State Police in Michigan announced how much they love burning gasoline and wasting taxpayer money earlier this week, bragging about a costly flyover search in Livingston County that – so far – hasn’t resulted in any arrests according to the Detroit Free Press.
But if you live in Deerfield, Handy or Cohoctah and have an outdoor grow, you might want to reconsider harvesting your crops now.
The search, funded by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, has become an annual thing in Michigan. In 2012, the net haul was about 49,000 plants, 406 arrests and seized more than $1 million in property.
We’re not aviation experts here, despite how high up we live our lives. But just a little research shows that the Michigan State Police have two types of helicopters and both have fuel tanks ranging from 110 gallons to 188 gallons. At $5.50 per-gallon average for jet fuel you’re looking at $605 to $1,034 every time they fill up. That doesn’t even account for pilot pay an
Each chopper has a range of about 370 miles, which they could easily cover doing the figure-eight patterns across the 585.43 square-mile county. All of that doesn’t even factor in pilot and cop pay for such an extravagant waste of time.