Morgantown police crack down on sign thieves

Near the end of my first year at WVU the Arnold residence hall, at the time home to the Honors Program and most of my on – campus friends, our little society slowly degraded into a controlled debauchery; really nothing different from any other large public university dorm.

In the quest of a souvenir from their freshman days, a couple of friends, now of course pillars of the general community and faithful alumni, inform the rest of us that they had stole the street sign from in the front of the dormitory one drunken night before. They claimed that their problem now was how to get it out of the building.

We thought the sounded weird. After all a simple street sign really isn’t that big.

So we went to their room to take a look.

In their closet was said street sign.

Still attached to the steel pole it had been mounted on.

Which had a basketball size piece of concrete around the bottom.

I thought the bigger mystery was how they managed to sneak that into the dorm, up eight flights of stairs, completely drunk.

In that spirit I present this story from the Herald-Mail.com:

Morgantown police crack down on sign thieves

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) -- Police have one word for the people who have been pilfering signs from city streets, and it's the one on that big red octagon: STOP.

Thieves have been stealing street and traffic signs, and sometimes destroying the metal posts they're hung on, Police Chief Phil Scott said Monday.

Sign-stealing is a perennial problem in Morgantown, but Scott said it started getting worse last year, particularly in neighborhoods dominated by West Virginia University students.

"High Street is always a popular one," Scott said. "And anytime that a street name coincides with someone's last name, it's a trophy."

The problem has become so common in Sunnyside that city officials are now identifying streets with green reflective tape on utility poles.

Scott said he's had enough.

Stealing signs in residential areas could pose problems for firefighters and ambulance drivers, and create serious traffic hazards. Missing stop and one-way signs "could actually be devastating" for out-of-town drivers and lead to deadly accidents, he said.

In some states, people who removed street signs and caused accidents have been charged with manslaughter. In a 1996 Florida case, three people were found guilty in a crash that killed three people, but their convictions were overturned on appeal.

Police officers often discover stolen road signs when they enter homes and apartments in Morgantown to investigate unrelated incidents, Scott said. In the past, they've seized the signs but generally not filed charges.

That's about to change.

Anyone caught stealing or possessing a traffic or street sign will be charged with a misdemeanor, he said. It's punishable by a fine of up to $500 and jail time.