WOULD PROP. 19 CURB POT-LINKED VIOLENCE?

Marijuana prompted several men to strong-arm their way into a west
Santa Rosa home last week and tie up residents with duct tape. It
lured a pair into an illicit garden in Round Valley where they were
shot dead by its tenders.

It led an unknown killer to shoot a 31-year-old father in his Santa
Rosa garage, leaving him for dead and making off with the goods.

Marijuana may be a mellowing depressant when ingested, but its trade
often is the nexus of violence. The huge profits made in the
marijuana business drive much of the associated crime.

Proposition 19, the Nov. 2 ballot initiative that would legalize
marijuana in California, at its best would slash profits from the
illegal trade and curb the violence, backers say.

At its worst, critics say, it would pit local and federal law
enforcement against each other. Marijuana cultivation would
proliferate, as would efforts to steal the drug and transport it
outside the state to sell at higher prices, opponents contend.

"I think you're still going to have violent crime associated to it,
and I believe it may even increase because of the availability,"
Sheriff Bill Cogbill said.

Polls offer conflicting analyses of voters' inclinations toward Prop.
19. Of people surveyed by the Public Policy Institute of California
in September, 52 percent said they'd vote yes, 41 percent said they'd
vote no and 7 percent were undecided. But a Reuters/Ipsos poll
released Oct. 5 reported that 53 percent of Californians surveyed
oppose legalizing marijuana and 43 percent support it.

Researchers at the Rand Corp., a think tank based in Santa Monica,
predict that legalization will slash the profits in the marijuana
trade and that as production costs go down, so will the risks.

By their estimates, the cost of an ounce of indoor-grown sinsemilla,
the prized seedless buds of a female plant, could fall as much as 84 percent.

That would undercut the price outside of the state as well, the Rand
report said.

"If you make the trade legal, it's not clear that the same people
would be involved in it or even attracted to it if there aren't the
same kinds of profits," said Elliott Currie, a professor of
criminology, law and society at UC Irvine.

Currie's research has focused on drug policy, trafficking and drug
abuse, including a 1993 book that in part looked into the effects of
decriminalization.

"If marijuana is illegal and you want to get some, that means you
have to hang out with people who may also be selling crystal meth,
heroin and other bad drugs," Currie said. "Severing that connection
between marijuana and the hard drugs can only be a good thing."

"I disagree," Santa Rosa Police Chief Tom Schwedhelm said. "Car
stereos, anyone can buy, but people still break into cars to take them."

The Sonoma County Law Enforcement Chiefs' Association opposes Prop.
19, as does the California Chiefs' Association and many other law
enforcement organizations.

A group of retired officers, judges and prosecutors called Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition, however, supports the measure. Its
members argue that current marijuana laws have done nothing to stanch
violent crime.

"The question is quite simple when you boil it down: Do you want to
continue what has never worked?" said former San Jose Police Chief
Joseph McNamara, a member of the group.

Marijuana has become far more mainstream in California since voters
in 1996 passed Proposition 215, the medical marijuana initiative
formally called the Compassionate Use Act. Hundreds of people gather
without fear of arrest each year in Laytonville to watch judges give
awards to growers who deliver the best high.

Licensed clinics across the state now provide pot to people with
recommendations from physicians, and backyard plots have
proliferated, creating more targets for criminals.

The California health department issued 337 medical marijuana IDs to
Sonoma County residents and 280 IDs to people in Mendocino County
during the 12 months that ended June 30. The IDs are voluntary and
may represent only a small fraction of the people with physician
recommendations for pot.

Local authorities say the prevalence of indoor marijuana gardens has
led to an increase in home invasion robberies.

A week ago, three men, two with firearms, grabbed a woman by the hair
as she walked up to her west Santa Rosa home and pulled her inside.
The suspects apparently had been tipped off to a large-scale illegal
marijuana growing and processing operation in the home, said Sgt.
Steve Fraga, who runs the violent crimes unit. The men bound the
woman and another man with duct tape and made off with an unknown
amount of processed pot.

It was one of 10 home invasion robberies involving marijuana so far
in 2010 in Santa Rosa, Schwedhelm said. There were seven in 2009.

Two people have been killed in the city since 2004 during marijuana
robberies. Andre Grant, 31, was shot to death April 10, 2006, in a
garage, where he was tending 25 marijuana plants, police said. The
killer or killers made off with the plants in the still-unsolved case.

Maximiliano Izquierdo Martinez, 20, of Windsor was fatally shot to
death in 2007 when he entered a Rincon Valley rental home intending
to rob the occupant of his marijuana, police said. Detectives found
more than 300 pounds of processed marijuana and $26,000 in cash at
the Beech Avenue home.

Five pot-garden workers have been shot to death this year during
backwoods confrontations with authorities in Mendocino, Lake, Napa
and Santa Clara counties, and unprecedented level of violence that is
attributed to the growing influence of ever-more-violent Mexican drug
cartels, more aggressive law enforcement tactics and the sheer
proliferation of large-scale pot operations.

Fraga, the Santa Rosa police sergeant, shares the view of many local
law enforcement officials who question whether legalization would
reduce violent crime.

"It wouldn't change anything," Fraga said. "You still have the haves
and the have-nots. The people doing all the work, and people who want
to just go steal it."

Most home invasions are driven by drugs and cash, said Diana Gomez,
Sonoma County Assistant District Attorney. The cases that come to
prosecutors increasingly involve marijuana, not methamphetamine and
harder drugs, she said.

"The nature of what they're going after has changed," Gomez said. Her
office has filed only a handful of home invasion robbery cases each
year since 1999, including six cases so far in 2010, Gomez said. Most
involve marijuana, she said, though she didn't provide exact numbers.
"There's still a whole bank of cases which go unreported," she said.

Sonoma County Sheriff's detectives, including those working for
Sonoma and Windsor police departments, have worked 13 home invasion
robberies in which marijuana was stolen in the past 12 months,
Sheriff's Capt. Matt McCaffrey said. They've also handled five
nonresidential robberies involving pot

Those numbers are "probably on the conservative side, and of course
only those that were reported to us," McCaffrey said.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman said he's not necessarily against
legalizing marijuana, but he does not support Prop. 19.

"I'm not opposing this law because it's marijuana, I'm opposing the
law because it's not written in a way that's consistent," Allman said.

Proposition 19 would give local governments the sole authority to
regulate the sale, transportation and consumption of the drug in
their jurisdictions. Allman and others have said this would create a
maelstrom of confusion.

"It's possible that all 58 counties would have 58 different marijuana
laws," Allman said. And that could hold true for the state's 481
municipalities.

"We don't have the resources to take on more regulation and
enforcement of things," said Sonoma County Assistant Sheriff Steve
Freitas, who will replace Cogbill as sheriff in January.

It's unclear how legalization would affect the swaths of forestlands
clear-cut for clandestine marijuana gardens, much of which
authorities say is produced to sell out of the state.

"Just because you make it legal in California doesn't mean the rest
of the world will follow," said Bob Nishiyama, who commands the
Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force. "Part of Mendocino's problem is
we're the provider country for marijuana for the rest of the world."

Agents with the state's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP,
removed 572,680 marijuana plants from forests in Mendocino County
during the 2010 marijuana season, a number that topped those
destroyed in all other counties, CAMP spokeswoman Michelle Gregory
said. Agents pulled 374,958 plants out of Lake County and 311,147
plants out of Sonoma County.

Gregory said their operations likely would continue if the law passes.

"If they are still operating on public lands and in national parks,
there will still be a need to take care of those issues," Gregory said.