Imagine you went to bed in the United States of America and woke up in Stalinist Russia. No, it’s not an episode of the Twilight Zone; it’s what happened to a family in Kansas one morning in 2012.
Bob Harte heard a knock at the door and upon answering it was met by a county SWAT team. They burst in and began searching the house. The children were still asleep. Harte demanded to know what was going on. Police said they had a warrant, but wouldn’t elaborate beyond the fact that they were looking for narcotics.
“We just kept saying, You’re in the wrong house,” said Addie Harte, his wife.
The Hartes weren’t running some inner-city crack house or a trailer park meth den; they were just a normal suburban family. After two hours of ransacking the home, officers found absolutely nothing. They left without so much as a “sorry for the inconvenience.”
As you can imagine, the Hartes were angry and confused over the raid. They had no idea why they were the target of a SWAT narcotics raid. When they tried to find out what triggered the assault on their privacy, they learned that the application used to obtain a search warrant was protected under Kansas law. In other words, they had no legal right to know why their house had been raided even though police found nothing and they hadn’t been arrested.
Bob Harte is not a man to take such a violation of his rights sitting down, so he hired a lawyer to investigate. What that lawyer turned up is actually more disturbing the initial raid.
Months prior to the raid, a State Trooper witnessed Harte coming out of a store that “sells equipment sometimes used for growing marijuana.” The store wasn’t named, but I’m guessing it was some kind of hardware store or nursery. In any case, Harte was not witnessed purchasing marijuana grow equipment; just that he was exiting the store.
So this Super Trooper sees a clean-cut middle-aged man coming out of a Home Depot-type establishment and instantly goes, “Holy sh*t, that guy is growing weed.”
Now it gets even creepier. The cops followed Harte back to his house and started going through his garbage. Because, you know, people don’t smoke or sell marijuana; they throw it away. The cops found a substance that turned out to be his wife’s favorite tea, but somehow “field tested” it and determined it was illegal drugs.
A lab later tested the substance and proved that it was, in fact, tea. It didn’t matter though; the cops had all they needed to get a warrant. Guy coming out of a hardware store? Check. Tea bags in the garbage can? Check. Assemble the assault team.
“It’s also astonishing how little police work they had to do to raid our house,” said Harte upon learning the reason behind the warrant.
The good news is, the police are going to have to answer for this in court. Harte has just filed a federal lawsuit against them. Here’s hoping the Bill Of Rights still exists and that the police will be held accountable for violations of his Constitutional rights.