Gotcha!

Like Mark Draughn, I've been somewhat skeptical of Barry Cooper, the former drug cop turned pitchman for how-to-beat-the-cops videos. He comes off as more of a huckster than a principled whistle-blower, which I think does the good ideas he stands for (police reform) more harm than good.

But damn. I have to hand it to him. This might be one of the ballsiest moves I've ever seen.

KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.

To clarify just a bit, according to Cooper, there was nothing illegal going on the bait house, just two evergreen trees and some grow lamps. There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it's difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn't lie to get a warrant.

Cooper chose the Odessa police department for baiting because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She's currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.

The story's worth watching, not only to see if the cops themselves are held accountable for this, but whether the local district attorney tries to come up with a crime with which to charge Cooper and his assistants. I can't imagine such a charge would get very far, but I wouldn't be surprised to see someone try.

Here's some local media coverage:

I had a signed search warrant with my name on it, but with my previous address, a home in the same county that I had sold 18 mos before. They got this warrant on the word of bail enforcement agents from another state (other side of the country), who said they had information that a wanted fugitive (armed robbery, not even murder or rape) had made a phone call from my house. Of course, that never happened, but it didn't matter as they searched the address on the search warrant, failed to find their man, and then came to knock on my door at 2:00 am that night.

I did not let them in. But they came back the next morning with 6 cruisers and about a dozen cops who surrounded my house and stayed there for about half the day. The police couldn't tell me what phone number this alleged phone call was made from, nor would the bail agents discuss it with me.

I doubt most jurisdictions really make it difficult on cops to get search warrants, no matter how bogus their info is.

This is my understanding of police officers:

i) They are generally very nice people who ensure that some modicum of law exists in society, and many a time they are heroes in every sense of the word.

ii) However, at the same time I am cognizant of the fact that they are human, and that just because someone wears a blue-suit, carries a badge, and open-carries a fire-arm, does not mean that they are as white as hysop. A cop can be just as dirty as any perp on the street, with the only difference being that the perp on the street has to watch out when they break into your house. A cop can simply go in through the front door, while the perp would probably try and jig a window in the back.

Thus, most cops are good people. However, there is nothing intrinsically present in a cop's badge that makes the holder of one immaculate. No oath can do that. In my profession (fund management) one of the highest milestones is the CFA designation, and one of the key cornerstones of it is ethics (one can get kicked out for the smallest infringement). However, that doesn't mean that there are people who are not ethical. Sadly, there will always be humans who do bad things.

And until the day that people who become policeofficers come fluttering down from heaven on angels' wings, there will always be some cops who will be worse than perps.

My biggest fear is institutionalized complacency and extreme bureaucratic indifference to the power they wield.

I collect NFA firearms. I have had many transfer and registration forms signed by the sheriff, and I always assumed there was some record of those forms kept by the sheriff's office. With those, they could potentially determine that I was "heavily armed" with "military-style weapons," thus necessitating a SWAT team dynamic entry at 2:00 AM. When the door's bashed in and flash bangs are going off, nothing good would come of that.

I can only thank God that didn't happen.

But the fact that they can get a signed search warrant, with no more investigative effort done than to take the word of some out of state bounty hunters, not even taking the time to cross-reference my address with the latest phone book or property tax records, should frighten anyone.

There are some suspicious inconsistencies in Barry Cooper’s story. He says that the Odessa “narcotics unit” arrived to find his attorney waiting in the house. However, the YouTube video shows the house being searched by three uniformed street cops armed with pistols (hardly a narcotics unit or SWAT team). The house is also obviously unoccupied at the time of the search (maybe the attorney showed up later?). These little lies could just be intended to make the story more dramatic, but they make me question Cooper’s credibility. According to the city website, Odessa has just 170 cops, and I find it difficult to believe that they would spend each night imaging their entire town via FLIR so that they could raid this house “less than 24 hours” after “the trap was set.”

Of course, if any Odessa officer lied in their search warrant affidavit, they should be prosecuted. But what if a neighbor saw out-of-state vehicles in the driveway, surveillance equipment and grow lights being installed, and aluminum foil being layered over the windows and decided to call it in? Just because the KopBusters crew faked their drug house doesn’t mean the search warrant was obtained illegally. I don’t want to be suckered into becoming part of the war on the war on crime before more of the facts come out.

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