STRAPPED POLICE RUN ON FUMES, AND FEDERAL POT-FIGHTING CASH

IGO, Calif.-Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, his budget under
pressure in a weak economy, has laid off staff, reduced patrols and
even released jail inmates. But there's one mission on which he's
spending more than in recent years: pot busts.

The reason is simple: If he steps up his pursuit of marijuana
growers, his department is eligible for roughly half a million
dollars a year in federal anti-drug funding, helping save some jobs.
The majority of the funding would have to be used to fight pot.
Marijuana may not be the county's most pressing crime problem, the
sheriff says, but "it's where the money is."

Washington has long allocated funds to help localities fight crime,
influencing their priorities in the process. Today's local budget
squeezes are enhancing this effect, and the result is particularly
striking in California, where many residents take a benign view of
pot but federal dollars help keep law-enforcement focused on it.

To make sure his office gets the federal funds, Sheriff Bosenko since
last year has spent about $340,000 of his department's shrinking
resources, more than in past years, on a team that tramps through the
woods looking for pot farms. Though the squad is mostly U.S.-funded,
the federal grants don't cover some of its needs, such as a team
chief and certain equipment. So, Mr. Bosenko has to pay for those out
of his regular budget.

He doesn't doubt the value of pursuing pot farming, which he says is
often the work of sophisticated Mexican gangs and leads to other
crimes like assault. But other infractions, like drunken driving and
robbery, may have a bigger direct impact on local residents than pot
growing, he says.

The pot money is "$340,000 I could use somewhere else in my
organization," he says. "That could fund three officers' salaries and
benefits, and we could have them out on our streets doing patrol."
His overall budget this year is about $35 million.

The U.S. Justice Department is spending nearly $3.6 billion this year
to augment budgets of state and local law-enforcement agencies. In
addition, the federal government last year set aside close to $4
billion of the economic-stimulus package for law-enforcement grants
for state and local agencies. The White House also is spending about
$239 million this year to fund local drug-trafficking task forces.

Much of the federal money helps local agencies go after sophisticated
criminal gangs and hard drugs like methamphetamine. Even staunch
supporters of legal pot don't dispute the value of that.

The Obama administration's approach to federal anti-drug efforts is
evolving. The federal government no longer is pursuing a "war on
drugs," as declared by the Nixon administration 39 years ago, but is
taking a less combative approach focusing more on stemming addiction,
according to a comment by the head of the White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske, in May 2009. Last
fall, a high-ranking Department of Justice official told federal
prosecutors not to target people who comply with state laws
permitting medical use of pot, which exist in California and 13 other states.

But the administration continues to support federal aid to fight
drugs, including marijuana, says a Justice Department spokesman. This
is "supplemental" funding for local agencies and shouldn't skew their
priorities, says Arnie Moorin, assistant deputy director of the White
House Office on National Drug Control Policy. "It's not to get into
the city or the county's or the state's business."

Even so, in California, budget realities mean federal money ends up
supporting priorities sometimes out of sync with public sentiment.
About 56% of California residents support full legalization of
marijuana, polling shows. The issue will be on this fall's ballot as
a voter initiative.

Tight budgets prompted sheriffs' departments in the state to cut more
than 800 positions in the first three months of this year, out of
about 30,000. Support for local law enforcement from the strapped
state government will fall by $100 million this year, the California
Association of Counties expects.

Shasta County supervisors told Sheriff Bosenko last spring that his
budget this year would be about $2 million less than last year's $38 million.

The sheriff laid off 26 people last July, more than 10% of his staff,
among them 11 deputies. He eliminated a major-crimes investigator and
cut nighttime patrols to two cars from four.

That slowed responses to emergencies, especially after midnight, when
an estimated 20% of drivers in the largely rural county 150 miles
north of Sacramento have been drinking. The county has higher rates
of assault, burglary, drunken driving and domestic violence than big
California cities.

To save still more, Mr. Bosenko closed a floor of the county jail and
gave early release to 185 inmates, among them 30 convicted drunk
drivers. "Those people will probably go out and drink and drive again
and hurt people," the sheriff says. "The criminals know that there's
very limited offender accountability due to our releases at the jail."

With nowhere to lock people up, the county saw more felony defendants
skipping their first court appearance. The percentage not showing up
doubled to 35% after the inmate release, according to the district
attorney, Jerry Benito.

While freeing inmates, the sheriff still had several hundred thousand
dollars of federal money to spend on pot patrols, such as an
operation that began at 4:30 one morning in May. The target was a
camp far up on a steep hillside covered in Manzanita brush,
discovered earlier in response to a tip.

As the sun rose, team leader Steve Solus sent a group of officers to
approach the camp from the uphill side, using a Gold Rush-era
cemetery as their base. The team included two federal agents working
with the county pot team, along with Phoebe, a pot-sniffing Belgian Malinois.

At the bottom of the hill, other team members reached their starting
point, a nudist retreat bordering the woods. Unable to reach the
manager, officers snipped the chain on the retreat's gate so the
other agents could approach from down-slope.

Over two hours, the team members slowly surrounded the camp. They
found it unoccupied. But someone had dug a 10-foot-by-12-foot hole in
the hillside, lined it with plastic tarps and threaded a black hose
to it from an uphill creek, creating a reservoir. Other hoses led
from the reservoir to water nearby pot plants.

Only about 70 had sprouted so far. Areas for many more were cleared.
"This could have 15 to 20 thousand" plants, Mr. Solus said. The
deputies pulled up all they could find. It was a routine raid, with
no arrests. Only 10% to 15% of outdoor raids result in arrests, Mr. Solus said.

Such federally funded efforts have ripple effects, beyond the
sheriff's department. When the pot busts nab suspects, they are fed
into the criminal-justice system. Mr. Solus says his team referred
about 75 cases to the local district attorney last year. The D.A.
doesn't get federal cash to help handle them.

If convicted, some are headed for California's state prisons. But
these are so overloaded that a panel of federal judges has ordered
the prison system to release 43,000 inmates. (It has released more
than 4,000 so far.) About 17% of state-prison inmates are there for
drug offenses. In California, more people are arrested for drug
crimes than any other offense, according to state data.

In Northern California's rural Lake County, which applied for
$275,000 in federal anti-pot funding this month, Denise Rushing, a
county supervisor, says it is "a vexing problem" whether to accept
such money. She worries that doing so causes local sheriff's offices
to skew their priorities toward pot busts and away from things that
more directly affect residents, like property crime. At a meeting
last month, Ms. Rushing opposed applying for the federal anti-pot
funds but was outvoted by other supervisors.

Lake County's sheriff, Rod Mitchell, says that while the debate over
federal pot funding has grown heated in his county recently, he
believes it should pursue federal anti-drug money because marijuana
growers continue to populate rural areas. He says his department
spends a small amount of its own money on administering the federally
funded pot team, and he also pays a detective to work on pot cases
out of his local budget.

In Fresno County, it's an easy call for Sheriff Margaret Mims: She
views her $275,000 or so in annual federal funding for anti-pot
efforts as a clear good, "a force multiplier" that "adds to our
ability to fight marijuana, especially when it's on public lands."
Far from being seeing the money as skewing her law-enforcement
priorities, Sheriff Mims says it allows her to put more effort into
pot investigations she would try to do "even if we didn't get this money."

Mr. Solus in Shasta says marijuana growers are turning both publicly
and privately owned woodlands into pot plantations. He contends that
if the ballot initiative to legalize pot passes, "California will
just become one big narco state, and the majority of the weed that
gets grown here will be sold in other states." Determined "to go out
and arrest people," he plans to use some of the federal funds for
helicopter flights to spot pot-growing sites.

One sheriff's department member he can draw on is Ray Hughes, a
deputy who normally works regular crime-fighting patrols Shasta Lake
City, north of Redding. Spending for that patrol has been cut, and
there's no money in the departmental budget to pay officers overtime.
But the federally funded pot team does have money for overtime, so
Mr. Hughes has started going on outdoor raids with Mr. Solus's squad.