Three years ago, former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti stood on a newly reconstructed 6th Street Bridge, calling its “Ribbon of Light” arches a “nod to our past and a bridge to the future.”
Meant to embody Boyle Heights’ rich history, the bridge has instead become a symbol of one of the neighborhood’s most pressing issues: streetlight outages.
In 2024, Boyle Heights ranked second out of the city’s 114 neighborhoods for streetlight outage service requests with 1,907 reports, according to MyLA311 Streetlight Service Request data. Downtown Los Angeles, another neighborhood in Council District 14, topped the chart with 2,206 requests.
In 2020, reports of streetlight outages in Boyle Heights placed with the MyLA311 system averaged around 42 a month. That number rose to an average of 50 in 2021, 85 in 2022 and continued climbing to 134 in 2023. The average reached 159 in 2024.
The issue can, in part, be traced back to the rising price of copper since the pandemic, which thieves tear out of streetlight fixtures to sell, according to an analysis by the nonprofit newsroom Crosstown. Copper was just under $2 a pound when a state of emergency was declared in California in March 2020. It’s about $4.50 today.
What’s being done
Early last year, former CD 14 Councilmember Kevin de León worked with District 11’s Traci Park to address the issue by launching a heavy metal task force in collaboration with LAPD and the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting.
By the end of July, the initiative had led 26 operations, ranging from undercover actions to high-visibility patrols. After only five months, the task force yielded 82 arrests, including 60 felony charges, over 2,000 pounds of stolen copper wire recovered and nine firearms seized.
The heavy metal task force remains active following funding approved by the City Council in August. The city’s Bureau of Engineering has also been working to redesign some elements of the bridge to make it more secure and foolproof so thieves have a more difficult time stealing.
The issue of streetlight outages was one of the first orders of business for CD 14’s new Councilmember Ysabel Jurado.
In December, she introduced a motion in the City Council to instruct the Bureau of Street Lighting to conduct a detailed analysis of streetlight outages in her district. The data must be broken down by neighborhood, locations with the highest number of outages and find areas suitable for solar streetlight conversions and ways to fund energy-efficiency upgrades.
The motion was approved in February and a report by the Bureau of Street Lighting is expected in early April.
Boyle Heights is not alone. I live in Hollywood and have made several 311 online requests for lighting repair. It’s been over a year and additional streetlights continue to be vandalized without repair. One by one, our streets are going dark.
Need tougher punishment for these vandals and for business locations that buy stolen copper wire… Time to create another lighting system not accessible for these thieves…