As I drive around my town, I see garbage and litter everywhere. Fast food wrappers strewn along highways, residential areas. I see crazy amounts of trash overflowing at the city bus-stops, overflowing from the provided refuse bins.
In the suicide/turning lanes there are piles of debris and detritus that fly around in the air spurred by speeding cars passing by…
I take a walk at the park, the ducks are swimming amongst flotsam and jetsam, ok well the vessel they were abandoned from were kayaks maybe.
Anyway back in the day Seinfeld had a bit about how cops, when they weren’t fighting crime, should be addressing these issues.
Honestly I think it’s sort of understated in its brilliance, maybe the smartest contribution Jerry has ever made to civilization.
What do you think? I think it’s a good use of existing resources, guys that have a lot of free time to help clean up even just a little bit could have a huge impact, maybe even get firefighters in on the action. And the best part is it teaches a little humility as well!!
Waste of resources. First, are cops really sitting around with lots of free time? Second, do you want to pay someone with that kind of training to spend time on unskilled labor? If there is that much excess capacity they need to layoff the cops and hire twice as many garbage people.
It seems to me that there is a lot more littering going on these days. There was a time when you didn’t see trash along the roadside. It was hammered into our heads as kids in the 70s that you do not litter. It looks like that’s been forgotten.
This, cops are busy enough already, or if they aren’t that’s a whole different problem, one possible solution to the litter problem would be to allow people to pay off traffic and parking fines with time spent cleaning up.
And how would you feel if the idle cops just came and took this honorary task away from you without any formal training and with the wrong motivation? I for one would immediately stop polluting so as not to give them any reason to pick my debris. Who do they think they are?
The police have to witness the littering before anything can be done. My FIL was a cop and wrote one littering ticket in his 36 years, it was a teenager throwing a liquor bottle out of the window. Said it was all he could do, he legally didn’t catch the kit with any liquor so he couldn’t nab him for possession.
Just based on the area I live, people are pigs. 2 or 3 times a week while taking my dog for a walk, I take my pick up claw and a bag and pick up trash. The sad part is I find just as much trash in my small neighborhood as the main arterial road next to the neighborhood. Last summer a small local newspaper did a story about my trash collecting. In their online edition, folks could leave comments. I thought I might get a thank you or two. Nope, got none but did get 7 negative comments for calling people pigs. The paper pulled the story because a couple of the comments contained threats.
Maybe instead we could turn the idea around, have the garbage men help solve crimes. It is a natural fit, they know the neighborhoods they work in, they are out in the early morning, and a lot of crime evidence must be disposed of in the garbage! After bingeing on The Supranos I am sure that a lot of bodies end up cut up and in the garbage. The trucks make so much noise that a few gun shots will go unnoticed.
Think of a Columbo type guy in a greasy old overcoat bothering the police with his crime theories and evidence from the garbage. Maybe throw in a smart garbage truck like Kitt from Knight Rider. The kids will love it. A spin off could be Recycling, Special Victims Unit.
I feel like there is a lot less. Littering is one of those things that started to become socially stigmatized in the late 70s/early 80s, along with drunk driving, driving without a seat belt, letting your pets roam the neighborhood, having unfixed pets, smoking indoors. Prior to then, all those things, including littering, were pretty common and lots and lots of people weren’t really embarrassed to do them. But each was (rightly) targeted by pretty intensive public awareness campaigns and over time, there developed pretty intense social pressure not to do those things.
I think what you remember from the 70s are those PSAs. They were there specifically because the trash was so bad.
What I really, really remember from the 80s, especially, was the glass. Everything came in glass bottles and people threw them out of car windows or left them on sidewalks where they would soon break. Broken glass was everywhere: not just big scary shards, but pulverized pieces. They were a constant menace at parks or on trails. People get nostalgic about glass bottles, but I hated the glass litter.
