DIARY OF A FLYTIP DETECTIVE
( and how crooks use every dirty trick to avoid getting caught )
tape. It can act as a deterrent and be quite a shock to someone who has pushed a fridge to the end of their drive, hoping the ‘ scrap collector’ will take it away.
Mostly these abandoned white goods get picked up, stripped of metal parts, then fly-tipped.
Until recently, one of our worst sites in Walsall was a pretty arched bridge over the Wyrley and Essington Canal. Fly- tippers would reverse their vans up to the bridge and tip their load onto the road, where it spilled into the canal.
Last summer there was so much rubbish — the soil and bags from cannabis farms, fridges, old sofas, supermarket trolleys — you couldn’t see the water. Our clean-up teams were removing ten tons of rubbish from the site every week.
Then the Leader of the Council managed to get our highways colleagues to close the road and put massive concrete blocks in front of the bridge to block access. The flytippers had to go elsewhere.
THURSDAY: EMAILS COME TO NOTHING
ThIs week’s report from our flytipping hotline shows 76 cases in the past three days alone.
My inbox is peppered with emails from residents who send me pictures of vans with their back doors open, number plates clearly visible, and people taking rubbish out and dumping it. That should be gold-standard evidence but it counts for nothing if the sender insists on remaining anonymous.
Yes, I understand they don’t want their tyres slashed or windows broken in recrimination. But without incontrovertible CCTV footage or a witness willing to go to court if necessary, we can’t build a case.
I am buzzed down to the reception area of our building, where a man proudly hands me a photo he has taken of a neighbour dumping building rubbish. It is crystal-clear but you can’t see any faces, and he mutters: ‘You didn’t get this from me’ as he rushes away.
I walk sadly back to my desk and file the photo with the 67 other cases I’m working on that seem to be going nowhere. I take a drive to Birmingham to find the owner of the rubbish tipped a few days ago. It’s a tidy, middle-class house with a well-kept lawn and the owner is horrified to hear why I’m there.
Industrial action in Birmingham meant the household rubbish hadn’t been collected for weeks, so she had employed a man who came to her door brandishing a business card extolling his waste disposal services and fraudulently stamped with a charity logo.
she said she felt betrayed because she put her trust in him, paid £1 a bag, then he dumped it all less than two miles from her house.
Thankfully, she is happy to support our enquiries and we’ve got the business card as evidence.
FRIDAY: IT’S HIGH FIVES ALL ROUND
I hEad straight to the address on the business card and find, parked outside, the grey van clearly recognisable from the CCTV footage. This is exciting but, as always, there are complications.
We are authorised to invite the registered owner of the vehicle in for interview, but it’s clear when he opens the door that the owner is at least 30 years older than the figure captured on CCTV. We are now forced to try to identify the suspect in other ways — I’m hoping we’ll be allowed to seize the vehicle, as it might speed the process a bit.
Back at the office, the team is waiting for five suspected fly-tippers who have been invited in for interview. some are of Eastern European descent, so we have employed a translator to join us.
an hour later, and two hours into the translator’s £27-an-hour time, only one has turned up.
he gets an £80 fine, which doesn’t even come close to covering the amount of money that will have been spent on his case alone.
The translator tells us it’s accepted among this tight-knit immigrant community that any rubbish that doesn’t fit in your bin can be left in car parks or by the road for the council to remove.
There are pockets of rubbishstrewn land like this all over town, which we have spent thousands trying to clear. We could send a clean-up crew there every day and still make no dent in the mess.
as we are packing up for the evening, the desk phone rings and my colleague Kirsty picks it up. I hear her saying ‘yes... yes... ’ then she squeals, punching the air.
Last month our covert cameras had revealed an amazingly clear bit of footage of a man emptying car tyres from his van onto a verge. We got the number plate but needed to identify the man. With cases like these we have started to post the footage on our new ‘Walsall’s Most Wanted’ web pages and social media, and offer a reward for information leading to conviction.
The council recently hiked the reward money offered from £100 to £500 and, incredibly, it has worked. someone saw that video, recognised the man and called us to give his name. I run downstairs to the police (in the same building) to see if they have a photo of the person with that name. It’s a match.
Maybe, just maybe, this one can get to court.