Press Editorial - Unskilled Crime For Quick Cash

Stealing from graveyards isn’t just macabre, it’s also desperate. Raiding cemeteries under cover of night and lugging out heavy fixtures and decorations is surely among the least appealing forms of unskilled crime.

When police in Mullica Township caught up with a massive case of cemetery theft this month, it offered an unusual indicator of the dire problems that have afflicted the region for several years.

The severe recession of 2007-09 caused a lot of people to turn gold jewelry into cash. Not all of that jewelry was legitimately owned.

After a few years, when much of the jewelry was gone, stories started to appear in the newspaper about metals of lesser value being grabbed.

Copper pipes and wires were stripped from buildings, costing much more in property damage than the thieves could ever get for selling the stolen metal to be melted and reused.

Police say substance abuse is behind a lot of this theft, and as opioid and heroin use have become epidemic, the state has had to institute controls to make it harder to sell stolen stuff.

The state enacted tough regulations on the purchase of precious metals. Buyers have to obtain from sellers of jewelry proof of their identity, and they have to keep the jewelry for at least two days, giving investigators time to see if it was stolen. Digital photos of the jewelry must be taken and kept for at least a year.

In 2014, New Jersey tightened its requirements for scrap-metal buyers to make it less likely they’d serve as fencing operations for metal thieves. Buyers have to copy and keep the sellers’ driver’s licenses. They have to report to the state the license plates and descriptions of the vehicles of sellers. Materials purchased have to be tagged and held for at least five days, and records on transactions of $50 or more must be kept for five years.

 The cemetery thieves allegedly took more than 200 items from the gravesites of families in Mullica, Egg Harbor City, Galloway Township, Pleasantville and probably elsewhere. Police say they transported the marble statues and metal gates and fences by car to an antiques dealer.

 They got paid about $4,000, which means on average they got just $20 for each bulky, heavy stolen piece.

Imposing restrictions and reporting requirements on dealers in used and antique items isn’t practical and seems unnecessary. The main action now in fencing stolen items of low value is online.

But resellers of used and antique items might be a bit more skeptical these days about the source of merchandise offered, especially if it comes from an unsecured location such as a graveyard.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/opinion/editorials/unskilled-crime-for-quick-cash-hits-a-new-low/article_4b31936c-8598-11e6-9e3d-6788bb51eccc.html

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http://gadfly01.blogspot.com/2016/09/stolen-cemetery-items-found-in-mullica.html