Czech conservationists call for special police unit to protect wildlife
Despite years of appeals from nature and animal conservationists, the Czech police have not created a dedicated unit to address incidents of poisoned birds of prey or poaching. The frequency of these cases has been rising annually in Czechia. Instead, Czech police officers employ an alternative approach to tackling what is known as environmental crime.
Klára Hlubocká guides the retrievers to the river and is their sole handler for the Czech Society for Ornithology.
"Our main mission is to find poisoned animals and bait. In most cases, unfortunately, I come in after it's all over. You can see that the animals have suffered before they died because they are found in various convulsive positions. It's not a pretty sight."
The main cause tends to be the poison carbofuran, a pesticide. In the last five years, people have poisoned more than 30 eagles with it.
"We hand the cases over to the police, the police try to investigate, and when they succeed, a judge convicts."
Ornithologists, including Ms. Hlubocká, are working together with the police and have submitted a total of 150 cases. But only three of these cases have led to convictions so far.
According to Pavla Říhová from the Faculty of Science at Charles University, poisoning animals only represents a small component of environmental crime.
"It can be, for example, illegal waste management, logging, illegal handling of protected species. The spectrum is quite broad and requires extensive expertise."
According to her, criminals solve such cases in cooperation with customs officers. However, Říhová points out that there is a shortage of specialized police officers to handle this type of crime.
"In our country, this form of crime is greatly underestimated by the state authorities. We keep hearing again and again that there are few cases, that it is negligible, that we have more important things to do."
At the same time, the number of cases is rising. Last year, the police investigated 270 cases, a 20-case increase from the previous year.
While Slovak and German police have dedicated environmental units, Czech police have chosen a different approach. Police spokesman Jakub Vinčálek says:
"The Police of the Czech Republic have this in place, but not within a separate unit. We have experts both at the nationwide units and specialists at regional directorates and territorial departments."
In his opinion, this is a better solution. "This way we cover the entire territory of the Czech Republic. By creating a special unit, it would be concentrated in a center and the entire area of the Czech Republic would not be covered."
In Czechia, dozens of police officers are assigned to handle environmental crime, but most of their cases remain unsolved. Only about a quarter of the cases result in convictions. Mr. Vinčálek explains that investigating these cases presents significant challenges for the police.
"If someone commits such a thing, it is usually beyond the reach of ordinary people, and the traces they leave behind are very often devalued precisely because the police learn about them with a time lag, or because they are in remote places."
In its development plan, the police bureau has pledged to provide additional training for officers in this field.
