POLICE NEED TO PUT A LID ON POT SEARCHES

One of my duties when I reported on criminal courts in Milwaukee County 10
years ago was checking search warrants to see where police had been nosing
around for evidence.

My recollection from reading these public records is that West Allis police
spent a whole lot of time pawing through people's garbage to catch
potheads. Other suburbs didn't seem to bother.

I remembered that this week when reading the news article about Angela
Talaska. West Allis cops, armed with an - oops - unsigned warrant, raided
her house in search of drugs. An officer then had the warrant signed by a
court commissioner after the search.

So I went back to my old beat to see if West Allis - in these days of
crowded prisons and tight budgets - was still trash-can-diving to put
stoners in the slammer. Sure enough, I found two dozen cases since January.

A typical scenario: Someone calls the cops and says, "I think so-and-so is
using or selling marijuana." Officers then grab the scofflaw's trash bags.

If they find as little as a few cannabis seeds or stems, they get a warrant
and send a small army of officers over to search the whole house. That's
what happened to Talaska, who was betrayed by the Zig-Zags and stems in her
trash.

It happened to Mary in January. An anonymous person whispered to police
that people at Mary's address were "using and possibly selling marijuana,"
in the words of the affidavit supporting the warrant. Her trash yielded
"several" seeds and stems.

Mary, a middle-aged mom who has a last name but not for publication, came
home one afternoon to find at least seven officers and a narcotics dog
taking apart her house. They had destroyed three doors to get in.

"They're running around and dumping all the dresser drawers out. I said, 'I
hope you're putting this all back.' They said, 'That's one thing we don't
have to do,' " she said.

They found absolutely nothing, which didn't surprise Mary, who said she
doesn't smoke marijuana and can't imagine how the seeds and stems were
mixed in with her coffee grounds, crumpled up tissues and such.

Even if they had found a couple of joints in the house, is that worth the
invasion of privacy when armed officers take over your house and go through
your things? I know I'm a child of the psychedelic '60s, but that seems
like overkill to me, man.

Most of the warrants I looked at showed that a few grams of marijuana were
discovered during the searches. Congratulations - you've sent a SWAT team
to someone's house to nail him for pot possession, which is a municipal
violation, a ticket rather than a crime.

"When they change the possession law, then we would have to revisit it,"
said West Allis police Deputy Chief Austin Dunbar.

The aggressive policy "puts people on notice that we don't turn a blind eye
to it," he said, and some searches do turn up larger amounts of drugs.

Yeah, but mostly it just keeps a lot of police officers employed, chasing
after pot smokers in an unwinnable drug war.

It was always amazing to me that stoners in West Allis never figured out
that putting drugs or paraphernalia in the trash is like dropping them off
at the police station. I imagine that's why they call it dope.

Police and Fire Commission head Wayne B. Clark said he's never heard a
complaint about these searches.

It's hardly surprising that Cheech or Chong aren't filing formal
complaints. But that doesn't make it right when police come over to tip out
their underwear drawer.