Nothing mellow about Weed Week raids in Stanislaus County
The white-hot outline of a figure moving quickly through marijuana plants was evident when imaging from the sheriff’s drone 350 feet above switched to infrared mode. That’s when I spotted the man on a large video screen from my safe perch at the mobile command post maybe 50 yards down the road.
A “runner,” the officers around me called the unidentified man. He was running away from the armored vehicle blasting high-volume “come out” commands, accompanied by sirens and horns, at the other end of the property in south Modesto.
We watched as he scaled a fence, then slowed to a stroll in a rear alley. Entering the side yard to a neighboring lot, he sat on a lawn chair at a round table. Stanislaus County deputies with drawn rifles soon approached, guided by those observing from afar. The man’s hands went up in surrender, and he was cuffed without further incident.
Only later — after SWAT agents in the armored vehicle crashed through a chained gate, deployed loud flash-bangs and methodically searched buildings, vehicles and the tarp-covered grows — did we realize that the fence the man had jumped was topped with coils of razor wire.
Later yet, having recovered footage recorded by the drone, officers traced the man’s path back to a outbuilding — where they found a firearm.
And at some point, deputies identified the runner as a convicted felon, the husband and father of a wife and young children cowering in a small home in front of the illegal grow. In his desperate haste to avoid capture, he had abandoned his terrified family.
Runners are common in these raids, the officers assured me. Officially, they call these operations “warrants” because they are the culmination of weeks or even months of surveillance, risk assessment, abatement planning and obtaining warrants from a judge.
Stanislaus busts: $55 million value
Unofficially, they also call this “Weed Week,” a five-day stretch of nothing but dawn-to-dusk busts of black market marijuana farms, running four teams simultaneously the entire time. Stanislaus deputies arrange the raids, assisted by special teams from other law enforcement including state drug agents.
Through Thursday, the day I observed, Weed Week yielded 86 arrests in 34 illegal grows across the county. Officers confiscated 12 guns, 40,000 marijuana plants and 4,357 pounds of processed pot with a street value of more than $55 million. Seven times, they called in Child Protective Services. And that doesn’t include whatever else went down on Friday.
It’s a lot.
Two days before, officers were shocked when 32 runners sprinted in all directions during a warrant on Vivian Road, between Ceres and Grayson. Authorities were proud of having nabbed them all.
I asked, how do you know you didn’t miss some?
“Because we saw 32 run, with the drone,” Sgt. Frank Soria replied, “and we (ended up with) 32 in custody.” When the adrenaline subsides, they can slowly count every fleeing figure on recorded footage, he explained.
Honestly, I don’t know how they pulled off these raids before bringing in drone technology about three years ago. Without that resource, the runner I witnessed could have claimed he’d been sitting at the round table the whole time. And authorities would never have linked him to the rifle.
The department helicopter assists, but can’t do ow-level surveillance like drones.
Homes for plants, not people
They use tiny drones for initial searches inside homes, too. In this same south Modesto raid, agents found that the house next door had been converted to indoor marijuana growing — 60 plants in big pots in the front room and 110 in a back room glowing with huge sun lamps. And 640 plants in tarp-covered rows out back, fed with huge garden hoses.
Black market cannabis can fetch $500 a pound, and you can get one or two pounds per plant. The could mean $800,000 for this one property, next to the family we’ve been talking about — where officers found another 21 bags of processed cannabis buds.
Those who go to the trouble to transport it to other states, where it’s illegal, might double or even triple their profit.
At the command post, I observed as a drone swung higher, looking over a larger swath of that south Modesto neighborhood between East Hatch and Olivera roads. I had marveled when Sheriff Jeff Dirkse last year told me there could be 1,000 illegal pot farms in the county; now, I saw row after row of tarp-covered back yards yet to be raided, in just one neighborhood.
“It’s still the No. 1 complaint I get,” Dirkse said.
Yes, medicinal and recreational cannabis is legal in California. Yes, you can legally grow up to six indoor plants for your own use. And you can buy it at regulated dispensaries, whose fees and taxes pay for warrant operations like the one I’m describing.
But if you grow 60 plants in your front room, and 110 in a back room, and 640 in your yard, and you guard it with a rifle, you might expect an armored vehicle to crash through your front gate some day.
Some operations steal water; others, electricity. Some are targets for violent home invasions. Many grows are tended by pour souls from Mexico who live in squalor, hoping to earn enough to pay off the coyotes who brought them illegally over the border in human trafficking networks.
“It’s sad,” Soria said, describing the living conditions he’s encountered.
It is. In truth, it’s tragic. For everyone, whether exploited labor or frustrated neighbor.
Battle continues to rage
And it’s not likely to change, because the payoff for this illicit production is not offset by the potential penalty. Marijuana cultivation is a misdemeanor crime in California, so most runners from a raid are released almost as soon as they’re booked, whether they’ve grown seven plants or 7,000.
The most obvious fix, Dirkse says, is reinstating felony penalties, with potential for time behind bars. States likes Washington and Colorado, which also allow medicinal and recreational marijuana use, don’t have such problems with rogue grows because such activity there still is a felony.
Stanislaus Supervisor Vito Chiesa sits on the California State Association of Counties’ cannabis working group, which advocates for legislative remedies to industry problems. Everyone around the table agrees, he said, that illegal grows can’t continue like this, but getting legislators to go along isn’t as easy as it sounds.
So the sheriff will continue orchestrating Weed Week busts a couple times a year, along with the smaller raids that his people do all the time, he said. Growers will continue growing, runners will continue running, and neighbors will continue suffering.
“The silent majority,” Dirkse said, “hates these things.”
