4 ms·

"Robert Harte, along with hundreds of other people, became a suspect when Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Jim Wingo saw Harte, his son and his daughter emerg

by krisdol 11y ago

"Robert Harte, along with hundreds of other people, became a suspect when Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Jim Wingo saw Harte, his son and his daughter emerge in August 2011 from a hydroponic gardening store and wrote down the Hartes’ license plate number" How is this legal? I cannot believe that this is a satisfactory level of probably cause needed for the police to start digging through people's trash and raiding their homes. It's incredible. On that note, I don't believe for a second that there even was marijuana in the trash before they searched for it.

abrodersen 11y ago
This did not satisfy the probable cause. Police dug through the trash and conducted a field test, and the field test incorrectly tested positive for THC. The author criticized these field tests in the original piece as being wildly inaccurate and too easy to coerce into positive results.
- jandrese 11y ago
  Those test kits are sometimes called probable cause kits, since they produce false positives so frequently. The conspiracy theory is that they're working exactly as desired and that more accurate kits would be counterproductive to their actual purpose.
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    Why would they do that? Why fake the test that will make you raid the empty house and look bad?
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      Because in general the people they raid don't have the resources to spend $25k on a lawsuit to get the media attention. It's mostly risk-free, and they can find something illegal in most houses.
    - abrodersen 11y ago
      Besides bad PR, there are no repercussions, especially with this ruling that the police aren't liable. They can raid lots of homes and catch more drug makers, and they don't have to pay for any inconvenient injuries or deaths.
    - reverend_gonzo 11y ago
      They may have information through a confidential informant (that they don't want to give up) or a method that is not legal (and can't be used to get a warrant). So, instead, they use a field test that may often show a false positive, but is enough to get the warrant and get inside.
      - jandrese 11y ago
        Confidential Informants like the cop writing down the license plates outside of the hydroponics shop?
    - chc 11y ago
      Police go on fishing expeditions all the time. Just because they don't actually have proof of the thing they were looking for doesn't mean they can't find anything to hang you. I once had a traffic stop evolve into the officer telling me I could either let him search my car or he'd call in a dog to give him probable cause. There really wasn't anything for him to find, but he doesn't have any reason not to play the odds.
      - gingerrr 11y ago
        Luckily this particular practice is no longer legally sanctioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodriguez_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodriguez_v._United_States
        gknoy 11y ago
        It would be nice to have a card that lists these landmark decisions, so that when pulled over you have a way to quickly have handy the names of cases. "If you don't let me search your car, I'm going to call in a dog ..." "Officer, the Supreme Court ruled in People vs Rodriguez (2015) that a traffic stop becomes unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a ticket for the violation." Of course, making such an argument at the time might be unwise, but at least you know that the law is on your side if you decide to decline the search.
        biot 11y ago
        I've seen various apps for that, including an enumeration of your rights by jurisdiction as to whether you're required to show an officer ID, stop & frisk laws, etc.
        guard-of-terra 11y ago
        Make one, sell it on ebay, profit.
    - fweespeech 11y ago
      If less than .5% of the families you raid have the ability to defend themselves via lawyers and PR [as is the case in the OP], literally only one family in 200+ was able to and willing to do so....there won't be any consequences. The OP basically has emails/internal communication basically stating they want drug users to "fear" 4/20 in their communities. It is a campaign of terror. > Thanks again to all of you who worked on this. I think for a first time even this was absolutely an outstanding success. The media coverage was 99% positive on this which is pretty darn good as well. We’ve had a lot of suggestions for this operation next year, such as having a telethon type billboard with a large green marijuana plant filling up as the pledges come in, making T-Shirts and whatnot. One agency had the observation that if this continues for a couple years 4/20 will be something to fear rather than something to celebrate. > The press release sent out the morning of April 20 announced that police would be targeting 375 houses across both Kansas and Missouri. But Wingo later reported that police found just 52 marijuana grows. That’s better than single digit number of grows found in 2012. But it also means that more than 300 households were wrongly targeted. Notice how, of the 300+ people wrongly targeted, no one complained in a substantial way? The police, quite literally, are used to suffering no consequences for ridiculous rates of error. Similarly, every single time they make an arrest its noted as a positive performance of their job duties. Its simple incentives built into the way the officers are reviewed like that that drive this. [e.g. If you view your job is to make arrests, you make arrests.]
zhemao 11y ago
There wasn't any marijuana. What they thought was marijuana were actually tea leaves.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
anon4 11y ago
They are police. Of course it's legal. What are you, a hippie communist?
- dang 11y ago
  > They are police. Of course it's legal. What are you, a hippie communist? Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
vec 11y ago
It's completely legal for the police to make note of who enters a public storefront. It's also legal for the police to dig through your trash. Once it's placed on the curb to be picked up it's not your trash anymore, it's the city or county's trash, and they can do with it as they like. Evidence of illegal contraband in trash is almost by definition probable cause for a search warrant, and judges tend to be okay with handing out a few false positive warrants. Assuming that the police are professional and the citizens are cooperative, the damage is usually relatively minor. This seems to be less a case of rules failing and more a case of common sense breaking down. Wasting an officer's time someone's trash because you once saw them leave a gardening store isn't illegal, it's just a dumb waste of resources. And serving the resulting search warrant with a SWAT team is the kind of risk-averse cover-your-ass common sense violation that legal remedies tend to make worse instead of better.

by krisdol 11y ago

abrodersen 11y ago

This did not satisfy the probable cause. Police dug through the trash and conducted a field test, and the field test incorrectly tested positive for THC. The author criticized these field tests in the original piece as being wildly inaccurate and too easy to coerce into positive results.

jandrese 11y ago
Those test kits are sometimes called probable cause kits, since they produce false positives so frequently. The conspiracy theory is that they're working exactly as desired and that more accurate kits would be counterproductive to their actual purpose.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Why would they do that? Why fake the test that will make you raid the empty house and look bad?
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    Because in general the people they raid don't have the resources to spend $25k on a lawsuit to get the media attention. It's mostly risk-free, and they can find something illegal in most houses.
  - abrodersen 11y ago
    Besides bad PR, there are no repercussions, especially with this ruling that the police aren't liable. They can raid lots of homes and catch more drug makers, and they don't have to pay for any inconvenient injuries or deaths.
  - reverend_gonzo 11y ago
    They may have information through a confidential informant (that they don't want to give up) or a method that is not legal (and can't be used to get a warrant). So, instead, they use a field test that may often show a false positive, but is enough to get the warrant and get inside.
    - jandrese 11y ago
      Confidential Informants like the cop writing down the license plates outside of the hydroponics shop?
  - chc 11y ago
    Police go on fishing expeditions all the time. Just because they don't actually have proof of the thing they were looking for doesn't mean they can't find anything to hang you. I once had a traffic stop evolve into the officer telling me I could either let him search my car or he'd call in a dog to give him probable cause. There really wasn't anything for him to find, but he doesn't have any reason not to play the odds.
    - gingerrr 11y ago
      Luckily this particular practice is no longer legally sanctioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodriguez_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodriguez_v._United_States
      - gknoy 11y ago
        It would be nice to have a card that lists these landmark decisions, so that when pulled over you have a way to quickly have handy the names of cases. "If you don't let me search your car, I'm going to call in a dog ..." "Officer, the Supreme Court ruled in People vs Rodriguez (2015) that a traffic stop becomes unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a ticket for the violation." Of course, making such an argument at the time might be unwise, but at least you know that the law is on your side if you decide to decline the search.
        biot 11y ago
        I've seen various apps for that, including an enumeration of your rights by jurisdiction as to whether you're required to show an officer ID, stop & frisk laws, etc.
        guard-of-terra 11y ago
        Make one, sell it on ebay, profit.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    If less than .5% of the families you raid have the ability to defend themselves via lawyers and PR [as is the case in the OP], literally only one family in 200+ was able to and willing to do so....there won't be any consequences. The OP basically has emails/internal communication basically stating they want drug users to "fear" 4/20 in their communities. It is a campaign of terror. > Thanks again to all of you who worked on this. I think for a first time even this was absolutely an outstanding success. The media coverage was 99% positive on this which is pretty darn good as well. We’ve had a lot of suggestions for this operation next year, such as having a telethon type billboard with a large green marijuana plant filling up as the pledges come in, making T-Shirts and whatnot. One agency had the observation that if this continues for a couple years 4/20 will be something to fear rather than something to celebrate. > The press release sent out the morning of April 20 announced that police would be targeting 375 houses across both Kansas and Missouri. But Wingo later reported that police found just 52 marijuana grows. That’s better than single digit number of grows found in 2012. But it also means that more than 300 households were wrongly targeted. Notice how, of the 300+ people wrongly targeted, no one complained in a substantial way? The police, quite literally, are used to suffering no consequences for ridiculous rates of error. Similarly, every single time they make an arrest its noted as a positive performance of their job duties. Its simple incentives built into the way the officers are reviewed like that that drive this. [e.g. If you view your job is to make arrests, you make arrests.]

zhemao 11y ago

There wasn't any marijuana. What they thought was marijuana were actually tea leaves.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

anon4 11y ago

They are police. Of course it's legal. What are you, a hippie communist?

dang 11y ago
> They are police. Of course it's legal. What are you, a hippie communist? Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

vec 11y ago

It's completely legal for the police to make note of who enters a public storefront. It's also legal for the police to dig through your trash. Once it's placed on the curb to be picked up it's not your trash anymore, it's the city or county's trash, and they can do with it as they like. Evidence of illegal contraband in trash is almost by definition probable cause for a search warrant, and judges tend to be okay with handing out a few false positive warrants. Assuming that the police are professional and the citizens are cooperative, the damage is usually relatively minor. This seems to be less a case of rules failing and more a case of common sense breaking down. Wasting an officer's time someone's trash because you once saw them leave a gardening store isn't illegal, it's just a dumb waste of resources. And serving the resulting search warrant with a SWAT team is the kind of risk-averse cover-your-ass common sense violation that legal remedies tend to make worse instead of better.