By John W. Whitehead
They came again this morning at about 8:00 oclock. A large cargo-type helicopter flew low over the cabin, shaking it on its very foundations. It shook all of us inside, too. I feel frightened I see how helpless and tormented I am becoming with disgust and disillusionment with the government which has turned this beautiful country into a police state I feel like I am in the middle of a war zone.Journal entry from a California resident describing the governments aerial searches for marijuana plants
Backyard gardeners, beware: tomato plants have become collateral damage in the governments war on drugs, especially marijuana.
In fact, merely growing a vegetable garden on your own property, or in a greenhouse on your property, orshopping at a gardening storefor gardening suppliesincredibly enoughcould set you up for a drug raidsanctioned by the courts.
Its happened before.
After shopping for hydroponic tomatoes at their local gardening store, a Kansas family found themselves subjected to a SWAT team raid as part of a multi-state, annual campaign dubbed Operation Constant Gardener, in whichpolice collected the license plates of hundreds of customers at the gardening storeand then investigated them for possible marijuana possession.
By investigated, I mean that police searched through the familys trash. (You can thank the Supreme Court and their1978 ruling inCalifornia v. Greenwoodfor allowing police to invade your trash can.) Finding wet glob vegetation in the garbage, the cops somehow managed to convince themselvesand a judgethat it was marijuana.
In fact, it was loose-leaf tea, but those pesky details dont usually bother the cops when theyre conducting field tests.
Indeed, field tests routinely read positive for illegal drugs even when no drugs are present. According to investigative journalist Radley Balko, its almost as if these tests come up positive whenever the police need them to.A partial list of substances that the tests have mistaken for illegal drugs would include sage, chocolate chip cookies, motor oil, spearmint, soap, tortilla dough, deodorant, billiards chalk, patchouli, flour, eucalyptus, breath mints, Jolly Ranchers and vitamins.
Theres a long list of innocent ingredients that could be mistaken for drugs and get you subjected to a raid, because thats all it takesjust the barest whiff of a suspicion by police that you might be engaged in criminal activityto start the ball rolling.
From there, these so-called investigations followthe usual script: judge issues a warrant for a SWAT raid based on botched data, cops raid the home and terrorize the family at gunpoint, cops find no drugs, family sues over a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, and then the courts protect the cops and their botched raid on the basis of qualified immunity.
It happens all the time.
As Balko reports, Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, andheld innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (Its happened with all five.)
Surely, you might think, the government has enough on its hands right nowpolicing a novel coronavirus pandemic, instituting nationwide lockdowns, quelling civil unrests over police brutalitythat it doesnt need to waste time and resources ferreting out pot farmers.
Youd be wrong.
This is a government that excels at make-work projects in which it assigns at-times unnecessary jobs to government agents to keep them busy or employed.
In this case, however, the make-work principle (translation: making work to keep the police state busy at taxpayer expense) is being used to justify sending police and expensive military helicopterslikely equipped with sophisticated surveillance and thermal imaging devicesonexploratory sorties every summeragain at taxpayer expensein order to uncover illegal marijuana growing operations.
Often, however, what these air and ground searches end up targeting are backyard gardeners growing tomato plants.
Just recently, in fact, eyewitnesses in Virginia reported low-flying black helicopters buzzing over rural and suburban neighborhoods as part of a multi-agency operation to search for marijuana growers. Oftentimes thesejoint operations involve local police, state police and the Army National Guard.
One woman reported having her tomato plants complimented by the 7 cops that pulled up in my yard in unmarked SUVs, after a helicopter hovered over our house for 20 minutes this morning. Another man reported a similar experience from a few years ago when police showed up inunmarked SUVs with guns pulled. Then the cops on the ground argued with the helicopter because the heat signature in the copter didnt match what was growing.
Back in 2013, an aerial surveillance mission spotted what police thought might be marijuana plants. Two days later, dozens of city officials, SWAT team, police officers and code compliance employees, and numerous official vehicles including dozens of police cars and several specialized vehicular equipment, including helicopters and unmanned flying drones, descended on The Garden of Eden, a 3.5-acre farm in Arlington, Texas, for a10-hour raid in search of marijuanathat turned up nothing more than tomato, blackberry and okra plants.
These aerial and ground sweeps have become regular occurrences across the country, part of the governments multi-million dollar Domestic Cannabis Eradication Program. Local cops refer to the annual military maneuvers as Eradication Day.
Started in 1979 as a way tofund local efforts to crack down on marijuana growersin California and Hawaii, the Eradication Programwent national in 1985, right around the time the Reagan Administrationenabled the armed forces to get more involved in the domestic war on drugs.
Writing forThe Washington Post, Radley Balko describes how these raids started off, with the National Guard, spy planes and helicopters:
The project was called the Campaign Against Marijuana Production, or CAMP In all, thirteen California counties were invaded by choppers, some of them blaring Wagners Ride of the Valkyries as they dropped Guardsmen and law enforcement officers armed with automatic weapons, sandviks, and machetes into the fields of California In CAMPs first year, the program conducted 524 raids, arrested 128 people, and seized about 65,000 marijuana plants. Operating costs ran at a little over $1.5 million. The next year, 24 more sheriffs signed up for the program, for a total of 37. CAMP conducted 398 raids, seized nearly 160,000 plants, and made 218 arrests at a cost to taxpayers of $2.3 million.
The areas larger growers had been put out of business (or, probably more accurately, had set up shop somewhere else), so by the start of the second campaign in 1984, CAMP officials were already targeting increasingly smaller growers. By the end of that 1984 campaign, the helicopters had to fly at lower and lower altitudes to spot smaller batches of plants. The noise, wind, and vibration from the choppers could knock out windows, kick up dust clouds, and scare livestock. The officials running the operation made no bones about the paramilitary tactics they were using.They considered the areas they were raiding to be war zones.In the interest of officer safety, they gave themselves permission to search any structures relatively close to a marijuana supply, without a warrant. Anyone coming anywhere near a raid operation was subject to detainment, usually at gunpoint.
Right around the same time, in the mid-1980s, the federal government started handing out grants to local police departments to assist with their local boots-on-the-ground war on drugs. These grants (through the Byrne Grant program and COPS program, both of which started to be phased out under George W. Bush, only to be re-upped by Barack Obama) could be used to pay for additional police personnel, equipment, training, technical assistance and information systems. However, studies show that while these federal grantsdid not improve police effectiveness or drug deterrence, they did incentivize SWAT team raids.
But how do you go from a war on drugs to SWAT-style raids on vegetable gardens?
Connect the dots, starting with the governments war on marijuana, the emergence of SWAT teams, the militarization of local police forces through the federal 1033 Program, which allows the Pentagon to transfer vast amounts of military equipmentmachine guns and ammunition, helicopters, night-vision gear, armored carsto local police departments, and the transformation of American communities into battlefields: as always, it comes back to the make work principle, which starts with local police finding ways to justify the use of military equipment and federal funding.
Each year, thegovernment spends between $14 and $18 million funding helicopter sweeps and police overtime to help the states track down illegal marijuana plants. These sweeps are even beingcarried out in states where its now legalto grow marijuana.
The sweeps work like this: Local police, working with multiple state agencies including the National Guard, carry out ground and air searches of different sectors.Air spotters flying overhead in helicopters relay their findings to police on the ground, who then carry out a search-and-destroy mission.
Mark my words: the use of police drones will make these kinds of aerial missions even more common.
For the most part, aerial surveillance is legal. As Arthur Holland Michel writes forThe Atlantic: When it comes to law enforcement,police are likewise free to use aerial surveillance without a warrant or special permission. Under current privacy law, these operations are just as legal as policing practices whereby an officer spots unlawful activity while walking or driving through a neighborhood.
There have been a few notable exceptions.
In 2015, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled thatsurveillance from a low-flying helicopter conducting an aerial search for marijuana by state police and the national guard was illegalunder the U.S. Constitution. The court reasoned that when low-flying aerial activity leads to more than just observation and actually causes an unreasonable intrusion on the groundmost commonly from an unreasonable amount of wind, dust, broken objects, noise, and sheer panicthen at some point courts are cand require a warrant before law enforcement engages in such activity. The Fourth Amendment and its prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures demands no less.
In Philip Cobbs case, helicopter spotters claimed to have seen two lone marijuana plants growing in the wreckage of a fallen oak tree on the Virginia natives 39-acre family farm.
Cobbs noticed the black helicopter circling overhead while spraying the blueberry bushes near his house. After watching the helicopter for several moments, Cobbs went inside to check on his blind, deaf 90-year-old mother. By the time he returned outside,several unmarked police SUVs had driven onto his property, and police (ten in all) in flak jackets, carrying semi-automatic weapons and shouting unintelligibly, had exited the vehiclesand were moving toward him.
Of course, it was never about the two pot plants.
What the cops were really after wasan excuse to search Cobbs little greenhouse, which he had used that spring to start tomato plants, cantaloupes, and watermelons, as well as asters and hollyhocks, which he planned to sell at a roadside stand near his home. The search of the greenhouse turned up nothing more than used tomato seedling containers.
Nevertheless, police charged Cobbs with misdemeanor possession of marijuana for the two plants they claimed to have found. Eventually, the charges were dismissed but not beforeThe Rutherford Institute took up Cobbs case, which revealed that police hadnt even bothered to secure a warrant before embarking on their raid of Cobbs propertya raid that had to cost taxpayers upwards of $25,000, at the very leastpart of their routine sweep of the countryside in search of pot-growing operations.
Two plants or two hundred or no plants at all: it doesnt matter.
A SWAT team targeted one South Carolina man for selling $50 worth of pot on two different occasions.The Washington Postreports: The SWAT team broke down Bettons door with a battering ram, then fired at least 57 bullets at him, hitting him nine times. He lost portions of his gallbladder, colon, bowel and rectum, and is paralyzed from the waist down. He also suffered damage to his liver, lung, small intestine and pancreas. Two of his vertebrae were damaged, and another was partially destroyed. Another bullet shattered his leg. After security footage showed that most of what police said about the raid was a lie, the copssettled the case for $2.75 million.
Monetary awards like that are the exception, however.
Most of the time, the cops get away with murder and mayhem. Literally.
Bottom line: no amount of marijuana is too insignificant if it allows police to qualify for federal grants and equipment and lay claim to seized assets (theres the profit motive) under the guise of fighting the War on Drugs.
SWAT teams carry outmore than 80,000 no-knock raids every year. The vast majority of these raids are to serveroutine drug warrants, many times for crimes no more serious than possession of marijuana.
Although growing numbers of states continue to decriminalize marijuana use and9 out of 10 Americans favor the legalization of either medical or recreational/adult-use marijuana, the governments profit-driven War on Drugswaged with state and local police officers dressed in SWAT gear, armed to the hilt, and trained to act like soldiers on a battlefield, all thanks to funding provided by the U.S. government, particularly the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)has not abated.
Since the formation of the DHS post-9/11, hundreds of billions of dollars in grants have flowed to local police departments for SWAT teams, giving rise to a police industrial complex that routinely devastates communities, terrorizes families, and destroys innocent lives.
No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations,SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.
Unfortunately, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids tend to go hand in hand with an overuse of paramilitary forces.
In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant. In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building. In another subset of cases, police conduct a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.
SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.
All too often, the shock-and-awe tactics utilized by many SWAT teams only increases the likelihood that someone will get hurt with little consequences for law enforcement, even when the raids are botched.
Botched SWAT team raids have resulted in the loss of countless lives, including children and the elderly. Usually, however, the first to be shot are the family dogs.
SWAT raids are usually carried out late at night or shortly before dawn. Unfortunately, to the unsuspecting homeownerespecially in cases involving mistaken identities or wrong addressesa raid can appear to be nothing less than a violent home invasion, with armed intruders crashing through their door.
Thats exactly what happened toJose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.
The problems inherent in these situations are further compounded by the fact that SWAT teams are granted no-knock warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.
This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have essentiallydone away with the need for a no-knock warrant altogether, giving the police authority to disregard the protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment.
Clearly, as I make clear in my bookBattlefield America: The War on the American People,something must be done.
When the war on drugsa.k.a. the war on the American peoplebecomes little more than a thinly veiled attempt to keep SWAT teams employed and special interests appeased, its time to revisit our drug policies and laws.
You take the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all the rights you expect to havewhen they come in like that, the only right you have is not to get shot if you cooperate.They open that door, your life is on the line, concluded Bob Harte, whose home was raided by a SWAT team simply because the family was seen shopping at a garden store, cops found loose tea in the familys trash and mistook it for marijuana.
Our family will never be the same, said Addie Harte, recalling the two-hour raid that had police invading their suburban home with a battering ram and AR-15 rifles. AsThe Washington Postreports:
Bob found himself flat on floor, hands behind his head, his eyes locked on the boots of the officer standing over him with an AR-15 assault rifle. Are there kids? the officers were yelling. Where are the kids? And Im laying there staring at this guys boots fearing for my kids lives, trying to tell them where my children are, Harte recalled later in a deposition on July 9, 2015. They are sending these guys with their guns drawn running upstairs to bust into my childrens house, bedroom, wake them out of bed.
It didnt matter that no drugs were foundnothing but a hydroponic tomato garden and loose tea leaves. The search and SWAT raid were reasonable, according to the courts.
Theres a lesson here for the rest of us. As Bob Harte concluded: If this can happen to us, everybody in the country needs to be afraid.
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Attack of the tomato killers: The Police State's war on weed and backyard gardens - Augusta Free Press
