- Metal theft is costing Cape Town at least R10 million a year, according to the City's mayoral committee member for safety and security, JP Smith.
- The City now has a special weapon in the fight against metal thieves and illicit scrapyards - a dog.
- Jackson, a seven-year-old crossbreed pit bull, can sniff out copper hidden under heaps of other metal.
Relentless metal thieves are costing the City of Cape Town millions of rand as infrastructure is stripped and sold to unscrupulous scrapyards.
Now, a highly trained dog with a particular penchant for sniffing out copper has been deployed to combat the scourge.
Cape Town lost around R2.5 million to metal theft in the last quarter of 2022, according to the City's mayoral committee member for safety and security, JP Smith.
The true cost of metal theft could be up to three times higher when accounting for scrap that has not been tracked.
The national government's six-month ban on the export of copper and copper alloy scrap, announced in November, has done little to stem the destruction of infrastructure, said Smith.
"The prohibition on the trade in copper that was authorised by national government has not had any impact. The guys on the street tell us that the situation is as bad as before."
Cape Town's fight against the rampant theft of metal, which disrupts the lives of residents and eats into the City's coffers, recently received an unlikely boost from the K9 Unit.
Jackson, a seven-year-old crossbreed pit bull, can sniff out copper wire hidden under other metal or buried in shallow ground.
"Jackson is quite unique … when I first had Jackson and his predecessors introduced him to me, I was very cynical about the idea that a dog could smell copper," said Smith during a search operation in Culemborg.
A week earlier, thieves attempted to hide a stolen metal rail in the area and, thanks to CCTV footage, were caught in the act.
"I remember that at the time [when I was first introduced to Jackson], I ended up losing a bet by burying a [copper] sample in a molehill, and the dog was able to detect it. That surprised me quite a bit," he added.
Cape Town's metro police are looking to introduce more copper-sniffing dogs to its K9 Unit, with Smith confirming training capabilities had recently been brought in-house and the Parow-headquartered kennels would be upgraded.
"We are currently working on increasing and improving the kennels. We've run out of kennel capacity at that unit, which is a former animal welfare facility that we took over," he said.
"We're starting to put the budget aside and doing the design for enhanced kennels so that we can give the dogs the best possible accommodation. We do treat them as officers, as members of the unit."