For the last several months, I’ve been researching and writing about Philadelphia’s struggles with illegal dumping: the people who do it, the people in charge of stopping them, the citizens working against it, and potential solutions the City has neglected.
This work has been motivated by a simple conviction: There’s far too much illegal dumping in Philly, and it’s an embarrassment to the city that we’re so ineffective at preventing it, and more importantly, our failures are an injustice to the under-resourced communities that suffer the brunt of the dumping.
By preventing illegal dumping, I mean deterring would-be offenders from dumping in the first place. It’s important for the Streets Department to quickly remove debris once it’s dumped, but doing so costs the city millions of dollars per year, and impacted communities are all too familiar with the perpetual cycle of dumping and removal that plays out at so-called hotspots where dumpers drop new piles as soon as the City cleans the old ones up.
Deterrence is necessary, and deterring a behavior requires understanding it.
Most of Philadelphia’s illegal dumpers are self-employed junk haulers with criminal records of varying length. Running such an operation is relatively easy money: You find a truck, find someone looking to get rid of construction debris, household trash, or old tires, charge them a cut-rate fee to haul it away, dump it on the streets of impoverished neighborhoods, and take off.
Short of a citywide jobs guarantee with no restrictions for criminal history, the only viable deterrent seems to be a strong chance of swift civil or criminal prosecution. Right now, in Philly, dumpers are extremely unlikely to suffer such consequences.
Some people believe we could deter illegal dumpers by eliminating legal dumping fees. I believe unlicensed operations will always be able to charge lower fees. Short of a citywide jobs guarantee with no restrictions for criminal history, the only viable deterrent seems to be a strong chance of swift civil or criminal prosecution. Right now, in Philly, dumpers are extremely unlikely to suffer such consequences.
Of the thousands of illegal dumping incidents resulting in millions of pounds of trash on our streets, very few are investigated, and of those investigated, a vanishingly small fraction result in civil or criminal penalties. In 2021, 220 illegal dumping investigations led to 13 Code Notice Violations (CVNs), four warrants, and one arrest. For context, Dallas — which has a population of 1.34 million — has made as many as 301 arrests for illegal dumping in a single year.
In Philly, dumpers don’t fear being caught for the simple reason that they virtually never are.
Months of research have led me to three explanations for our dismal enforcement results:
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- We lack traditional investigative manpower, meaning either police officers devoted to environmental crimes or unarmed solid waste investigators from the Streets Department.
- The crux of our current enforcement system — a network of surveillance cameras monitored by the Police and Streets Departments — is either woefully mismanaged or inherently ineffective.
- Those in charge of enforcement are housed in a sprawling array of departments and need to be organized into a more cohesive unit.
Lack of investigative manpower
This May, District Attorney Larry Krasner, who takes endless flack from his political opponents as a soft-on-crime, tough-on-cops DA, has said that his office has the capacity to prosecute 150 illegal dumping cases per year — and that he would love to do so. Krasner also said he can’t prosecute cases the police don’t bring him, and we “can’t have an environmental unit that’s only two people and expect them to generate the work of 10.”
The will to prosecute is not the problem. The problem is our ability to investigate.
Earlier this month, a PPD spokesperson told me that the Environmental Crimes Unit (ECU) spends most of its time investigating illegal dumping cases, and in those investigations, it relies most heavily on traditional police work — officer surveillance and reports from citizens and witnesses. It does not rely so heavily on the Streets Department’s network of 188 surveillance cameras dedicated to capturing footage of illegal dumping, or the three full-time employees who do nothing but monitor those cameras.
In the words of the PPD spokesperson, Streets surveillance footage “is not the primary basis” of ECU arrests. While Streets and the ECU both insist that they have a great working relationship, it’s clear that their relationship is not producing the results Philly needs.
At present, the most effective tool we have for catching illegal dumpers is traditional investigative manpower. And, at present, we have exactly one officer and one detective assigned to the ECU.
Other cities make far more arrests with far fewer surveillance cameras because they have far more investigators — whether armed police or unarmed municipal employees — devoted to catching illegal dumpers. The math here is simple. Assigning more investigators to the illegal dumping beat equals catching more offenders, and catching more offenders equals cleaner streets.
Many cameras, few arrests, and lots of unanswered questions
Even though the ECU doesn’t use these cameras much, the Streets Department plans to install 80 more. According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, the PPD also has 450 general use CCTV cameras that it monitors independently. Again, both departments say they have a good working relationship and communicate regularly about illegal dumping. But findings from 2019 study led by Penn professor Dan Hopkins says otherwise:
Over the course of the year we found that the main issue is that police officers are overwhelmed with too much data for a human to handle, and when they do happen to stumble upon the occurrence of a dump, they must manually tell someone in the Streets Department to access the specified video and investigate the issue.
The researchers involved with that study began developing a technology to address this issue. They created an algorithm to automatically sort through footage to flag dumping activity, and a user-friendly interface to facilitate better interdepartmental communication. The development of this technology was derailed by the pandemic, and the City never revisited it.
Kyle Lewis, the Streets Department’s Director of Recycling and the Director of the Kenney administration’s interdepartmental Cleaner Public Spaces Enforcement Committee (CPSEC), doesn’t concede the study’s conclusion. She believes her department can handle the volume of footage, even though the available evidence suggests otherwise.
The math here is simple. Assigning more investigators to the illegal dumping beat equals catching more offenders, and catching more offenders equals cleaner streets.
And so, Streets is actively installing more cameras that cost thousands of dollars apiece, and Councilmember Jamie Gauthier just secured funding in the FY2023 budget so that we can hire more technicians to help with installation and maintenance. Maybe it will work this time.
Or, maybe we will spend more money, and devote a lot of personnel, to an enforcement tool that, for whatever reason — shoddy cameras? Mismanagement? Miscommunication? — does not deliver adequate results.
We need to get to the bottom of the chasm between resources invested in surveillance cameras and results delivered by them. Otherwise we might as well be dumping piles of money in the street.
Lack of organization
After Mayor Kenney dissolved his Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet due to pandemic-induced budget constraints, he convened CPSEC as a substitute. It’s a sprawling interdepartmental committee with representatives from a host of city agencies, most notably Streets, the PPD, the Law Department, Licenses and Inspections, and the Inspector General, all of whom play at least a limited role in illegal dumping investigations.
So far, CPSEC seems to be an inadequate organizing force. To wit: Earlier this year, they decided to open up more avenues for civil prosecution of parties involved in illegal dumping by issuing code violation notices (CVNs) to property owners who pay dumpers — and issue steeper fines by charging dumpers for each item dumped, not just for each act of dumping.
What we need right now is an adult in the room, someone who can pinpoint flaws in the current system, formulate a clear plan for overhauling it, and make the people running this mess of a system get it done.
But more civil prosecution requires more attorneys to handle casework. The Law Department determined it would need four new attorneys devoted to illegal dumping cases. Gauthier heard them out and included that exact budget item in her #JustServicesPHL campaign. But when the new budget took effect on July 1, money for those Law Department attorneys was nowhere to be found.
What’s the point of having a CPSEC if the solutions it devises never materialize? Is it just another toothless committee with a nice-sounding name — but without power to act?
Put an adult in the room
What we need right now is an adult in the room, someone who can pinpoint flaws in the current system, formulate a clear plan for overhauling it, and make the people running this mess of a system get it done.
Since our network of surveillance cameras is either mismanaged or an inherent waste of money, and our enforcement system’s lack of organization leads to wasted time and energy, and the public is increasingly frustrated and desperate for results, it seems entirely appropriate for City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart to step up and become that leader.
Rhynhart has proven time and again her ability to tackle convoluted city problems (like gun violence, which is already correlated to dirty streets: her office built an up-to-date map of gun violence and studied its economic impact). What’s more, she’s already delved into our municipal waste management machine. When the pandemic slowed trash collection citywide, Rhynhart stepped up to show not only how bad things had gotten, but also how much worse things were for our cities poorest residents.
Therefore, I’m calling on Controller Rhynhart to conduct a thorough audit of:
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- Our network of surveillance cameras and its role in illegal dumping investigations
- The organization and communication between the various city employees involved in illegal dumping enforcement in order to:
- Identify the flaws and point the way forward.
Please, Controller: Lead us all the way out from the shadows of Filthadelphia.
