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New Marijuana Practices in California: Private Security Firm Raiding Mendocino Pot Farms

by markthshark
They wear camouflaged uniforms, bearing military-style insignia. They ride helicopters over the forests of Mendocino County, Calif., on the state's north coast, equipped with firearms, where they cut down illegal marijuana. But they aren't the army. They aren't even the police. They are Lear Asset Management (no phone listing or company website), a private security firm that is attracting a lot of attention for the work it's doing -- and even perhaps some work it hasn't done.
lear_asset_management_california.jpg
New Marijuana Practices in California: Private Security Firm Raiding Pot Farms in Mendocino County
by marktheshark, Wednesday, September 24, 2014

I guess you could call them The New Pinkertons. Myself, I call them mercenary prohibitionists; the domestic equivalent of Blackwater. And they have no place anywhere in America.

They wear camouflaged uniforms, bearing military-style insignia. They ride helicopters over the forests of Mendocino County, Calif., on the state's north coast, equipped with firearms, where they cut down illegal marijuana. But they aren't the army. They aren't even the police. They are Lear Asset Management (no phone listing or company website), a private security firm that is attracting a lot of attention for the work it's doing -- and even perhaps some work it hasn't done.

KCBS in San Francisco described them as "mysterious men dropping from helicopters to chop down" pot plants. Rumors swirl in the area's marijuana community about heavily armed men choppering onto their private land and cutting down their marijuana plants without identifying themselves or answering questions about who they are. Lear has become a boogeyman of sorts for a certain population in northern California

Boogeyman indeed

TPM DC

They don't hide. Fifty-five year old founder of Lear, Paul Trouette, talked to TPM for better than thirty minutes earlier this week, describing what his company does and why they do it. Trouette sees his firm filling a void, a void that law enforcement cannot fill. At one point, Trouette invoked the name, Pinkertons -- the infamous private detective agency founded in 1850, and known for violent union busting and chasing down outlaws of the old west, among other things -- in order to justify setting a new precedent for what they're now doing in this county of 88,000 on the edge of the California Redwoods.

Affectionately known as God's Country

"Law enforcement just doesn't have the means to take care of it any longer," Trouette told TPM. The 2011 murder of Fort Bragg, Calif. city councilman Jere Melo by an illegal trespasser tending poppy plants as Melo patrolled private land for a timber company made a big impression on Trouette, he said. Lear was incorporated the same year, and the company has worked with a non-profit founded in Melo's memory.

"That's when the hole began to be filled in my understanding of how to put together a cohesive, legal, organized private security firm that is now dealing with these types of issues," Trouette said, explaining that he sees Lear "on the cutting edge of citizens becoming involved in their communities and utilizing their legal rights to affect positive change in their communities."

Prior to their new assignment, Lear took on a quasi-law enforcement on at least one occasion. Back in 2013, Lear scouted an illegal marijuana grow on private land in rural Mendocino County. As reported by the Willits News they encountered two trespassers, detaining them until police arrived. The two individuals were subsequently arrested for possessing firearms and methamphetamine.
When asked, Trouette described his overall relationship with the county sheriff as "strained at times."

In a phone interview with TPM, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman seemed a little uncomfortable with having armed contractors operating in his jurisdiction. But he said he hadn't been given any evidence that Lear had infringed on marijuana growers' rights -- though he would be quick to investigate if he was. Trouette asserted that his team had only ever conducted marijuana raids on private land where they'd been hired to work.

"I will go out of my way to investigate anybody's who's doing vigilante work in the name of trying to make the world a better place," Allman said. "But I can't open an investigation until somebody says I'm the victim of a crime."

So far, marijuana eradication accounts for about ten percent of Lear's work. Trouette told TPM that most of his business comes from environmental cleanup (?) and more traditional private security work like guarding construction sites. Regardless, Trouette says he's not worried about infringing on official authority. He clearly maintains a broad perspective of what private citizens are allowed to do under state and federal laws.

At one point, for example, he said that private citizens aren't restricted by the Fourth Amendment, which covers illegal searches and seizures, in the same way that law enforcement officers are.

"It's very clear in the penal code that citizens and private persons have an enormous amount of authority under the penal code and also sometimes even more authority where they're not subject to the Fourth Amendment restrictions," he continued. "You can witness a felony or a misdemeanor or any public nuisance, in your presence, and you have the ability to affect that arrest. And go to the point where the use of force is equal to the force used in the person that you're arresting."

Um, what?

There's much more about this dubious practice at TPM. I encourage everyone to read the entire article about what marijuana legalization is up against in America: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/lear-asset-management-marijuana-raids-mendocino-california


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/24/1332190/-New-Marijuana-Policy-in-California-Private-Security-Firm-Raiding-Pot-Farms-in-Mendocino-County
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by markthshark
lear_asset_management_protection_california.jpg
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