On a June afternoon in 2023, Inspector Robert Ritchie was driving an unmarked police car on West Glenwood Avenue in North Philly when he saw someone standing in the open back of a parked U-Haul moving truck.
The man, Saul Miller, was pushing a large brown sofa and a chaise off the truck and onto the sidewalk, according to a police report. When he noticed Ritchie, he quickly finished and got into the front passenger seat. A woman named Lorraine McAfee started driving the truck down the street.
“Due to the fact that they were fleeing the scene, I activated my police lights and sirens and pulled the U-Haul truck over,” Ritchie said in the report. “Miller quickly exited the passenger side cabin and ran in my direction. I stopped (him) and told him to remain still.”
“I am sorry, I am going to pick all that stuff up and put it back in the truck,” Miller told Ritchie, according to the stilted language of the police report. He said he wasn’t armed and didn’t have ID on him. Officers from the police 25th District arrived to detain him and McAfee, and a detective came to take photos of the couches.
“It should be noted that the brown sofa and brown chaise is so large, that it is blocking the entire sidewalk, forcing all pedestrians on the sidewalk to have to walk into the street to get around the short dumped furniture,” Ritchie said in his report.
Miller and McAfee were not only arrested, but were later also sued by the city’s Law Department — accused of violating anti-dumping laws and together owing the city nearly $22,000 in penalties.
McAfee said she hadn’t been aware that Miller was illegally dumping until the police pulled her over. “I wouldn’t do nothing like that,” she said in an interview with Billy Penn. She had paid some people $90 for what she thought was legal disposal of the furniture, she said.
“I’m being falsely accused,” she said. “They had cleaned out something for me. I was taking stuff out of a house and I thought we were taking it to the dump.”
McAfee, who’s a nurse, was unaware that at a hearing in January, a judge ruled for the city and confirmed that she must pay $10,000 plus cleanup costs. Records show that a court notice mailed to her came back as undeliverable. “I don’t know what I have to do,” she said. “I was supposed to get a court date. I never got a court date.”
Miller, who lives about a mile from where the sofa was dumped, never responded to legal notices and the judge ruled against him by default, according to court records. He could not be reached for comment.
A nearly $1 million fine for dumping tires and trash
The lawsuit against Miller and McAfee was one of 48 the city filed against accused dumpers last year, compared to just 13 in 2023, according to a list provided by the Law Department.
The ramped-up effort has its roots in a surge in Philadelphia’s chronic illegal dumping problem during the pandemic, which led City Council to pass laws in 2022 toughening penalties.
Whereas previously a dumping incident might have brought a single penalty of a few hundred dollars, then-councilmember Cherelle Parker spearheaded a change that sharply boosted fines to $5,000 per dumped object, for each person involved. That allows massive fines to stack up for violations like depositing a few pieces of lumber on a street or vacant lot.
“Not only is dumping an irresponsible business practice, but it’s also disrespectful to the community,” Parker said at the time.
Since then, Licenses & Inspections and other agencies have been routinely issuing violation notices for $40,000, $150,000, or more, which if not paid or settled can lead to enforcement through a civil lawsuit.
The biggest penalty the city has pursued in court, $963,000, followed the dumping of 40 used tires and 36 other items in Fairmount Park in May 2023. The alleged dumpers, Shawn Patterson and Warner Burton, didn’t pay off their initial violation notices and are scheduled for a civil trial on April 15.
Burton said he was sued because he rented a truck for Patterson, a childhood friend who was supposedly moving out of his mother’s house. He claims he never drove the vehicle himself or dumped anything. He was stunned when he learned about the fines — $380,000 for him and $580,000 for Patterson.
“Damn near a million dollars for what, some tires? Come on. It’s a money grab,” Burton said. He said he suspects they were targeted for enforcement because Patterson has a previous offense on his record.
Burton said he’s now trying to pull together money both for a lawyer and for a funeral for his father, who is dying. “It’s a lesson to be learned from this. Be careful who you allow in your circles. Be a little bit more careful when it comes to helping people,” he said.
Patterson could not be reached for comment.
The second largest fine, for $585,000, was imposed on Tirebul’s Tire Shop on Ogontz Avenue for dumping more than 110 tires in multiple locations in March 2023. The city sued and a judge affirmed the fine last August.
Tirebul’s has since gone out of business, according to a person who answered the company’s phone number. The man, who declined to give his name, said he owns a new business at the same location. He had heard the illegal dumping was not done by Tirebul’s but by someone else using a vehicle registered at the same address, he said.
Tirebul’s former owner could not be reached for comment.
Huge fines, few actual payments
Over the past two years, attorneys with the Law Department have filed suits asking for enforcement of $7.4 million in penalties, according to court records — $1.4 million in 2023 and $6 million 2024.
The city’s lawyers have so far won judgments worth about $5 million from those cases.
The actual amount of money collected is much smaller. Dumpers often don’t pay up after being cited, and in many cases never respond to the subsequent lawsuit.
When people do come in to settle the initial violation, they typically end up paying about $2,000 per item dumped, or 40% of the original fine, said Carlton Williams, the city’s director of Clean and Green Initiatives.
“If they got a $50,000 fine, the Law Department will try to come up with a reasonable cost — stiff enough for them to realize what they did was wrong, but not so burdensome enough where they can’t afford to pay it, that it just doesn’t have an impact,” he said.
The city collected more than $200,000 in 2024, Williams said. That included legal settlements, fines paid to the police, and payments for violations issued by the Community Life Improvement Program (CLIP) for dumping and unkempt vacant lots.
It’s not much compared to the tens of millions of dollars Philadelphia spends annually on trash cleanup and enforcement, a sum that has increased over the past 15 months as part of Mayor Parker’s Clean and Green initiative.
Collections for dumping violations could increase in the future, however. The city could try to garnish defendants’ bank accounts, or seize their cars or homes. Officials said a process for judgment referral to collect fines is being developed.
“We’re going to continue to work with the Law Department to expand their capabilities to go after those judgments,” Williams told Billy Penn. “We want to turn that into real money and to hold people accountable for the cleanups, the restitution, and the fines and the damages they’re causing the city, to deter this type of behavior once and for all.”
Officials note that the violations enforced through civil lawsuits represent just a tiny fraction of all illegal dumping and littering incidents.
CLIP alone issued 14,979 violations in 2024, per the Sanitation Department. Those include both lower-level Code Violation Notices for things like household trash infractions, and pricier Notices of Violations for large-scale dumping. The police and Licenses & Inspections also separately issue additional violations.
Caught in a web of cameras
While investigations sometimes begin when an officer happens to see someone dumping, as with McAfee and Miller, or when a resident calls police about an incident, most start with a surveillance camera.
The Sanitation Department has about 639 cameras installed at dumping hotspots, feeding into banks of monitors at an office in Port Richmond, Williams said. It’s staffed by 8 to 12 Sanitation employees, who look for images of newly dumped material and then rewind the video to show the dumper’s vehicle and get a license plate number.
“It’s quite impressive,” said Police Captain Shawn Trush, who oversees the department’s Environmental Crimes unit. “It reminds you of NASA. They really have a full contingent and a lot of equipment.”
A lieutenant and four detectives in Trush’s unit also have access to their department’s network of cameras, Parks & Recreation cameras, and footage provided by owners of private cameras at homes and businesses.
In one camera-driven investigation from February 2024, police were alerted to a load of construction material dumped on Newton Avenue in Lawncrest. Called Snake Road by residents, it’s a chronic dumping site on the edge of Tacony Creek Park. It’s near a spot where volunteers last week finished removing some 4,000 dumped tires.
Camera images showed the construction material on Snake Road came from a dark blue truck and trailer labeled “Fully Loaded Junk Removal,” and another camera showed the same truck driving through Olney a few minutes earlier. A detective looked up the company’s website, and database searches turned up addresses for the owner, Quaheem Payne, in Norristown and Philadelphia.
Payne was sent a violation notice saying he was responsible for the dumping of 31 bags of debris. The city “has determined that you violated Section 10-710 (3) of the Philadelphia Code, as the owner of the vehicle who illegally dumped in the street on the 5600 block of Newton Ave,” it said. “Therefore, you are subject to a fine of $5,000.00 for each individual item dumped bringing your total to $155,000.00,” in addition to $2,663 in cleanup costs.
Last June the city sued Payne and his business, and in February Judge Anne Marie Coyle in the Court of Common Pleas ruled they were liable for the fines.
In an interview, Payne said he has wanted to settle the case but his attorney missed a court date, leading to the judgment. They’re in discussions with the city and expect to settle in the next few days, he said.
Payne said he doesn’t drive his company trucks and can’t be completely sure one of his employees didn’t dump the material. But he argued that the charge doesn’t make sense because the dump site is a short drive both to his business and to Burns & Co., one of a few waste recovery facilities in the area where he has accounts to deposit trash legally.
“Burns is literally five minutes away from that spot. My guy could have gone and dumped for free — not free, but free for him,” he said. Investigators may have seen his trucks, with the company name clearly displayed, near the dump site and thought, “we’ve got to get somebody,” Payne said. “He’s driving through here every day.”
The size of the fine was “ridiculous,” he added. “They were suing me for $155,000? What the heck could have been dumped for that amount?”
In another typical case, police used surveillance from Pearce Street, a small street on the edge of Bridesburg that curves under I-95 and past a lot filled with shipping containers.
Footage from July 20, 2023 showed a pile of seven large black trash bags on the street near the curb along with a white U-Haul truck, according to photos in a court record. Dumpers often use those kinds of trucks.
As in many dumping cases, U-Haul provided the police with a rental receipt and a copy of the driver’s license. The truck had been rented in Perkiomenville by Kimberly Ann Wood, who lived a few blocks from the dumping site in Frankford, according to a violation notice. She was fined $35,000, plus $1,737 for cleanup costs.
The city sued the following March, Wood didn’t respond, and Coyle found her liable.
Wood could not be reached for comment.
An alternative to sparse criminal prosecutions
The civil enforcement push represents a shift in strategy. Previous administrations tried to prosecute some dumping violations as crimes, referring them to the District Attorney’s office. But Williams, who previously oversaw sanitation as Streets commissioner in the Kenney administration, said the process was slow and resulted in few convictions.
With criminal prosecutions, “we didn’t see the impact we wanted,” he said. “However, when you start to increase the fines that we’ve done through the civil process, we’re starting to see people get huge judgments against them, and we’re starting to see a greater impact than we did with the criminal process.”
Williams said a civil case is much easier to move along because the rules of evidence are less stringent, and the onus is on defendants to prove they weren’t responsible for the violation — a high burden, given the footage of license plates and of people dumping that is available to city lawyers.
Trush estimated police undertook more than a dozen criminal dumping investigations last year, but there were only two actual arrests, according to the DA’s data dashboard. Four people were charged with dumping or littering in 2024.
Over the past decade, the office has charged between 3 and 26 people per year, or an average of about 10 annually. The number of convictions was not reported.
District Attorney Larry Krasner last week announced a new initiative to prosecute more short dumping and other quality of life crimes, thanks to a funding boost from the Parker administration.
Accused dumper pleads “I didn’t do this”
Court records shed some light on who the dumpers are. The vast majority of those sued over the past two years lived in Philadelphia, with just a handful listed as having addresses in Chester, Abington, Norristown, Ardmore and other towns. At least a few of them owned or worked for small hauling or demolition businesses, or in one case an auto body repair shop.
“There are certain groups or businesses that like to hang outside the Home Depot or Lowe’s. They see you buying a new bathtub or shower, and they’re like, do you want us to get rid of your trash for you? They’ll follow you right back to your house and take whatever you’re ripping out,” Trush said.
The homeowner pays the hauler, who then dumps the material illegally on a street or vacant lot. “It’s a serious problem,” he said.
In the smattering of cases where court filings include comments from accused dumpers, their responses to violation notices and lawsuits range from claims they were misidentified as the dumper, to contrition and pleas for mercy.
One defendant, Estarlyn Tejada, was accused of using a van to deposit a total of 80 tires on five occasions at 9th and Wyoming in the summer of 2022.
The intersection is surrounded by vacant lots that make up the Logan Triangle, a neighborhood demolished in the 1980s because it sat on top of a sinking toxic waste dump. It’s also a few blocks from a 24-hour tire shop.
The city issued a $400,000 fine and $2,395 in cleanup costs. After a judge ruled Tejada was liable, he filed a response. “I didn’t do this,” he hand-wrote on a court form. “A friend ask me to drive my van. I let him to drive for 1 day and I didn’t know what he did. If you check the camara you can see [it] is not my face.”
“How I’m going to pay a violation that I didn’t do?” he asked.
Speaking through a translator, Tejada told Billy Penn he missed three court dates because the city sent violation and legal notices to his mother’s house, and he didn’t receive them in time. He said the friend who borrowed the van admits to dumping the tires and may be willing to explain that to a judge.
“First, he don’t got that amount of money,” said Tejada’s wife, Xiomairy Azcona. “Second, he doesn’t want to pay for something he didn’t do. So he wants to take the person who did that to the court.”
“I wasn’t expecting to get caught”
Another suit accused Tacony resident Glenn Brown and his company, Seth’s Junk Removal, of dumping 10 pieces of furniture and other debris on Warnock Street, at the southern edge of the Logan Triangle, in May 2023. The city imposed $52,000 in fines and costs.
Brown hired a lawyer, admitted to the dumping, and was ordered to pay $40,000.
In an interview, he said he did it because he’d mistakenly undercharged a customer for a two-load hauling job. He ended up paying more than he’d expected to legally dispose of the heavy first load at Burns & Co., and was trying to avoid taking a loss on the second load.
“I said, f–k that, I want the $300 for myself. I was just being greedy,” he said. “I’ll know better next time. It’ll never happen again. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Brown claims he had never dumped illegally before, but said he knows other waste haulers who don’t care about breaking the law and routinely do so. He should have known it’s not a good option for him, he said — not only because it’s illegal but also because his truck has a decal prominently displaying his company’s name.
“I wasn’t expecting to get caught on camera,” he said. “The little white cameras, I thought they didn’t work. They work.”
He expects to make small monthly payments toward the $40,000 penalty but will probably never pay it all off, he said. He complained that the fine is disproportionately high compared to the roughly $1,800 cost of cleaning up the debris he dumped.
“I thought I was going to get a little slap on the wrist. I already was never going to do it again,” he said. “This was my first offense, and I was honest. Why am I stuck with $40,000?”
The reduction in fines for Brown is apparently smaller than the relief other defendants have been granted.
Settlement amounts are rarely mentioned in court documents, but in one case a defendant was originally fined about $36,000 and settled for a little less than $6,000. In another case, a $430,000 fine for dumping 80 bags and other debris was apparently reduced to $30,000, according to notations on a judge’s order.
Dumping is decreasing. Maybe.
As a sign that would-be dumpers are becoming more hesitant in the face of possible big fines, Williams said 311 complaints about illegal dumping were down 20% in February compared to the same period last year.
Recent expansions of street-cleaning in business corridors, curbside trash pickup, vacant lot remediation, and other programs have contributed to the drop, he said.
The Office of Clean and Green Initiatives is also beginning to use a new litter indexing system, and “we’re starting to see less locations that are filled with trash-filled lots,” Williams said.
Trush agreed. “I think it’s getting better,” he said. Among residents, “the reporting may be going up and people are more conscientious now. There’s a little less apathy. My guess is that the Clean and Green initiative has had a positive impact, and we’re doing the best we can to keep up with the complaints.”
“The community is the biggest component with this, with them helping us out and giving us that information and utilizing the resources that we have here,” said Deputy Commissioner Myesha Massey, who oversees community partnerships for the department. “We need that community input and buy-in in order to make our operations successful.”
Councilmember Anthony Phillips, Parker’s successor in the 9th District and the sponsor of a council hearing last month on dumping enforcement, also said the civil enforcement push is having an effect.
“It’s making a heck of a difference on the ground,” he told Billy Penn, “but we need more, clearly.”
Yet opinions vary on the new initiative’s deterrent effect.
Accurately tracking an illegal activity is inherently difficult, and the initiative is only a little more than a year old. A Law Department spokesperson said “it’s too early to tell” if it’s led to less illegal dumping.
Shari Hersh, the founder of Trash Academy, said she’s not aware of any noticeable abatement. Trash Academy is a coalition of community groups that campaign to end dumping, and Hersh frequently visits dumping hotspots and talks with neighbors of the sites.
She recently went to a lot at 9th and Ontario in Hunting Park that has been dumped on for at least 20 years, she said. She saw four surveillance cameras nearby, but the dumping continues — during her visit, the site was piled with construction and demolition debris, children’s clothing and other materials. She called the widespread idea that cameras deter dumpers a “mythology.”
The city needs to do much more, she and other advocates say. They cite ideas like using tire boots to immobilize dumpers’ trucks, canceling their business licenses, and publicly shaming them by publishing their names and pictures.
Hersh and others say it’s also critical to create low-cost waste disposal options that small haulers like Glenn Brown can afford — something cheap enough to overcome the appeal of just dumping in a neighborhood and, possibly, risking a fine.
“There are 40,000 vacant lots and 3,000 miles of streets,” she said. “You cannot enforce your way out of that.”
Editor’s note: The number of arrests for illegal dumping in 2024 was added to the article.
