Search Results: sheriff (472)

Graphic: Media Junkie

​A small-town Montana police chief was arrested Tuesday for allegedly growing marijuana in a barn near his residence.

Roosevelt County deputies arrested Poplar Police Chief Chad A. Hilde at his rural home north of Culbertson, Montana, reports Travis Coleman at the Great Falls Tribune. The chief is being charged with one felony count of “criminal production or manufacture of dangerous drugs,” and one misdemeanor count of “criminal possession of dangerous drugs.”
Chief Hilde, who faces up to 10 years in prison on the felony charge, has been placed on “administrative leave,” according to a dispatcher Monday at the Poplar Police Department. The police chief, who says the marijuana belonged to an authorized patient, said he planned to sue the Roosevelt County Sheriff.
A juvenile female runaway told Roosevelt County Sheriff’s Deputy Matt Wallace on July 30 that Chief Hilde had marijuana growing in his barn, and that Hilde told her it was for medical purposes, according to an affidavit filed by acting Roosevelt County Attorney Steven Howard.

Photo: M. Spencer Green/AP
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart: “We will act as we always have, which is arrest”

​Nearly a year after the Cook County Board passed an ordinance allowing sheriff’s police to ticket marijuana smokers for minor possession instead of arresting them, officers still haven’t written the first ticket.

“The ordinance gives us the discretion to choose,” said Steve Patterson, a spokesman for Sheriff Tom Dart. “So we’ll choose to continue acting as we always have, which is arrest.”
County commissioners made headlines last July when they passed the ordinance that gives officers the choice to either arrest people in unincorporated areas possessing 10 grams or less of marijuana, or to hand out tickets for $200 within the county’s unincorporated areas, reports William Lee of the Chicago Tribune.
The ordinance came into being after Commissioner Earleen Collins’s grandson was arrested for possessing half a joint.
The ordinance, which was supported by marijuana legalization advocates, first ran aground after a county board committee rejected Sheriff Dart’s request to extend the discretionary ticket-writing power to wherever sheriff’s officers patrol. This would have included suburban Ford Heights, which Dart’s office patrols because the town doesn’t have its own police force.

Photo: Michael Montgomery
Garberville’s KMUD is a bastion of free speech

​Marijuana growers in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle have for decades received reports of pending police raids from a local radio station. Now the police, citing a boom in pot production and “armed illegal drug traffickers,” want the broadcasts to stop.

As pot growers in Humboldt and Mendocino counties launch another growing season, local, state and federal law enforcement agents are preparing for their part of the annual ritual — deploying helicopters, trucks and armed agents to seize marijuana plants, reports Michael Montgomery at NPR.
​”According to a citizen’s observation, at 8:45 a.m., three helicopters were seen heading from Laytonville to Bell Spring Road,” Garberville radio station KMUD recently broadcast.


Photo: PennLive.com

​In yet another embarrassing loss for law enforcement in California, who have tried for years to ignore the fact that medicinal cannabis is legal in the state — and has been for 14 years now — San Luis Obispo County cut a $20,000 check on Monday to a patient whose medical marijuana was wrongfully destroyed.

The county paid 46-year-old Kimberly Marshall the equivalent of $3,333 per pound, the replacement value for six pounds of a specially grown outdoor strain of pot, reports Karen Velie at Cal Coast News.


Graphic: Ronnie Smith For Sheriff, Gallatin County
Ronnie Lee Smith: “The laws against marijuana violate the U.S. and Kentucky constitutions on numerous levels”

​Ronnie Lee Smith wants to be sheriff of Gallatin County, Kentucky. Which is not that unusual, until you realize that Smith is better known as pot comedian and social media personality Roland A. Duby.

“All activist potheads should run for sheriff like I am,” Smith said Friday.
“I remember having my marijuana taken and thrown in the creek by a friendly policeman who shall remain nameless,” Smith said. “I wasn’t arrested and turned into a criminal for it.”

Photo: Redding Record Searchlight
Sheriff Steve Warren wishes he was a DEA agent: “No matter what, marijuana is still against federal law”

​Maybe Lassen County Sheriff Steve Warren wasn’t paying attention 14 years ago when medical marijuana was legalized in California.

Sheriff Warren told the Board of Supervisors at their April 20 meeting that his position on marijuana is “very clear.” The sheriff said he’d already asked the administrative office if the county could “simply prohibit marijuana cultivation and dispensaries in the county.”

“Pardon my ignorance,” Warren, who must have been unaware of just how much he was asking, said to the supervisors, “but I thought we already had a moratorium. I thought we already had a prohibition such as Citrus Heights, Lincoln, Roseville, and some of those other cities have done.”
“I thought the only one [dispensary]we had in the world around here was in the city,” the sheriff said, reports the Lassen County Times.
But Warren said his department has “encountered” two other marijuana dispensaries in the county.

Photo: MPP
Every year, CAMP goes all Rambo, terrorizing ordinary citizens for growing marijuana, of all things.

​Should a local radio station broadcast information on the real-time movements of police and drug agents? Community station KMUD, based in southern Humboldt County, the unofficial capital of marijuana cultivation in California, says its reports are an essential tool in protecting the community from police abuse.

The broadcasts grew from a citizens’ monitoring project that began after the Reagan Administration in 1983 launched the huge, wasteful and ineffective “marijuana eradication campaign” known as CAMP, or Campaign Against Marijuana Planting.
The waste, arrogance and abuse associated with the program — which has unfortunately become the largest law enforcement task force in the United States, with more than 100 agencies taking part — have become legendary.

Photo: Peter Dean Rickards/The Independent

​A Washington state medical marijuana activist — who nearly killed an armed intruder in his home this month — has been barred from buying guns, even though he says he has no criminal record.

Steve Sarich of CannaCare said he tried to buy a shotgun and a pistol a few days after the March 15 shootout at his home, to replace guns that were seized by investigators, reports Gene Johnson of The Associated Press. But Sarich said he failed the background check.
Sarich got an email from the King County Sheriff’s Office Tuesday, attempting to explain the denial. It says Sarich showed law enforcement officers his paperwork as a medical marijuana patient — and those papers create a presumption that Sarich is an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance.
Sarich is a legal medical marijuana patient under Washington’s medical marijuana law, passed by voters in 1998.

Graphic: mysouthwestga.com

​Five teens on a spring break road trip to Corpus Christie were caught smoking pot in a sheriff’s department parking lot Friday night in Roswell, New Mexico.

The stoned teens stopped in what they thought was a museum parking lot at 6:30 p.m. and partied down in what was actually the Chaves County Sheriff’s Department parking lot, reports Kris Lantz at KRQE.
Sheriff Rob Coon said a dispatcher noticed the teens’ “peculiar” behavior.
“They all got our and started passing a couple of marijuana pipes around,” Sheriff Coon said. “Our dispatchers had a clear shot right to where they were at.”

Photo: Bryant Anderson/The Daily Triplicate
Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Morris last year displayed some of the four pounds of marijuana seized during a traffic stop. On Friday, the pot was returned to its owner.

​Daniel Sosa went to Crescent City, California last Friday to pick up four pounds of marijuana.

He had a 2 p.m. appointment to pick up the stuff — at the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office.

“It seemed weird,” Sosa said. “I was worried they were going to arrest me again.”

If the pot looked familiar to Sosa, it was because it was the same weed that had been confiscated from him a year ago, during a routine traffic stop, reports Kurt Madar of The Daily Triplicate.
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