Cape Town - The City of Cape Town has added has added another member to the K9 team to help combat rising cable theft. According to the City, the arrests made by the Metal Theft Unit have risen since November last year.
Despite the horror stories aligned to this breed of dog, the City has managed to train and hire a pit bull by the name of Jackson that will be responsible for sniffing out copper during raids.
Donated to the unit, Jackson, 5, was trained to detect missing people by his previous owner. Being adopted, he was then trained to detect narcotics and was the only K9 who could imprint on copper.
Metro police spokesperson Ruth Solomons said the pit bull will be with the unit until it turns seven years old, or until there are medical conditions that might prevent him from continuing with the job.
“Jackson does small detections of narcotics and copper. He is not able to detect and be responsible for a big bust yet, but had smaller successes with copper,” said Solomons.
Introducing Jackson on his Facebook page, mayoral committee member for safety and security JP Smith said: “Meet the lovable pit bull. He is an officer in our K9 unit. He has a strange taste in music because of his metal head. K9 Jackson is a copper-sniffing dog in our metro specialised services division.
“In our efforts to stem the tide of damage and theft of infrastructure, we added him to our team. Jackson is loved by everyone except thieves and bucket shop owners.”
According to the City, the unit arrested 152 suspects, conducted 1 156 hot spot patrols and 1 487 inspections at scrapyards and bucket shops, and recovered hundreds of kilograms of metal, cables and other stolen infrastructure between July 2022 and the end of January 2023.
The rise of stolen metal coincides with increased higher stages of load shedding.
In a recent case, officers arrested three suspects in Elsies River last Saturday. The team conducted a search of a light delivery vehicle in the neighbourhood of a scrapyard in the area and found 15 pieces of high mast poles belonging to Prasa.
The vehicle’s occupants could not account for how they came to have the poles and were arrested for the possession of stolen property.