The Law Enforcement Officer Thread

DENVER — It’s nighttime at the Herbal Cure, a south Denver marijuana shop and grow house tucked into a parking lot beside the highway. Inside is a marijuana bounty: thousands of dollars’ worth of cannabis plants, boxes of marijuana-infused chocolate, jars of $360-an-ounce weed with names like Frankenberry, Lemon Skunk and Purple Cheddar.

Chris Bowyer, a lanky combat veteran turned cannabis security guard, is outside. He has a .40-caliber pistol on his hip and a few extra magazines stored away, and he is talking about his work on the battlefield. Not the one in Iraq — the one in Colorado, where criminals seeking to breach marijuana businesses face veterans trying to stop them.

“This is my therapy,” Mr. Bowyer said, heading for a place where burglars broke in recently. He checked a fence for signs of a new incursion, then headed to an office to note the night’s activities in a rigorously organized logbook. “This is what we did in the military.”

In Colorado, a curious marriage has formed between the booming retail cannabis industry — legal in the state since 2014, but not in the eyes of the federal government — and young war veterans, more than 200 of whom have taken jobs protecting marijuana businesses across the state. They spend their days and nights in urban marijuana shops and suburban warehouses and on rural farms, warding off the burglars who have become hallmarks of this cash-heavy, high-value business.

For some, a cannabis security job is a way station toward the police department or law school. For others, though, it is a vocation with purpose, a union of two outsider groups leaning on each other in a nation uncertain about how to accept them.

“It’s almost a kindred spirit kind of thing,” said Mr. Bowyer, 30, sitting in an office with a computer, a bulletproof vest and a booklet detailing marijuana products marketed under the name Jimi Hendrix. Marijuana growers and sellers “recognize that there is another group of guys who have their own talents,” he said, “and that we are here for them.”

No industry is immune to thievery. But the owners of Colorado’s 978 marijuana shop licenses and 1,393 marijuana growing licenses are particularly vulnerable. Because the federal government considers marijuana illegal, many banks will not work with cannabis businesses, forcing them to deal in mountains of cash.

Perhaps more significant, their product is also lucrative for criminals: A pound of marijuana worth $2,000 in Colorado can be sold for $4,000 or $6,000 across state lines. Stores and grow houses are often soft targets in darkened parts of town. And unlike cash, marijuana is untraceable, easily sold on Craigslist or driven to dealers in Chicago and New York.

“The black market is still booming,” said Cmdr. James Henning of the Denver Police Department. Contrary to the popular narrative, marijuana is a burglar’s typical prize. “They don’t get cash,” the commander said. “That’s usually in the big old safe, and they can’t get into that. Usually, it’s plants and finished product.”

The department said it believed that the city’s marijuana businesses had been targeted by organized groups, though it has no evidence that the groups are linked to foreign cartels.

Surveillance videos of some burglaries show thieves sawing through the roofs of businesses, tracking law enforcement with police scanners and tying up employees. In one case, in Southern Colorado, a pair of guards spotted four men in tactical gear carrying AR-15 rifles through a field.

Denver, one of the few jurisdictions compiling data on crimes at marijuana businesses, has 421 pot-growing houses and shops. It recorded 192 burglaries and thefts at such businesses in 2015. In Aurora, a suburb with 19 operating pot shops, 18 burglaries and robberies have occurred since 2014.

But some business owners do not report break-ins because they worry that they will be seen as targets or attract inspectors who will find a violation.

Criminals have netted anything from a few marijuana-laced sodas to a quarter-million dollars in plants. In June, much worse occurred: Two armed men entered a pot shop in Aurora, called Green Heart, and killed a guard, Travis Mason. The police called it a botched robbery.

Mr. Mason, 24, a former Marine and father of three, was believed to be the first cannabis employee to die on the job in Colorado, and the killing alarmed the industry. Some security businesses reported a rush of requests for armed guards.

“Thieves in this industry are getting much more brazen, much more aggressive,” said Ryan Tracy, 38, general manager at the Herbal Cure, which now has a guard on duty every night.

Yeah but it's too far out west. People can't make decent pizza that far west.

We’ve tracked countless cases here where cops were able to keep their jobs after killing unarmed people, killing people after responding to the wrong house, killing people and then lying about it . . . the list goes on.

Give the Weirton, W.Va., police chief some credit. He’s come up with a new spin on the the same problem. He just fired a cop for not killing someone.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.

Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.

“I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.

Mr. Mader, who was standing behind Mr. Williams’ car parked on the street, said he then “began to use my calm voice.”

“I told him, ‘Put down the gun,’ and he’s like, ‘Just shoot me.’ And I told him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you brother.’ Then he starts flicking his wrist to get me to react to it.

“I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and deescalate it. I knew it was a suicide-by-cop” situation.

Mader was responding to a 911 call from Williams’s girlfriend. In that call, she told police that Williams was threatening to kill himself, not anyone else.

What Mader did upon arriving at the scene is a hell of a lot braver course of action than simply opening fire when the suspect doesn’t immediately disarm. What Mader did is in fact exactly what we want cops to do when someone is in crisis. It’s also precisely what law enforcement officers say they do on a daily basis — put themselves at risk in order to save lives. Mader should have been given a medal. Unfortunately, two more cops then showed up, and quickly shot Williams dead.

As it turns out, Williams’s gun wasn’t loaded. There’s no way any of the police officers could have known that. But it does show that Mader had read Williams correctly — he wasn’t actually a threat to anyone but himself. His life could have been saved.

The Weirton police department then refused to name Williams for three days and assigned an investigator to look into the shooting . . . who then promptly left for a weeklong vacation. Then came the punchline.

Mr. Mader — speaking publicly about this case for the first time — said that when he tried to return to work on May 17, following normal protocol for taking time off after an officer-involved shooting, he was told to go see Weirton Police Chief Rob Alexander.

In a meeting with the chief and City Manager Travis Blosser, Mr. Mader said Chief Alexander told him: “We’re putting you on administrative leave and we’re going to do an investigation to see if you are going to be an officer here. You put two other officers in danger.”

Mr. Mader said that “right then I said to him: ‘Look, I didn’t shoot him because he said, ‘Just shoot me.’ ”

On June 7, a Weirton officer delivered him a notice of termination letter dated June 6, which said by not shooting Mr. Williams he “failed to eliminate a threat.”

The city mentioned two other incidents in firing Mader, but it seems clear that his failure to kill Williams was the motivation for his termination. Even the rare cop who gets fired often gets to keep his pension. Mader won’t be getting one.

After he received his termination notice, Mr. Mader sought attorneys to help him fight the city. He was told because he was still a probationary employee in an “at-will” state, he could be fired for any reason and there was no point in fighting the city.

One attorney told him the best he could hope for was to ask to resign instead of being terminated.

“But I told [the attorney] ‘Look, I don’t want to admit guilt. I’ll take the termination instead of the resignation because I didn’t do anything wrong,’ ” Mr. Mader said. “To resign and admit I did something wrong here would have ate at me. I think I’m right in what I did. I’ll take it to the grave.”

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran an article about the longstanding problem in which even the rare bad cops who do get fired are often able to quickly find work at another policy agency. Mader, who served a tour in Afghanistan and has two sons under five-years-old, told the Post-Gazette that he’s now studying for a commercial truck driving license, but he’d consider another job in law enforcement if he were offered one. I hope that happens. I hope he’s given the same second chance that corrupt, trigger-happy cops are given. My hunch is that he’ll be driving trucks.