I take you weren't attacked in the ghetto, nor have been into many ghettos (I suspect you have been to none), so your position is not too logical. Even if near, the docking site is outside the ghetto, and scrap metal thievery is not the same as robbery, so again two illogical links, and I again get the sense of a sweeping statement about something that all/most Gypsies do. And question regarding the docking station is, of course, proper guarding.

Now, scrap metal thievery is another separate problem usually linked to Gypsy perpetrators, one I as someone working for a railway is familiar with, so this shall be the main part of my reply. This is also to inform the Westerners here about something they may not know much about.

A number of nomadic Gypsy clans used to be specialised in collecting nicked or broken metalware from peasants, and either repairing and re-selling it, or bringing it to scrap metal handlers. After the 'communist' dictatures crushed nomadic lifestyles and the 1989/90 changes brought joblessness and a throwaway economy, some members of these clans switched to thievery of public property, including metal in disused state factories, railroad catenary, signal cables, even rails.

The first thing I note is, obviously, that metal thieves aren't necessarily active only near their dwelling places. They are even active beyond borders. When catenary is stolen along a strech of 30 km, that's long already. One spectacular case was the tearing-up of railway tracks leading to a prison near Munich in Germany. In Hungary, I once read of a gang from Romania being caught.

The second thing to note is that while Gypsies are usually assumed as perpetrators hereabouts, it can't be taken for certain that Gypsies constituted the thieves. A counterexample: I once participated (in a very small part) in a project to re-live a narrow-gauge railway, where a difficulty was that most of the rails were torn up and stolen - reportedly by local villagers who came with carts and lorries. There are no Gypsy quarters in villages of that region (but there is poverty). Meanwhile, in Northern Germany, metal theft is usually blamed on Polish organized crime (and there are very few Gypsies in Poland).

The third, and most important, thing to note is that every form of theft not for own consumption is a supply/demand problem, which is best solved on the demand side, and so far we only looked at the supply side.

The demand side problem is crooked scrap metal handlers who don't look at the origins of what they buy (and reap most of the profit from the theft, I note) - some of them even designate targets to the thieves -, and controllers who are either corrupt or have insufficient means/time for the job. (My railway sometimes sent out scouts on its own, and then scrap metal handlers shrugged when asked how they could buy two tons of cables with a railway emblem two days after the media were full of the news of a hit on a railway line.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}