Mysterious Men Dropping From Helicopters to Chop Down Norcal Marijuana Grows

Mysterious Men Dropping From Helicopters To Chop Down NorCal Marijuana Grows
September 12, 2014


MENDOCINO COUNTY (KPIX 5) — There’s been some mysterious activity in the skies over Mendocino County lately. Folks who live there want to know: Who are the armed men dropping out of helicopters to chop down their marijuana grows?
They dress in combat camouflage, some of them hide their faces. This summer, a group of men in Mendocino County loaded into helicopters and flew missions to eradicate marijuana. They’re not police officers. They work for a security company called Lear Asset Management.

According to their promotional poster, the group works with law enforcement .That’s why Susan Schindler suspected the posse, when her medical marijuana garden was hit last month.

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    “They took hand saws and just cut the trunks,” Schindler said.

Schindler said the armed men in camouflage dropped into her garden from an unmarked helicopter and refused to identify themselves. “There was no paperwork, no copies of any warrants they didn’t leave any inventory of what they took,” she said.

She told KPIX 5 that she is following all the county regulations: 25 plants per parcel, the legal limit in Mendocino County. And she said the strain of cannabis she grows has no street value: It really is medicinal.

“The irony is that this whole garden that was destroyed was not a garden that would get you high,” Schindler said.

Lear Asset Management’s president Paul Trouette turned down KPIX 5’s request for an interview, but said Lear had nothing to do with the raid on Susan’s garden.

So we asked Mendocino County’s sheriff, Tom Allman. “The sheriff’s department doesn’t hire any private security to go out and do our job,” he said.

Allman said his deputies have conducted some recent raids, including several in Susan’s area on the day she was hit. But he says his guys wear badges and clearly identify themselves.

“So are they seeing things?” We asked him. “Or is it just the fact that they are mistaken?”

“I think there are some people who may become paranoid this time of year,” he said.

But Schindler has another theory: Whoever is behind it, she believes she’s an easy target. “I think they tried to find places where they saw nobody, I think they tried to find places where they would not be confronted with guns.”

So it’s still unclear who exactly is raiding the pot farms. The security company, Lear, insists they are only staying on the private property that hires them. And that’s perfectly legal.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/09/12/mysterious-men-dropping-from-helicopters-to-chop-down-norcal-marijuana-grows-mendocino-county-lear-asset-management/

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'MYSTERIOUS, HEAVILY-ARMED MEN' DROP FROM HELICOPTERS TO DESTROY MARIJUANA FIELDS

13 Sep 2014

A group of unknown, "heavily-armed" men dressed in camouflage have been dropping from helicopters into marijuana fields in Mendocino County in order to chop down plants and eradicate growing operations.


According to CBS San Francisco's KPIX, one of the groups conducting such raids is private security contractor LEAR Asset Protection and Management. A LEAR spokesman acknowledged the group had conducted similar raids in Mendocino County over the last year.

However, medical marijuana grower Susan Schindler told KPIX that a group of men who used helicopters to raid her field last month refused to identify themselves.

"There was no paperwork, there were no copies of any warrants, there were no inventories left of what they took," Schindler said.

Schindler also said she is following all county regulations regarding her grow site, and that the field of marijuana she was growing had no street value.

"The irony is that this whole garden that was destroyed was not a garden that would get you high," she told KPIX.

>>>LEAR President Paul Truitt said his company was not involved in any way in the raid on Schindler's property. Thus, the question remains: who chopped down Schindler's marijuana plants?

Mendocino County sheriff Tom Allman acknowledged that the sheriff's office had conducted raids in the area of Schindler's farm, and on the same day, but maintained that officers wear badges and regularly identify themselves before a raid.

"The sheriff's office does not hire any private security guards to go out and do our job," Allman told KPIX. "I think that there are some people who may become paranoid this time of year."

This is not the first instance of authorities or others using helicopters to take down marijuana fields. Last month, drug investigators used a helicopter to airlift nearly 4,000 marijuana plants out of the Laguna Wilderness Park in Orange County.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-California/2014/09/13/Mysterious-Heavily-Armed-Men-Drop-from-Helicopters-to-Destroy-Marijuana-Fields

The New Pinkertons: Private Security Outfit Raids Pot Farms In California


ByDYLAN SCOTTPublishedSEPTEMBER 24, 2014, 11:58 AM EDT9824 Views

They wear camouflaged uniforms, bearing military-style insignia. They ride helicopters over the forests of Mendocino County, Calif., on the state's north coast, equipped with firearms, where they cut down illegal marijuana. But they aren't the army. They aren't even the police. They are Lear Asset Management, a private security firm that is attracting a lot of attention for the work it's doing -- and even perhaps some work it hasn't done

KCBS in San Francisco described them as "mysterious men dropping from helicopters to chop down" pot plants. Rumors swirl in the area's marijuana community about heavily armed men choppering onto their private land and cutting down their marijuana plants without identifying themselves or answering questions about who they are. Lear has become a boogeyman of sorts for a certain population in northern California.

But they aren't hiding. Paul Trouette, Lear Asset Management's 55-year-old founder, spoke with TPM for more than 30 minutes earlier this week to describe what his company does and why they do it. They see themselves filling a void that law enforcement cannot. Trouette at one point invoked the Pinkertons -- the private detective agency notorious for, among other things, violently busting unions and chasing Wild West outlaws -- to demonstrate the historical precedent for what they're now doing in this county of 88,000 on the edge of the California Redwoods.

"Law enforcement just doesn't have the means to take care of it any longer," Trouette told TPM. The 2011 murder of Fort Bragg, Calif. city councilman Jere Melo by an illegal trespasser tending poppy plants as Melo patrolled private land for a timber company made a big impression on Trouette, he said. Lear was incorporated the same year, and the company has worked with a non-profit founded in Melo's memory.

"That's when the hole began to be filled in my understanding of how to put together a cohesive, legal, organized private security firm that is now dealing with these types of issues," Trouette said, explaining that he sees Lear "on the cutting edge of citizens becoming involved in their communities and utilizing their legal rights to affect positive change in their communities."

ContinuedFrom above......



Paul Trouette, right, before a marijuana clean-up project. Image via Jere Melo Foundation.

Lear has already assumed a quasi-law enforcement role on at least one occasion. In June 2013, Lear was scouting an illegal marijuana grow on private land in rural Mendocino County when it encountered two individuals who were trespassing. They detained the men, one of whom was armed with a handgun, and called the police, who then arrested the men for possessing firearms and methamphetamine, the Willits News reported.

It is probably no surprise then that Trouette described his relationship with the county sheriff as "strained at times." In a phone interview with TPM, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman seemed a little uncomfortable with having armed contractors operating in his jurisdiction. But he said he hadn't been given any evidence that Lear had infringed on marijuana growers' rights -- though he would be quick to investigate if he was. Trouette asserted that his team had only ever conducted marijuana raids on private land where they'd been hired to work.

"I will go out of my way to investigate anybody's who's doing vigilante work in the name of trying to make the world a better place," Allman said. "But I can't open an investigation until somebody says I'm the victim of a crime."

Marijuana eradication is only about 10 percent of Lear's work, Trouette said, which also includes environmental clean-up and more traditional private security like guarding construction sites. But regardless, he isn't worried about infringing on official authority and clearly holds a broad view of what private citizens are allowed to do under state and federal law. At one point, for example, he said that private citizens aren't restricted by the Fourth Amendment, which covers illegal searches and seizures, in the same way that law enforcement officers are.

"It's very clear in the penal code that citizens and private persons have an enormous amount of authority under the penal code and also sometimes even more authority where they're not subject to the Fourth Amendment restrictions," he continued. "You can witness a felony or a misdemeanor or any public nuisance, in your presence, and you have the ability to affect that arrest. And go to the point where the use of force is equal to the force used in the person that you're arresting."

That worldview might stem from his background. Trouette has a family history of military and law enforcement service through his father, grandfather and uncles, he said, though he worked in private investing before founding Lear in 2011. (He repeatedly asked TPM to be discreet with personal details of his life and refused to discuss his family situation, citing the nature of his work).

History plays a significant role in how Trouette understands his work -- and ignorance of it and the law, he believes, is why Lear is quickly becoming a fountain of conspiracy theories for the area's pot farmers.

"Those theories are rooted I think in ignorance of the laws of the state," he said. "If one studies the laws of the state, they'll understand that private security or private policing has been around for a couple hundred years. Since 1850, you know, the old Pinkerton agents."

It could also be an byproduct of how Lear and Trouette present themselves. A widely circulated online video, produced in tandem with the Jere Melo Foundation, shows the group in its natural habitat. They are decked out in their military-style fatigues and armed. They ride into the woods to clean up a former marijuana grow site on land owned by the Mendocino Redwood Company. The soundtrack is reminiscent of an action movie. On an increasingly notorious Lear brochure, the employees look like soldiers and are shown dropping out of helicopters. Some of the employees' faces are scrubbed in order to protect their anonymity.


The company employs at any given time between 15 to 30 employees made up of former military and federal law enforcement types, Trouette said, and he takes the perceived dangers it brings seriously. In the video, Trouette explains the need for the employees to be armed -- and this was produced by the group founded in honor of the murdered city councilman who helped shape Trouette's understanding of Lear's work -- but he says they haven't needed to exchange fire yet.

continued from above........3rd part_

"The more times you work in these fields, the more there is potential for those bad situations," he told TPM. "That could happen any day. There are a lot of people out in the rural areas who have criminal activities."

But that conduct has its own serious risks. Sheriff Allman was adamant that he didn't want to be seen as criticizing Trouette. "I'm not going to say anything negative about his business," the sheriff told TPM, adding that he supports the property rights of private land owners who want to hire a company like Lear. But then he described his greatest fear knowing that a firm like Trouette's is working in the same area as his own officers: "Friendly fire."

"Let me tell you what keeps me awake. If a citizen calls up and says, 'Listen, there's men with long guns and camouflage green that look like policemen that are cutting my marijuana down.' And my dispatcher goes, 'Oh my gosh, it's not us,'" he said. "What we're going to do is we're going to send cops with guns to this location where we think there's a marijuana ripoff. Honestly, what could possibly go wrong here? A lot more things are going to go wrong than are going to go right."

Lear's self-presentation also complicates any effort to separate fact from fiction in the rumors about Lear -- "vigilantes going around the hills," as Ellen Komp, deputy director of the California branch of the pro-pot National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, described the stories to TPM. The group presents a tough and serious facade, and it has performed dozens of projects. It's a real business and Trouette's full-time job. But it also appears to overstate, at least to some degree, its relationship with the law enforcement community -- though Trouette told TPM that many authorities are "in total support" of Lear's work.

In that infamous Lear brochure, the company boasts that it works with state and federal law enforcement agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Land Management. The DEA, BLM and U.S. Forest Service told TPM that they did not have any contracts with the company. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife said that a $78,000 grant that they awarded to a non-profit of which Trouette is a member -- the Mendocino County Black Tail Association -- was used to hire Lear for environmental clean-up. (Trouette has said there was nothing untoward about his non-profit using a state grant to hire his for-profit company because he abstained from the vote on the grant.)

Patrick Foy, a spokesman for the state department, told TPM that the agency was looking into the situation "to make sure (Trouette) is not working outside the scope of our contracted grant arrangement."

Trouette explained to TPM that when the brochure says that Lear "works with" those agencies, it generally means that they are "sharing information, intelligence" with them. "We don't contract with them," he said. "We work with them collaboratively."



LEAR 2014 Poster by tpmdocs

Gabriel Chin, a law professor at the University of California-Davis, told TPM that the scope and exact nature of Lear's work was unlike what he had heard of other security firms doing and Trouette himself said he believed that they were "unique" in California. But the general concept is familiar, dating back to the Pinkertons and others of their ilk, Chin said.

And as actual law enforcement is stretched thinner and thinner, Chin said it shouldn't be a surprise if more private entities turn to firms like Lear -- though it does raise serious questions.

"For decades, we've had private security for various sorts of situations and the basic reason for that is that you can't always just call 9-1-1 and have police respond, even if what you're talking about is a crime," he said. "The worry, of course, is that if they're not careful, if they do go to the wrong place, that there could be violence, unnecessary violence. The worry is that they're not law enforcement officers and that they might encounter people and violate their rights in some way, or intimidate them or assault or harm them in an effort to protect themselves."

For his part, Trouette seems aware of at least some of these challenges. He said he had set up a meeting with the local marijuana growers association to explain his company's work. While the relationship with actual law enforcement is clearly imperfect -- Trouette himself acknowledged there are a lot of "type-A personalities" involved -- both he and Allman stressed the need for them to work well together to avoid the kind of "friendly fire" situation that Allman described to TPM.

So Trouette is becoming public relations-conscious. He initially declined to speak with KCBS for the first story that brought Lear national attention. But he has since spoken with Time magazineas well as TPM at length in an effort to shed the mystique of his firm's operations.

"We're really concerned about being painted in the right light," he said. "There has been some really wacko stuff."


Read full article:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/lear-asset-management-marijuana-raids-mendocino-california

Private Police State? Blackwater-Like Contractor Seeks to Legalize Private Police in the U.S.
September 22, 2014


Private contractors from LEAR Asset Management

There are very few news stories about government overreach that shock me these days, but this week there were two — both in California. Each came and went with barely a whisper in the media, even from the “liberty” news.

Perhaps we’re so bombarded with mafia tactics by the government that some events just get lost in the chaos. And no, one of these developments is NOT the Los Angeles School District acquiring tanks and grenade launchers, although that’s probably of equal significance. Below is the first of these local stories. The second will be in a follow-up article.

This is probably the scariest development in law enforcement, ever, and I don’t say that lightly. If you thought no-knock SWAT raids to serve warrants for non-violent crimes was the epitome of tyranny, wait until you get a load of private mercenaries conducting special forces-type raids on American citizens.

That’s right, a report out of Mendocino, California admits that Blackwater-like private “security” contractors are now being used to “police pot.” Mysterious soldiers repelled out of unmarked helicopters fully armed for war to raid legal medical cannabis gardens last month. They didn’t identify themselves or present paperwork of any kind. They just destroyed the garden and left. Other witnesses claim this invading army is also “confiscating” product.

This is the ultimate “feeler” story in the unfolding Totalitarian Tip-Toe if I’ve ever seen one. A quirky local story of “mystery men” used to raise the public threshold of acceptable tyranny, a.k.a. legitimizing private-sector soldiers for law enforcement.


The war machine seems to be gauging how much terror they can inflict on peaceful Americans before they say WTF (See Ferguson) and, perhaps more importantly, to see if the public will allow this vast new market for war profiteers.

It should be a massive media story “private war profiteering at home to terrorize citizens fight crime”. Helicopters, weapons of war, and tactical gear are expensive. Who’s seeding these start-ups anyway?

The manipulation continued a day after this story was reported, when Alex Altman of TIME wrote “Californians Turn to Private Security to Police Pot Country” as if all the citizens of California have agreed to this type of policing. Subtle manipulation.

continued from above......


TIME writes:

Over the summer, residents claimed men in military gear had been dropping onto private property from unmarked helicopters and cutting down the medicinal pot gardens of local residents. Local law enforcement have conducted helicopter raids in the area, but some worried the culprit this time was different: a private-security firm called Lear Asset Management.

The confusion was easy to understand. In the wildlands of California’s pot country, the workings of law enforcement are hard to track, and the rules for growing pot are often contradictory. To add to the mess, the various local, county, state and federal enforcement efforts don’t always communicate with each other about their efforts. The added possibility of private mercenaries, with faceless employers, fast-roping from helicopters raised alarm bells for many farmers.

TIME legitimizes Lear Asset Management and the practice of private policing with a matter-of-fact job description:

They are hired by large land owners to do the work of clearing trespass gardens from private property, and perform forest reclamation, sometimes funded by government grant. Deep in the woods, they cut down illegal pot plants and scrub the environmental footprint produced by the backwoods drug trade. They carry AR-15 rifles, lest they meet armed watchmen bent on defending their plots.

I really don’t have a problem with securing private property from vandals, but did you catch that slip “sometimes funded by government grant”? That’s when “private security” becomes “law enforcement.” This is the RED ALERT buried in this story. At best our tax dollars are being used to fund private armies for large land owners. At worst, when will we see these warriors policing BLM land (aka National Parks)? Wait for it…

Altman quotes official statistics about how successful Lear and law enforcement are in raiding marijuana farmers, measured in the “street value” of the forbidden crop seized at gunpoint, as if that is still acceptable behavior by society’s peace keepers in the era of legal weed. But Altman just uses it as a segue into a broader “problem” of policing environmental vandalism on large stretches of open land, including “public” land.

More recently, the trespass grow sites have migrated from public land onto the vast plots owned by private citizens and timber companies. Some of them have hired Lear to deal with the problem. The company has run about nine missions across California’s pot country this year, with more planned this fall, Trouette says. And while the company’s special-ops aspect gets much of the attention, most of the work focuses on environmental reclamation.

The public is supposed to believe Lear is merely an environmental clean-up team doing community service who just so happens to have military special ops capability. How quaint. I didn’t know litter maintenance required AR-15s. But who would be opposed protecting the environment? Smart marketing.

TIME goes for the hard close to sell this tyranny by providing legal cover for these raids without warrants, before ending the article as a sponsored post for “regulation” of Lear’s “flourishing” domestic mercenary business as the “best thing for locals.”

Reports of vigilante marijuana raids on private property may simply stem from a lack of legal clarity. Under the so-called “open fields doctrine” set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment does not protect undeveloped property from warrantless searches. As a result, police may be permitted to cut down private gardens without a warrant. (my emphasis because you need to read and reread every word)


So let me get this straight: a criminal gang of armed thugs commits violence and theft, and the best way to solve that problem is to legalize and regulate those thugs? Sounds like ISIS.

The creepiest thing about this development is that it’s a clever, more professional repackaging of a previous attempt to introduce private police in America. Some of you liberty lovers may recall it being rolled out once before in an eerily similar manner.

In 2009, FOX News wrote U.S. Mystery ‘Police’ Force Has Small Montana City on Edge after a local news report aired showing an extremely well-funded private security contractor going by the name American Police Force (APF) rolling into the town of Hardin in black Mercedes tagged as “Harding Police Department”.


The town contracting a private firm for domestic policing caused massive outrage not just locally in Montana but also around the United States. APF is now referred to as a well-funded fraud perpetuated by a petty con man and the event was swiftly dumped into the dustbin of history.

The Wikipedia entry on APF states:

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

Harvest Season Impacted By Drought, Raids
An increasing number of people are growing pot these days, but the lack of water and stepped up enforcement by police have made it a tough year.

• Law enforcement agencies have targeted outdoor grows this year.

The 2014 outdoor cannabis cultivation season will draw to a close in Northern California during the next few weeks, and in the Bay Area, the arrival of harvest is often met with trimming parties and bargains on gorgeous, fragrant "sungrown" bud. But beyond the Bay, growers are battling almost-Biblical drought conditions this fall. And across California, law enforcement agencies have stepped up eradication campaigns against marijuana growers with little regard for whether crops are meant for the medical market.

In the Emerald Triangle, a decades-old pot-growing region a few hours north of the Bay Area that generates billions of dollars in revenue each year, the three-year-long drought has punished area growers, said Tim Blake, a veteran farmer and founder of The Emerald Cup, the largest annual outdoor cannabis competition in the world.

The growing popularity of cannabis has encouraged more folks than ever to try their hand at a little home-growing. DIY weed costs pennies on the dollar compared to store-bought bud. "You got crops coming in from all sides," Blake said. "It's an explosive market."

But the market has been booming just as California's water supply has plummeted. The once-mighty Eel River has run dry in several spots this year, and unregulated cannabis cultivation has played a part in it, experts say. Many private creeks and streams are dry, and many growers without wells are without local water supplies. "The water situation has been so critical," Blake said. "It's been tough on people."

Some savvy growers are managing to get through the drought because they stocked up on rain tanks last winter and planted less this year, said Hezekiah Allen, executive director of The Emerald Growers Association. "So far I haven't heard anyone who actually lost a crop due to water," he said.

But Blake said drought-related problems have impacted growers in a major way. Mites, mold, and fungus "have attacked people at a level nobody can even imagine or comprehend." And the dry weather has prompted animals to come out of the forest and go in search of water and food, he said. "More animals — gopher, deer, bear — are attacking crops than ever before. It's massive.

"We have a huge hornet problem — there's no water for them and no food," Blake continued. "Where are they going to go? People are feeding skunk off their backyard porches. Bears are coming into people's backyards. A friend lost half his crop to deer that came through. It's an amazing thing."

Sonoma, Mendocino, and Humboldt counties have also been hammered this year by law enforcement. After years of busting illegal grows on public lands, authorities this year have targeted private medical gardens with raids funded by state, federal, and private grants. Patients report that private contractors hired by law enforcement agencies have been going after pot gardens, cutting plants at the root, and then leaving without making any arrests. "They've been just going after small people — 25, 40, 60-plant gardens," Blake said. "They're dropping in and cutting 40 crops a day rather than just 5 or so."

The action is a throwback to the old days of "heavy-handed ... extreme ... brutal" enforcement, said Allen. "The best farmers leading the way are getting busted," he added. "That's a problem.

"It's more extreme, but going back as far as the early Nineties, this is absolutely nothing we haven't seen before," Allen continued. "Certain factions of law enforcement have been terrorizing this community for decades."

Blake said that many growers, however, managed to avoid the raids by harvesting their crop early — thanks to the new trend in "light deprivation," which involves using tarps to black out the sun and trick pot plants into thinking that fall has arrived so they start flowering early. The first "light dep" crop hit the market in August and early September — before the raids began.

In the central part of the state, years of federal eradication efforts in the Sierra foothills have pushed growers into the Central Valley. Counties, including Fresno, have responded by enacting blanket bans on medical cannabis cultivation and levying hundreds of fines of $1,000-per-day, per-plant. On Monday, the Fresno County Board of Supervisors heard appeals from folks whose 2014 fines total nearly $1 million. Lawyers for those fined often say that their clients either didn't know pot was being grown on their property, or didn't know that Fresno County could ban medical marijuana-growing.

Fresno-area resident Michael Green, who is suing the county as the Fresno Cannabis Association, said the Central Valley has a real problem with profiteers. But authorities are treating nonprofit medical gardeners like criminals, he said. "It's a hot and heavy harvest: The police are out in force and the lawsuits are flying," Green said.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/harvest-season-impacted-by-drought-raids/Content?oid=4079927


----im no psychic but my guess would be this is happening in conjunction with the 'national' dispensary format getting ready to come online ....in every medical state--jm2c

---------TAX and ""REGULATE""---------

Shoot those bastards for trespassing while they are roping down like spiders from a rain gutter.

It's sure a war isn't it, welcome to corporate America I guess, just another shadow army doing masters bidding. So just who's assets are these guys suppose to be protecting then?

greenlikemoney said:

Shoot those bastards for trespassing while they are roping down like spiders from a rain gutter.

Click to expand...

I bet it happens sooner than later and I say rightfully so. I s cali a castle law state?

A privite military force operating inside the borders of the US is illegal. Just them existing is violating the law, even if they take no actions.

Anti marijuana mercenaries......... What's the fucking world coming to.
What's next people jumping the Whitehouse fence and going thru the front door ..maybe they need to hire LEAR asset protection management to guard the Whitehouse !

It just occurred to me the dynamics of this story, at first I was just dumbfounded of to how this could happen, then it clicked. The money grab is so expansive that they now have hired goons to help bump up numbers.

oldtimer54 said:

Anti marijuana mercenaries......... What's the fucking world coming to.
What's next people jumping the Whitehouse fence and going thru the front door ..maybe they need to hire LEAR asset protection management to guard the Whitehouse !

Click to expand...

I would not trust LEAR to protect the president , not this sitting president.

I've came to the conclusion that some folks hate to see others who are not like them, doing good, being well off. They will try to do anything to stop the spread of wealth. This "war on drugs" only happen after the civil rights laws of the 1960's was passed. Today more minorities are locked up then anytime in the past yet we are "more free" than anytime before.

I don't think everybody wants to see crime rates drop, nope, they rather have an excuse to crackdown on crime and lock up even more people for a longer amount of time. Prisons are big business, they create a bunch of jobs while getting rid of many people. Yeah of course some folks need to be put away to protect society but its been way over done since the 1970's, IMO

I don't see any combat patches either. I dont think they are military. I'm setting out the bear traps now

How many shots do u think I can get off with my ar-15 against these invaders before they hit the ground? Now if these guys don't have warrants or even announce who they are...they will eventually run into someone better equipped or at least comparably equipped. Without any kind of markings, who's to say someone wouldn't mistake them for an invading force and blow them away. Seems like they would have someone knocking at the front door with a warrant the same time these guys are repelling from a chopper, or else it's not legit...but then again I forgot we're talking about Cali