Dave's not here man..............
Cops Are Watching Your Electric Bill
by Yizuman 24 Replies latest jw friends
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Faust
I don't find the warrant that unjustified, the family just fit a pattern of typical pot growers which (apparently) had led them to real culprits in the past. If the pattern is fairly accurate, of course they are going to apply it. It's not like they were harmed in any way, just slightly inconvenienced. I would be more "outraged" if they would have taken her to jail or whatever just because of the electric bill, but that didn't happen; they just made sure to investigate their suspicions. Besides, like they said in the article, a whole lot more small coincidences just fell into place against them. The dog reacting and trash day being on that day, etc.
It'd be interesting to see, however, how successful their pattern is in identifying actual law violations/pot growers. I'd say that if it's even a remotely positive number (ie more than half of the people ?) then it's not such a heinous thing.
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xjw_b12
It seems to me that the act of mass-reviews of electric bills is an unreasonable search!
Hiding something Elsewhere?
In this neck of the woods they also use infrared surveilance cameras on airplanes to scan the rural areas looking for farms and barns that have been converted to grow ops. A lot of farms in this area, use the outdoor wood burning furnaces, to heat water and pipe it through the buildings for the heat, so the electricity bills would not necessarily indicate anything.
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Elsewhere
Hiding something Elsewhere?
lol... nope. I just believe that if someone is law-abiding, then they should be able to enjoy the right of being secure in their privacy.
The infra-red scanning was shot down here in the US as being an unlawful search too.
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Wren
$300.00 a month? That's Chicken Feed! It's a normal bill where I live.
An article about cops/marijuana/electricity hit the front page of the local paper here. The headlines were 'STEALING ELECTRICITY!' because the price is so darn high! A couple of hydroponic pot farmers had an entire barn full of crops, out in the bush. They tapped into the electric line down by the road for all the grow lights. The electric company found it fiquring that had a loss of $10,000.00 somewhere along the line. The cops finding the barn full of plants warrented about two sentences out of a full page article. Needless to say they were convicted of felony theft of electricity.
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outoftheorg
Looking at utility bills is nothing new. City water bills were scanned beginning years ago to find boot leg distilling for beer and whiskey.
It may be that today, the law enforcement people act too quickly. It used to be that they had to do surveilance on the building to add to the other info and get a court order for a search.
It looks like that was done in this case also. I don't see a problem.
Outoftheorg
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Farkel
I used to live right next door to Carlsbad, CA, in Oceanside. Before I left the San Diego area two years ago, a single person who used the heat only two or three times in the winter would still have a utility bill of over a hundred dollars.
Three hundred dollars a month wouldn't be unreasonable given the size of that family and the appliances and computers being used. If the San Diego area had a climate like the Midwest, the bill would be more like $600 a month. Energy is VERY expensive in that area.
That being said, the cops in question need to get a life and quit meddling in people's affairs like that.
Farkel
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Atilla
I guess it's time to get my own generator so know one will find out.
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cruzanheart
Anybody see "Saving Grace" with Brenda Blethyn? It's a hilarious British movie about an English "lady of the manor" who finds herself in a great amount of debt and decides to pay it off by growing a bumper crop of marijuana. And, yes, lots of electricity was involved!
Nina
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franklin J
This is a joke!
Let them come to my Long Island home; where a typical monthly electric bil from the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) is routinesly $500 to $550 . No joke.
Frank, of the Long Island class ( land of high taxes)