Excellence in Criminal Investigation contest. (IACP is the world's oldest and largest nonprofit organization of police executives. ChoicePoint helps businesses, government agencies and nonprofits via information and technology solutions.)
The Construction Theft Detail finished behind the first-place Florida Department of Law Enforcement Child Abduction Response Team, the nation's first agency to establish a statewide network of child abduction response teams, and the cold case unit at the Charlotte-Mecklenberg, North Carolina, Police Department, recognized for using retired law enforcement experts to examine and prioritize cold-case investigations.
Up until recently, Riesselmann says the Construction Theft Detail struggled to make inroads into crime. Companies were either uncooperative or unresponsive to theft-proofing suggestions. As a result, stealing was as easy as finding a vulnerable construction site—the Valley has a buffet variety to choose from—and having sticky fingers. It's not unusual to see sites with a handful of unmanned backhoes and bulldozers, just-finished subdivisions with unlocked gates or poorly lighted under-construction retail projects.
Separating the equipment from the owner was made all the easier when, as often was the case, sites lacked roving cameras, locks, trustworthy security (i.e., they weren't sleeping), had too many entrances or keys were left in ignitions. Then there was the needle-in-the-haystack experience of tracing stolen items. Equipment found its way into stores, out of state, even on eBay. On a trip to Ventura County, California, Riesselmann discovered items stolen from Vegas in pawnshops. It was part of a 31,000-piece cache of equipment authorities recovered from a Ventura County-based theft ring operating in nine states and 67 cities. Thieves were preparing to sell some of the tools and equipment in Central America and South America, Riesselmann says. "People will take materials left out at job site, people within the industry will take property, people from out of state will steal tools," he says.
Things improved as more companies started taking preventative measures. Some signed up for the construction identification number program, which assigns numbers for tools and equipment, making it easier to identify pilfered items. Metro officials now routinely meet with eight homebuilders and attend monthly meetings of the Association of General Contractors, a local construction industry trade group, where they preach the gospel of crime prevention. One such tidbit: Since high-end appliances are favored targets, increase monitoring when they're installed. "When you see appliances coming out, pretty soon that cuts into bottom line," Ojeda says.
Smaller construction companies need to be especially vigilant, Riesselmann says, because theft can force them into bankruptcy. Toward that end, he urges companies and developers to avoid purchasing equipment with universal keys that can often start equipment of a particular model of machine. "People will take equipment from one company, do what they need to do, then abandon it," he says.
Ojeda adds that residents should also be brought into the crime-fighting fray: "With the quick pace that homes are put together, it's hard to monitor each and every job site 24 hours a day." As such, the first people living in a new neighborhood should keep an eye out for suspicious activity. "Don't assume that people who are on work sites after hours are employees and should be there."