Raid(s) Of The Day: The CAMP Raids (The criminal war on drugs!)
Radley Balko has been blogging about failed police raids daily. Here is todays.....
In the mid-1980s, the federal government and the state of California stated the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP. The program combined federal law enforcement and military resources with state law enforcement in an effort to eradicate marijuana cultivation in the northern part of the state.
It effectively turned parts of California into a military zone. CAMP sent U-2 spy planes over the skies to search for pot, then sent -- literally -- black helicopters full of armed National Guard troops, drug cops, and sometimes even volunteers to cut down the plants. Anyone who happened to be nearby could be detained, often at gunpoint.
Journalist Dan Baum writes in his book Smoke and Mirrors, that CAMP roadblocks started hauling whole families out of cars and holding them at gunpoint while searching their vehicles without warrants. CAMP troops . . . went house to house kicking in doors and ransacking homes, again without warrants." California Attorney General John Van de Kamp also recruited LAPD cops to raid suspected pot grows in the northern part of the state. Baum reported that the the feeling within the department was that spending a couple weeks of raiding hippies in a place like Humboldt County was like "summer camp."
More from Baum:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/26/raids-of-the-day-the-camp_n_3163932.html
