Why did a SWAT team raid Bob and
Addie Harte’s house in Leawood, Kansas, two years ago, then force
the couple and their two children to sit on a couch for two hours
while officers rifled their belongings, searching for “narcotics”
that were not there? KSHB, the NBC station in Kansas City,
reports that the Hartes made two mistakes: Bob went to a
hydroponics store in Kansas City, Missouri, with his son to buy
supplies for a school science project, and Addie drank tea. It cost
them $25,000 to discover that these innocent actions earned them an
early-morning visit by screaming, rifle-waving men with a battering
ram.
The Hartes, who tried to reassure their neighbors by showing
them the search report indicating that nothing was taken from their
home, were naturally curious what they had done to attract police
attention. But the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office would not say,
so the Hartes hired a lawyer to help them obtain the relevant
records, which according to KSHB is not easy in Kansas because
state law favors darkness over sunshine. Eventually the Hartes
learned that a Missouri Highway Patrol trooper saw Bob at the
hydroponics store on August 9, 2011. Seven months later, state
police passed on this hot tip to the sheriff’s office, which sprang
into action (after a few weeks), rummaging through the Hartes’
garbage three times in April 2012. On all three occasions, they
found “wet plant material” that a field test supposedly identified
as marijuana.
Such tests are notoriously
unreliable, confusing chocolate with hashish, soy milk with
GHB, and soap with cocaine, among other hilarious errors that
result in fruitless searches, mistaken arrests, and
false imprisonment. But the cops did not bother to confirm
their field results with a more reliable lab test before charging
into the Hartes’ home, three days after their third surreptitious
trash inspection. When the Hartes starting asking questions about
the raid, the sheriff’s office suddenly decided to test that wet
plant material, which it turned out was not marijuana after all.
The Hartes figure it must have been the loose tea that Addie
favors, which she tends to toss into the trash after brewing. Field
tests have been known to misidentify
various possible tea ingredients, including spearmint, peppermint,
lavendar, vanilla, anise, and chicory, as marijuana.
Since mistakes like this are pretty embarrassing, the Hartes
think Kansas cops would be more careful if obtaining police records
were easier. “You shouldn’t have to have $25,000, even $5,000,”
Addie Harte tells KSHB. “You shouldn’t have to have that kind of
money to find out why people came raiding your house like some sort
of police state.”
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