County workers to write tickets for littering

Clayton County police are recruiting crimefighters from within their own county government to help stop crime at the ground-level by making people pay for littering.

“It’s a known fact that small crimes lead to bigger crimes,” Deputy police Chief Greg Porter said. “If an area is not cared for in a responsible manner, there is a tendency for the quality of life to deteriorate.”

On Tuesday, police asked the Clayton County Commission to give code enforcement officers, sanitation workers, lawn mowers and other county employees the authority to issue tickets to anyone caught improperly disposing trash.

The idea is to train the workers and outfit them with citation books, just like the ones Clayton’s 327 police officers carry.

“These guys are out in the county during the day and see these things,” County Commissioner Sonna Singleton said Wednesday. “We will get more eyes and ears out there to better our county.”

The commission is to vote on the proposal next week.

The tickets include a summons to Magistrate Court and could carry fines up to a $1,000 fine, six months in jail and mandatory cleanup of county properties.

The citations are geared for drivers spilling debris from the back of a truck, anyone caught throwing wrappers from a car window, even dropping cigarette butts during a stroll.

Officers encourage residents to jot down the tag number of any vehicle seen dropping trash and call police.

Singleton said she has not only called police, but chased down debris-droppers to personally scold them.

“The key to quality of life in this county is the way the county looks,” Singleton said. “Two people I saw throwing trash in my district had other county tags. They were shocked I pulled up beside them. They have a perception that we have trash all over and that’s what this county looks like.”

Porter blames that relaxed attitude toward litter to fueling the county’s crime problem. FBI statistics show Clayton County was only one of two counties in metro Atlanta that reported double-digit increases in violent crime last year.