Thieves in New Haven are focusing on something new to steal. They are swiping shopping carts from local supermarkets.
“We're finding two problems," said Officer David Hartman. "One: some people do try to melt down the carts by bringing them to a scrap metal yard. And the other, the carts are also used by people to transport things to scrap metal yards."
Police are cracking down on the thefts and are arresting or ticketing people they find with carts.
Local businesses are also taking steps.
Ferraro's Market on Grand Avenue put up beams around the store years ago after it kept losing carriages.
“What we did was we came up with some ideas where the carriages couldn't get outside the patio area, and we put one or two people on to help people bring their stuff to their cars," said Tony DelMauro, a manager at Ferraro's. "It actually worked out better, one, for customer service, and two, so we could take care of the carriages and they wouldn't get taken on us."
Since each cart costs hundreds of dollars, a little prevention is going a long way.
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“Any metal now is something that they're looking to get. Even if they see us working on things, asking us out there if we have any scrap or anything, which we usually don't,” said DelMauro.
