Cops' chopper search finds 334 pot plants

9/11/2013

By Patsy Nicosia

Cops

Three days of high-flying surveillance by crews in a Lakota helicopter paid off for the Schoharie County Sheriff's Office as deputies located and then removed 334 marijuana plants from swampy, backwoods plots in Wright, Esperance, Schoharie, and Sharon with the help of the National Guard's Counterdrug Task Force.
The flyovers began Wednesday following a press conference to explain the effort at the Sharon Springs Airport; within a few hours, said Sheriff Tony Desmond, they'd located the first of the pot plants in Esperance.
Crews in the chopper, including Deputy Bruce Baker, who'd undergone two days of State Police Academy training in distinguishing the pot plants from the air, quickly spotted what they were after and radioed the locations to support on the ground.
By the time the exercise was done Friday, they had located 170 plants in Wright, 88 in Esperance, 70 in Schoharie, and six in Sharon.
"It's pretty easy to spot," Deputy Baker said, before climbing aboard the Lakota. "With two days at the State Police academy and 10 years on the road...it doesn't look much like corn-which is about the only other thing out there."
It's also a brighter, pronounced green, said the Technical Sergeant piloting the flight who, along with the rest of the crew, asked not to be photographed or identified for security reasons.
"About the only thing out there that masks it is ragweed," the Tech Sergeant said, "and it's a bumper year for that, so that could be a problem."
As could the location of the pot, said Sheriff Desmond, and in fact, some of the plants spotted from the area were in spots so desolate he wasn't sure how deputies, even using four-wheelers, would get to them.
The Tech Sergeant said the National Guard uses missions like the one in Schoharie County both as a training exercise and as a way to support both local law enforcement and local communities.
It also helps establish relationships all three can draw on down the road, he said.
Sheriff Desmond estimates he gets a tip a day on someone growing marijuana somewhere in the county, and though there are few arrests, he said he's happy just to get it from ever reaching the street.
"It can be very time-consuming and very costly to make an arrest," Sheriff Desmond said.
With on-the-ground surveillance, could be tying someone up for days or weeks...And too often, this stuff is planted on someone else's property or on state land.
"If we can get to it before it's harvested, I'm satisfied."
Though drugs like heroin have been growing in popularity locally, Sheriff Desmond said marijuana remains the top drug of choice.
Though Wednesday's crews were relying on line-of-sight to locate the plants, the Tech Sergeant said the Lakotas also have infra-red and night search capabilities-both of which they turned to in what became a rescue mission at the Texas-Mexico border.
The mission followed a 17-hour flight to Texas, he said, and they were assisting the Border Patrol in searching for drug cartel operatives when they spotted some women stranded without food or water waving frantically and were able to call in local law enforcement to assist them.