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Case study: Local Authorities and Parish councils

Fly Tipping Hotspot - Commercial Space Adjacent to Residential

Our client challenge and requirement:

This particular location had been a challenge for the Bedford Environmental Crime team for many years. The fly tipping location is surrounded by many terraced houses and is adjacent to a large block of flats. The rubbish left here consisted of substantial amounts of medium to large items of household waste, including domestic appliances, furniture, mattresses and smaller items such as sacks of household waste. The location has become a habitual place for local residents to leave rubbish. Cameras have been tried in this area before but have always struggled to collate the quality and level of evidence required.

Our process and service solution provision:

Crimewave conducted a detailed survey of the site, and due to the number of feeder roads to this location we developed a strategy of different targeted camera locations to enable us to adjust camera views and establish what precise streets and locations the rubbish was coming from. We installed two devices, one to monitor the area of dumping, and another that had the flexibility to be able to establish which properties and vehicles were involved in this wide scale issue.

Our team closely monitored all activity in this dumping spot. The type of issues we identified were street drinking and the litter left from this, a large number of items disposed from the adjacent terraced properties, and finally something we had not anticipated. We identified very large amounts of rubbish being left here particularly at weekends. On further investigation we found that multiple employees of the landlord of the adjacent flats were clearing properties of all sorts of items, including large furniture items and household waste bags. This was occurring several times per week. We also evidenced that the same employee was bringing rubbish from elsewhere in commercial vehicles and dumping at this location. As an example, we have six hours of continuous footage showing linked vehicles coming to and from the premises and staff emptying properties of the flats into this area.