POLICE USE 911 RUSE, TOO

Editor, The News:

Re: Sniffing around (News views, May 26).

I read with interest your editorial on the inspection teams which use
Hydro usage rates to allow themselves entry into private homes to look
for marijuana grow operations. This is, apparently, not the only ploy
being used to get around search warrants.

About two years ago I had occasion to meet an ex-grower. He told me
that the RCMP had been using the 911 service to get into people's
homes when they suspected a grow op.

The police would arrive at a house and tell the owner or occupant that
a 911 call had come from their house and the police had to be let in
to investigate. Or the story would be that a neighbour had called the
emergency service and the RCMP had to be let in to verify the call.

The man I spoke with said it had happened to him on more than one
occasion and he knew of other growers who had experienced the same
thing. This fellow managed to dissuade the police the first couple of
times they showed up claiming a call had come from his address because
he could prove, without them having to enter, that he had no ground
line to his home. He lived in a very rural area so they couldn't use
the ruse that his neighbours had phoned warning of a break-in or a
suspicious person on the property.

When I first heard this tale I was a bit taken aback. Then I started
watching the grow op takedown stories in the newspapers and, lo and
behold, the incidences of RCMP officers discovering grow-ops due to a
911 call were disturbingly frequent. Needless to say, I am suspicious
and appalled. If this is the case, then I think it's time something
should be done. How dare the very people we are supposed to be able to
trust implicitly circumvent the laws by using a public emergency
service to get around a legitimate search warrant? We do not live in a
communist country and private citizens here do have rights.

And if, as the police repeatedly claim, organized crime is behind so
many grow-ops, why then do we never hear of people connected to it
getting caught?

Is it easier to harass the law-abiding public, like the fellow in Pitt
Meadows with the legitimate computer business, than it is to get out
there and do something about really dangerous drug producers?

Because it looks to me like 90 per cent of the grow ops found are
small time businesses having nothing whatsoever to do with organized
crime. I'm also starting to wonder if this big crackdown on grow ops
doesn't have more to do with appeasing antsy Americans, who think
we're too soft on marijuana production, than it does with public safety.

The fact that grow ops are sometimes discovered using ruses does not
justify circumventing civil rights. Maybe it is time we legalized the
stuff. That way the police could stop wasting resources on a soft
drug. They could also stop harassing private citizens in their homes
with higher than normal electricity consumption and a seeming penchant
for misdialing 911.

Carolyn Taplin

Maple Ridge