Legal Assistant

As in every other part of the country, thieves in or around Grand Junction, Colo., have spotted an opportunity with the rising prices paid for scrap metal.

Randy Van Gundy, vice president of Grand Junction-based Van Gundy’s AMPCO Inc., says his company has made considerable efforts to be part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem.

“I want to buy legitimate scrap and I’m going to prosecute whoever I can,” states Randy. “We just fulfilled a request from a sheriff’s department for a DVD yesterday of a guy bringing in scrap.

“We have 20 cameras, we make a copy of the picture ID and we get license plate shots,” says Randy of the Van Gundy’s AMPCO procedure. “We collect a lot of information on every seller.”

He says of the system, provided by Thinc Technologies of nearby Fruita, Colo., “The police love it. We just upgraded our camera system and we can store footage and go back 45 days (up from 10), and it’s now easier with this system to burn a DVD that can go to a law enforcement agency.”

He continues, “I want the public to know that we have monitors and we put alerts on metal theft out at the scales, so the public knows I’m not trying to hide anything.”