Enviro Cop

The true story will be left for a jury to decide. Both the injured man and his employer have been charged with illegal disposal of hazardous waste -- a felony. But to Dicker's disappointment, the district attorney decided not to pursue injury to a child charges.

Stephen Dicker and his colleagues envision big things for their new unit. They see themselves going after the major polluters of water and air -- and that, according to Neighborhood Protection chief Bea Link, is exactly what the city has in mind for them. Unfortunately, those big busts have been slower in coming than those closest to the project had hoped. And, although Chief Sam Nuchia approved the creation of the environmental investigations unit, one of his recent decisions is blamed for slowing its progress.

In August, citing a lack of sergeants in the patrol division, Nuchia ordered the controversial transfer of many sergeants from the investigative divisions back to the streets. The environmental unit's Sergeant Mike Walsh -- one of the original members of the Rat-on-a-Rat program -- was one of those transferred.

"They took the guy with the most experience and put him back on patrol," says one official involved with the new unit. "The new sergeant is a good policeman, but knows nothing about environmental investigations. So he can't train the new hires. So they're all sitting around there looking at each other."

Meanwhile, says the official, the number of cases being sent from the environmental investigations unit to the district attorney's office for charges has slowed to a trickle. (A spokesman for Nuchia acknowledges that every division in the department affected by the transfers will undergo a period of adjustment.)

But even if the new unit had 25 officers fully trained in environmental investigations -- as opposed to the current five, some of whom are still on the low end of the learning curve -- Dicker says they would stay busy. He likens HPD's fledgling attack on environmental crime to the way it belatedly reacted to the gang problem.

"The street patrolmen knew what was going on," says Dicker. "But it took a little more time to convince the upper-ups that it was going to be a problem."

The same, he says, holds true for environmental justice.
"We'll eventually get caught up," says Dicker. "We're moving up the food chain slow but sure."

Until then, he realizes, there are going to be times when he finds his head in a sack of garbage.