cannabisnews.com: 100 Raids, No Arrests For Police Pot Squad





100 Raids, No Arrests For Police Pot Squad
Posted by FoM on December 11, 2000 at 17:48:02 PT
By Chad Skelton
Source: Vancouver Sun 
A Vancouver police team set up specifically to deal with the city's booming marijuana industry hasn't arrested a single suspect despite raiding more than 100 growing operations over the past year, a Vancouver Sun investigation has found. The absence of arrests and criminal charges by the ``Grow Busters'' team is due to a controversial decision -- apparently unique in the Lower Mainland -- that police resources are better spent shutting down more growing operations than trying to build criminal cases against offenders. 
The Grow Busters policy has been criticized by some -- including officers within the police department itself -- for essentially allowing marijuana growers to get away with their crimes. And civil libertarians say the policy may be an abuse of police powers, since Grow Busters is using search warrants to destabilize the drug industry, rather than to gather evidence for criminal charges. Grow Busters, a unit of six patrol constables established earlier this year, seizes the marijuana it finds during raids while city staff shut off the electricity and declare the premises unfit for occupancy. But no effort is made to identify who is behind the operations so they can be criminally charged. (Some growers are still arrested and charged in separate investigations carried out by the Vancouver police department's drug squad.) Grow Busters does not do surveillance of suspected growing operations to observe who visits them. They raid growing operations during the day -- when city inspectors can attend -- even though police know growers usually maintain their plants at night. And, in some cases, police do not even investigate people they find living inthe same house as a growing operation during a raid. ``Do we use the resources to try and prove those folks have been in there? That would mean fingerprinting and photographing and a lot of things,'' said Inspector Val Harrison, who oversees Grow Busters. ``We have made the decision at this point that ... our resources are better spent in going onto the next warrant execution.'' Controversy over Grow Busters' policy led to the team's amalgamation this fall into the Vancouver police drug squad. But Harrison says Grow Busters is still a defined group of officers that will continue to focus on shutting down a large number of growing operations rather than trying to arrest perpetrators. While careful not to criticize the Vancouver police department directly, drug investigators with other police forces expressed shock that a police unit would decide arresting people is not part of its job. ``The deterrent factor is removed ... if the cops are just going around knocking places down and not paying any attention to who's behind it,'' Corporal Gary Begg, a spokesman for Langley RCMP, said when told by The Sun of the Vancouver policy. Begg added Langley's growing-operation busting ``Green Team'' usually does preliminary surveillance on suspected growing operations before a raid. ``We always try to associate people with the product,'' he said. Begg could not provide detailed arrest statistics for Langley. But Delta police say the 97 warrants they executed on growing operations in the first nine months of this year have led to 115 arrests. Corporal John Furac, a team leader with Surrey RCMP's drug squad, said Surrey's Green Team averages about one arrest per raid and makes heavy use of surveillance. ``I can't speak for other police forces,'' Furac said. ``But our intent is to put people in jail. Running around just taking the plants doesn't do anything. You might as well just leave the plants there. ... If [marijuana growers] are not going to get prosecuted, they'll just keep doing it.'' Without criminal charges, Furac said, police have little hope of reaching the organized crime groups believed to be behind many of the operations. ``If you just take one house off and don't do any further looking into it, the organization may have 10 more,'' he said. ``So what have you done? You haven't taken the head off the snake.'' Furac also said gathering enough evidence for a criminal charge doesn't take that much effort. ``By the time you get to the point you're doing a search warrant, 90 per cent of your work is done,'' he said. ``If you're going to go through all that work and trouble to get a search warrant, why not go that extra step and grab onto the person?'' Courts have been lenient on marijuana growers in the past (a Vancouver Sun investigation last year found only one in five growers received jail sentences). But courts appear to have adopted a tougher attitude lately, sentencing some growers to one or two years in jail. Still, Harrison questioned whether arresting and charging growers would do much good. ``What have we accomplished by trying to throw people in jail? Have we got less marijuana in Vancouver? No, I think we have more marijuana,'' she said. ``I'm not certain that that's a deterrent at all. What happened when the Americans smashed the [cocaine] cartels in Colombia? Do they have less cocaine in the United States as a result? If we could figure out how to take the profit out of the business, that would be the deterrent.'' The amalgamation of Grow Busters and the drug squad means Grow Busters' searches and arrests are no longer independently tracked. But Harrison confirmed in an interview that, prior to the two units being merged, Grow Busters made no arrests. ``Seventy-five per cent of the time we haven't encountered anybody in the house,'' she said. ``The other 25 per cent of the time, there have been people in the home, but they haven't been in the grow. ... The grows are all locked off. ... We understand there perhaps is involvement, but it's a matter of proving the involvement.'' That would require dusting grows for fingerprints and other investigative techniques -- all of which would take significant police time the department believes is better spent on more raids. Told of Grow Busters' policy, Murray Mollard, policy director with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said: ``Normally, society expects the police to pursue a prosecution when they find adequate evidence of a serious criminal offence. ``The fact that the police are obtaining search warrants with no intent of prosecuting is cause for concern.'' Greg DelBigio, a Vancouver defence lawyer, raised concerns about the way Grow Busters obtains search warrants. ``In applying for a search warrant, the law requires that police provide `full, fair and frank' disclosure as to why they believe a warrant is necessary,'' DelBigio said. ``If, at the outset, it is the intent of the police to simply seize and destroy evidence rather than to use the evidence to advance a prosecution -- then arguably that is information that should be disclosed at the time the search warrant is being applied for.'' In dozens of applications for search warrants reviewed by The Sun, none informed the justice of the peace that police had no intention of pursuing a criminal investigation. But DelBigio said police are unlikely to be challenged in court on the issue. ``One of the problems with this is you're never going to get a court to test this because no one whose [marijuana] plants were taken is going to go before a judge to say it's unfair,'' DelBigio said. Harrison said city lawyers and federal Crown prosecutors have told police they are doing nothing wrong. ``Once we're inside [a grow-operation], there's a decision to be made about how we're going to use the resources we've got to proceed with the investigation,'' Harrison said. She said police have talked to the federal department of justice and city hall about that. ``And they're quite prepared to say: `Look, you guys have the discretion to make those kinds of decisions.''' Grow Busters was established in large part because the size of the growing-operation problem in Vancouver became too large for the drug squad to handle alone. Police have estimated there are as many as 4,000 growing operations in the city of Vancouver alone. Under the old system, police found that once they arrested people for growing marijuana, they would set up again at the same address after being released from jail. But when city inspectors attend with police, Grow Busters can turn off utilities and declare a property unsafe to occupy so a growing operation cannot be re-established there immediately. The program also encourages landlords to be more vigilant in keeping track of their properties, because after a raid they must pay a $309 fee to the city to have their property declared safe for occupancy and another $200 to reconnect the electricity and gas. But many landlords are angry with the policy because police have done little to arrest the bad tenants who set up the growing operations in the first place. ``They couldn't catch the criminals, so they catch the landlord,'' said Daniel Yung, whose rental property at 4816 Culloden was raided by Grow Busters in early August. While the Vancouver drug squad still conducts some marijuana investigations, Grow Busters has become the department's primary growing-operation fighting tool. A review of search warrant documents by The Sun suggests at least three-quarters of all growing operation raids in Vancouver are now conducted by Grow Busters -- sometimes as many as a 10 raids a week. But while Grow Busters conducts only brief investigations to gain a warrant, the drug squad routinely uses tools like surveillance to try to determine who is behind the growing operations. Because they are building a criminal case, the drug squad seizes most equipment from the growing operations it raids -- documents, fans, mechanical timers and pumps. Grow Busters, in contrast, has no intention of building a criminal case. As a result, it usually only takes two things from the houses it raids: marijuana plants and high-intensity lamps (which are a fire hazard). That leaves much of the marijuana-growing machinery still in place -- in some cases allowing brazen criminals to simply relocate. Julie Yang's rental property at 5349 Chambers was raided by Grow Busters in mid-November. A few days after the police raid, Yang visited the property to find all of the growing operation equipment had been removed. ``The tenant came back and cleaned up after the police had been in,'' Yang said. ``They took their equipment.'' Harrison conceded not seizing the equipment makes such relocations possible. ``I suppose that's a possibility,'' she said. ``Obviously it's not something we want, but we don't have the facilities to store this stuff.'' With such different approaches to dealing with the marijuana problem, how is it determined whether Grow Busters or the drug squad investigates a suspected growing operation? Harrison said the two units are in constant communication and growing operations believed to be part of a network of several houses are handled by the drug squad. But aside from those clearcut cases, it is a toss-up. Until recently, Grow Busters and the drug squad maintained separate anonymous tip lines. In other words, whether a marijuana grower ended up being arrested in Vancouver or not was based largely on which unit got the tip. ``It may mean that it's unfair,'' Harrison said. ``But what can I say? ... That's life. If you go through a red light, whether or not you get a ticket is going to depend on the officer that stops you. ... Discretion is a huge, huge part of police work.'' Note: Vancouver Police Didn't Even Try To Lay Charges Against Marijuana Growers.News Article Courtesy Of MapInc.http://mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1859/a04.htmlNewsHawk: Chris C.Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)Author: Chad SkeltonPublished: December 11, 2000Copyright: The Vancouver Sun 2000Address: 200 Granville Street, Ste.#1, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3Fax: (604) 605-2323Contact: sunletters pacpress.southam.caWebsite: http://www.vancouversun.com/CannabisNews - Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml
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Comment #12 posted by Iceman on July 26, 2001 at 23:06:09 PT:
"Grow Busters"
 I wish that the Canadian Government would take a closer look at Marijuana. It is way less harmfull than alcohol, as well as half the prescription drugs out there. Let's say I go to a liquor store and buy a 40 oz. bottle of Rum (about 35-40 bucks, half taxes). I'll consume about half of it, deicide I want to go to the bar, get in my Truck, drive and perhaps hurt someone, or myself. Or I'll blackout and really hurt someone and be a complete idiot. Marijuana, on the other hand, (costing anywhere from 20-50 bucks for an eigth of an ounce, or 6-8 cigarettes) will make me hungry after a cigarette, as well as happy. I'll smoke a fatty, eat some chips and go for a nap. I realise that there would be more legal paperwork etc... But imagine the new income for our sorry excuse of a government. KUDOS to the BC Marijuana Party and thier goals.Eric
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Comment #11 posted by kaptinemo on December 13, 2000 at 10:03:50 PT:
The inevitable slide
The pavement on the Road To Hell gets hotter the closer you get the final Destination. Pretty soon, Canadians will start wondering why their feet feel so warm despite it being Winter.The soles of the 'Average American's shoes have partially melted from that heat, already; the problem is that they are so delirious from said heat that they don't know what's happening. Sadly, we here, do.As Senor Lehder and 4D have pointed out, the subject of this latest article is only the next step along that slide down the slippery slope of tyranny. A tyranny many Canadians mistakenly believe they are somehow culturally innoculated against. As I pointed out in my previous comment on this page, that's proving to be a false assumption. History plainly shows, time and again, that when the police - *any* police - start acting like modern-day Visigoths and Vandals, sacking people's homes with impunity, under the supposed 'color of law', sooner or later the populace has to make some hard choices.They can either 'grunt and roll over'. Or they can change the laws. Or fix bayonets.Sadly, no fourth way has ever been discovered which did not somehow devolve into the first three choices. So Canadians will eventually be forced into making the same kind of hard choices that Americans are just on the cusp of making.Pray we all make the sane choice.
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Comment #10 posted by dddd on December 13, 2000 at 08:58:07 PT
legal rogues
 I think you found the correct term,Lehder;'pillaging'. If this catches on,it will make LAPD Rampart look harmless.Can you imagine a more fertile situation for corruption in law enforcement?When no explanation is needed to a court,it will be way worse than it already is. Instead of being afraid of getting busted,and going to court,you will have to fear the terror of your neighborhood SWAT squad raiders.If you greased their palms,you might avoid an invasion. Another point,it's already hard enough for these cops,who make about the same wages as a garbageman,,to resist dipping into the piles of cash they find.If there were no charges filed,and word of mouth documentation,it would make it all even more ripe for corruption. This is rather scary.........dddd
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Comment #9 posted by Lehder on December 13, 2000 at 07:25:23 PT
right on, dddd, a dangerous new development
I was quite taken aback reading this article last night because I see, as you do, that this is a troubling sea-change in police tactics: The practice of ignoring procedure is justified by not bringing charges. The Canadian police are now better more than military search and destroy squads, answering to no one, pillaging at will and serving only themselves. Do you suppose they only destroy the dope and leave the victim's rent money on the counter? They don't around here.This development strikes me in exactly the same way as the privatizing of prisons did about 12 or 15 years ago. The moment I read that an economic motive had been created for incarcerating people, I took warning, and feared that our prison population would soar. In the present case, I think the temptations of plunder will energize these kinds of raids that will increase in ferocity and frequency throughout Canada. And as soon as an American judge can determine that the Constitution, in the case of drugs, protects the authority and rights of unregulated roving gangs of thieves and pillagers, we will see this new policy tried out in the U.S. too. "It's the icy fingers of a barbarian clutching your shoulder."The drug warriors in the U.S. will find this clever new strategy irresistible - and maybe even "legal". It is cruder, though, and even less disguised in its motivations and meaning than the privatizing of prisons. As kaptinemo pointed out a while ago, eventually the warriors, shorn of all legitimacy, will be reduced to nothing but Naked Force and that in that moment ( as also noted by Lech Walesa in his struggle ) we will win. It will take a few more years of fighting, but victory will be assured. Are we there?
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Comment #8 posted by publius on December 13, 2000 at 05:54:47 PT:
there ought to be a law
One would think that before any property is seized, a determination would have been made as to whose it was, prior to any finding of guilt or innocence. Lacking sucha determination, any consequent confiscation would be a violation of common sense in relation to "property rights". 
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Comment #7 posted by kaptinemo on December 13, 2000 at 05:07:12 PT:
Greed doesn't recognize national borders.
Recently, the Ontario Provincial government voted itself the right to seize assets, US Drugwar style. They have even adopted the same kind of sophist dodge of claiming that since the seizures were 'civil', not criminally justified, they are under none of the rules regarding what scant 'property rights' Canadians have. They've eevn gone so far as to mimic the bit about the owner has to pay to keep the goods from being sold, even if there's no conviction. How long before the other Provinces follow suit?In short, it is a blatant 'me, too' attempt to emulate the ideologically bankrupt but enormously profitable (for the government) US DrugWar.All done by Canadians. Americans didn't twist their arms; the wannabe robber-barons-with-badges were just tired of seeing all that lovely loot being handed back to the owners, as Canadian law required. So, by fiat, and with no apparent public support, the cops had their pol cronies vote themselves a nice, big under-the-table pay raise. And Canadians will soon be in the same salad with the US in the 'trampled rights' department. Like I said, greed does not recongnize national boundaries.This should serve as a warning: the antis succeed by divide and conquer. Sometimes they play a race card. Sometimes they wrap themselves in The Flag - their respective flags - and make nationalistic noises, to rally the less discerning and excite them to a patriotic frenzy . Sometimes they use religion. But the main thrust of my little tirade here is that they USE.Don't get used.
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Comment #6 posted by dddd on December 12, 2000 at 20:57:16 PT
Raids
I agree.that "you Americans" thing wasnt very nice Symmetric,,,,you Canadian.I like to think that the border is not territorial,but instead it's the border between the antis,and us.I think we're on the same side.At the same time,I cant blame symmetric for being disgusted with American policy makers,and I hope,and assume that is what was meant.Raiding and confiscating grow operations,and filing no charges,is almost scarier than busting the owners and operators.Think about it.It has major implications in going toward a "police state".It may seem good in a way,that the owner doesnt get busted,but there's a whole other side to this that we should consider.The legal ramifications are disturbing.It makes it so the cops can play fast and loose,without proving the raids were legally justifiable.This trend is not as good as it may first appear.........dddd
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Comment #5 posted by defenderoffreeworld on December 12, 2000 at 17:38:05 PT:
symmetric, that's the attitude we don't need
'you americans' covers a lot of grounds. i am an american citizen, and i hate the country, the legal system, the ignorance, the hypocrisy, almost everything. and along with a others, i advocate and put my vote on changing this bulls--t! so some americans are aware and acting, its the system and the ones who run it you should be upset with. 
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Comment #4 posted by freedom fighter on December 12, 2000 at 17:14:44 PT
Logic of a grower
I'll make friend with Mr. Landlord.509$ to get it fixed, I'll pay you, 700$HID stolen by the grow busters! No problem, $40 to replace a new HID.So they took my bucket too. No problem, $20 bucks take cares of it. Another $40 bucks for some nutes and I am all set to grow another one.My total cost is $800 to start a new one that will pay me $3000 in about 20 weeks or so. Don't think I will tell you how many exactly set-ups I have. Just pretend I got 100 houses.Having done this for years, I have many landlord friends. They are always happy to see my money.(This is a fictional account that occured many years ago.)
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Comment #3 posted by Dan Hillman on December 12, 2000 at 13:38:38 PT
Confiscation without legal due process...
...equals rule by terror.  We are seeing the same thing in California, where the police have seized a number of medical pot gardens while subsequently declining to press charges. They call this "sending a message".
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Comment #2 posted by TroutMask on December 12, 2000 at 07:11:01 PT
No, We're NOT
No, as a US citizen, I'm not happy about the US-led War on Some Drugs in general or the jailing of otherwise innocent cannabis users in particular. However, I believe that within the next 12 months, we may see decriminalization of MJ in Canada, then the US will have a very serious problem: How to police a gigantic border between legal cannabis (Canada) and illegal cannabis (US). That will be nearly impossible. If we can't do it on the Mexican border alone, there is NO WAY we can do it on the Mexican AND Canadian borders.
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Comment #1 posted by Symmetric on December 12, 2000 at 06:58:07 PT:
I hope you americans are happy
I think they've decided to put on a show because the USA is threatening to put Canada on the list of drug producing nations. Even the police realize their actions make no difference in the big scheme of things but I guess everyone needs statistics eh? I'd just like to say: god bless the Canadian legal system.
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