I guess we're fairly lucky here in my small town of 3215 population as I haven't seen any ruined TVs (or any televisions, period) here, on the curbs or otherwise, in years. The last time I saw a junked TV in this neighborhood was about eight years ago. It was a 1978-vintage RCA Colortrak 25" console, all in one piece. Haven't seen anything like it here since, although now that TV is 100-percent digital I had expected to see CRT sets being trashed left and right since June 12 last year--but it hasn't happened yet.
Another thing I haven't seen much of--yet, anyway--is trashed flat-panel sets, although there may not be that many such sets in this town yet, almost nine months after the DTV transition. Perhaps a lot of folks around here are using converter boxes with their old reliable analog sets and have no intention of getting a FP set anytime soon; however, I am surprised I haven't seen more FPs in the trash here (if the truth be known, I haven't seen any such sets on the curbs yet) with broken screens since the end of football season, or sets that have been smashed accidentally when they fell off of or were knocked off their stands. My RCA XL-100 analog table set, which weighs something on the order of 50 pounds, has fallen off its stand once since I've had it (ten years), the only damage being a bent shadow mask in the CRT. I was able to repair it in five minutes with a couple of sweeps across the screen with an old speaker magnet; the set has worked flawlessly, with an excellent picture, ever since. Had this been a flat-panel set, however, it would likely have been ruined the second it hit the floor,
despite the fact that the floors in my apartment are carpeted.
The foregoing is only one of several reasons I am in no hurry to replace my TVs with flat panels--which I refuse to do as long as the old sets work as well as they do. The older analog sets were more durable and will take much more abuse than today's flimsily-built flat panels. Strike the screen of any recent-vintage or older analog set and you'll get away with it most of the time; try the same thing with an FP and the set will be made into an instant pile of junk. The fact that flat-panel TVs, in particular the Chinese and Korean off-brands (Vizio, Haier, et al.) no one ever heard of until very recently, do not last nearly as long as the older analog CRT sets did
bothers me as well, but that's material for another thread.
Breaking the necks off CRTs and throwing rocks at the screens of otherwise restorable televisions is nothing new. By the '90s this was fairly common in the Cleveland suburb where I used to live, but since I moved here I've only seen two TVs in the trash, the 25" Colortrak I described above and one 1980s-vintage RCA 12" portable. I did see two large stereo consoles in front of a house just down the street from my apartment about three years ago (one was a Morse Electrophonic, the other a GE, IIRC). The stereos seemed to be in excellent shape from the looks of the cabinets (no scratches, doodles or other destruction that I could see), so I guess if there are any copper thieves in this town they are steering clear of these. Stereo consoles, even solid-state ones, have transformers with copper wire in the windings, but they probably aren't as desirable as TV yokes; the latter, after all, have much more (larger gauge) wire in them so they will fetch more money than the small-gauge wire in transformers.