Copper thieves taking down phone lines, leaving some Dallas neighborhoods without service

DALLAS - Dallas police and AT&T are trying to stop copper thieves taking down lines and taking out phone, cable and internet service.

In some places like Southwest Oak Cliff, the thefts and outages have happened several times.

AT&T crews have been working all across Southwest Oak Cliff restoring cable lines cables that have been cut by thieves to steal the copper. And in their efforts to steal the copper, in many cases they're cutting off lifelines to people in neighborhoods.

"They're coming in, and they're stealing the cable lines to get the copper wire out of the inside of it," explained Dallas Police Det. Jamison Lewis.

Entire neighborhoods have had cables repeatedly being taken out by thieves.

"Given that there's a rise in copper prices just went up, that’s causing more crime involving theft," said Curtis McGruder with AT&T.

"It takes out the whole neighborhood’s cable, internet and phone," Lewis said. "So anybody that has a landline, they've now lost their ability to call 911. Anybody who works on the internet, using internet for their cell service or working from home, they no longer have the ability to do that."

Jimmy Martinez has been without phone, internet or cable since Thursday with kids in the house and while trying to work from home.

"Been doing mobile hot spot since then. So certain things that I run, they are a little bit over capacity," he said. "Slowness is the experience. Of course, I cannot do anything with the internet for the kids. So work has been covered, but it's been it's been barely."

AT&T employees will be in marked up vehicles and vests with logos. Anyone else on a ladder or with a saw, call 911.

"Each section of the cable could be 100 to 200 feet long," said Brian Martinez with AT&T. "And in some cases, they're stealing two to ten sections at a time."

Each section costs up to $15,000 to repair.

"We really need the public to help us with this because it's happening in front of their eyes. They just don’t know it," McGruder said.

Images show burn sites where thieves burn off the outer covering of the copper cable so it can be sold raw to recyclers.

"We're trying to work with all of our scrap yards where the metal's sold to try to start finding people that are coming in with hundreds of pounds of copper wire that doesn’t really add up," Lewis said.