From the “if you build it they will use it” files
by digby
Apparently, tea and gardening are suspicious acts:
Why did a SWAT team raid Bob and Addie Harte’s house in Leawood, Kansas, two years ago, then force the couple and their two children to sit on a couch for two hours while officers rifled their belongings, searching for “narcotics” that were not there? KSHB, the NBC station in Kansas City, reports that the Hartes made two mistakes: Bob went to a hydroponics store in Kansas City, Missouri, with his son to buy supplies for a school science project, and Addie drank tea. It cost them $25,000 to discover that these innocent actions earned them an early-morning visit by screaming, rifle-waving men with a battering ram.
The Hartes, who tried to reassure their neighbors by showing them the search report indicating that nothing was taken from their home, were naturally curious what they had done to attract police attention. But the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office would not say, so the Hartes hired a lawyer to help them obtain the relevant records, which according to KSHB is not easy in Kansas because state law favors darkness over sunshine. Eventually the Hartes learned that a Missouri Highway Patrol trooper saw Bob at the hydroponics store on August 9, 2011. Seven months later, state police passed on this hot tip to the sheriff’s office, which sprang into action (after a few weeks), rummaging through the Hartes’ garbage three times in April 2012. On all three occasions, they found “wet plant material” that a field test supposedly identified as marijuana.
Such tests are notoriously unreliable, confusing chocolate with hashish, soy milk with GHB, and soap with cocaine, among other hilarious errors that result in fruitless searches, mistaken arrests, and false imprisonment. But the cops did not bother to confirm their field results with a more reliable lab test before charging into the Hartes’ home, three days after their third surreptitious trash inspection. When the Hartes starting asking questions about the raid, the sheriff’s office suddenly decided to test that wet plant material, which it turned out was not marijuana after all. The Hartes figure it must have been the loose tea that Addie favors, which she tends to toss into the trash after brewing. Field tests have been known to misidentify various possible tea ingredients, including spearmint, peppermint, lavendar, vanilla, anise, and chicory, as marijuana.
One might ask why they were so concerned about marijuana in the first place but I think we know the answer to that. The bigger question is why they used a SWAT team to break down the door with a battering ram at the crack of dawn?
Answer: because they have a SWAT team and it has to do something, right? The Johnson County sheriff serves a wealthy suburban county and has lots of money for military goodies. Obviously, they don’t have as much opportunity to suit up in their costumes and break down doors as they would have in say, Fallujah, so they need to be creative.
And you’d better hope it isn’t you. Just in case, don’t take up any kind of hydroponic gardening (or anything that be construed as such a thing) and whatever you do, don’t drink tea. These are clues that you are a drug dealer and armed police can burst into your home anytime they choose. (And, by the way, they can shoot you if they feel threatened, so don’t even think of protesting.)
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