Only my two cents. Having been to the trade day at Collinsville...there are a fair amount of hippy and Deliveriance-type characters in the region. As for these guys being threats....only if some law enforcement dude came around their pot plants...would they be terribly upset. As for all of the departments involved....it looks good when they go to homeland security and beg for a $100k check to buy a speedboat for the county police and a $15k check for the Collinsville police department to buy some additional assault rifles. I know the game...and I know how they all play it now. They aren’t real police anymore...they are simply overgrown kids with toys.
Absolutely right. It's all about the numbers. Every department and agency needs to be able to justify their existence through statistics. We were involved in XX raids and arrested XX armed anti-government militia types in 2007. If we're going to increase these arrests, we'll need to increase our budget by, oh, I dunno, say, $1.5 million.
The raids are the perfect time for the folks not involved in any aspect of the investigation to go along for the ride and get their statistics.