Attala County Conservation Officer Jason Blaylock, Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, has now collected $15,302 in fines after swearing out affidavits with the Justice Court against 65 individuals, charging them with illegally dumping trash or dead wildlife.
Blaylock has been working for months to gather evidence against dumpers, using both still and video cameras to capture the culprits on film in areas known 
to have a high rate of illegal dumping.
“I started this project back in December of 2016,” he said, noting that many county residents had long complained of the trash people had thrown out on roadsides and private property. “Just riding around the county, it isn’t appealing in some places.”
Blaylock strategically placed various cameras to gain visual evidence of the incidents and then had to work through identifying the individuals captured on film.
“I started running camera surveys on county roads to find people throwing out trash and dumping deer carcasses, dumping whatever,” he said. “There were 12 to 15 different locations that I gathered evidence on. I wish I could count the hours watching video and such. It’s gotta be in the hundreds, if not thousands.”
With all the effort put in, Blaylock said he and county officials did not want to simply issue tickets that could be easily paid. They wanted to drive home the seriousness of the problem by having Blaylock swear out affidavits so that the accused would have to appear in Justice Court.
In all, 80 affidavits were sworn out against alleged culprits - 65 of them for trash dumping, another 15 for carcass dumping and related offenses. Forty-
seven of those individuals have entered guilty pleas, garnering the county more than $15,000 in fines. Several more of the cases have yet to go to court.
Only four of the affidavits have been contested by the accused so far, likely due to the photographic and video evidence Blaylock has collected.
Blaylock said he hopes the increased efforts in surveillance and prosecution will make people think twice before dumping their waste in the future. He said county residents were the impetus for the increased efforts to identify and prosecute in these cases.
“I guess the public got this spurred and we’re the ones working for them,” he said.
