There’s some issue with overtaxing the grid in California, but that’s not the only electricity problem facing the Riverside police, who are scouring PG&E’s electrical customer billings for the clearly criminal under-user.

In their lawsuit filed in March, Chen-Chen Hwang, 67, and her husband Jiun-Tsong Wu, 75, alleged that deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department raided their two homes on Aug. 5, 2021. The couple’s lawyer, Alex Coolman, said the deputies suspected they were “stealing power to grow marijuana because their power consumption was low,” as per the Southern California News Group.

But Hwang and Wu were simply “thrifty,” Coolman said in a tweet. The couple uses solar panels to reduce their overall power usage.

For those of you unaware, there are two indicia of a marijuana grow house, very high or very low electrical usage, the former because they use high power lights and irrigation systems which suck up electric and the latter because they bypass the meter to conceal their usage and avoid having to pay the bill.

But how would the Riverside deputies know? It would be one thing if they had other indicia of a grow house and then went back to the utility to check the bills for the location, but that doesn’t appear to be what happened here, and there is nothing to suggest any cause to believe there was any cause other than the electric bill to think these were grow houses. So did PG&E reach out to the police to investigate “low users”?

The deputies then put two and two together and came up empty, so they naturally raided anyway.

The deputies allegedly broke multiple doors and rummaged through the couple’s belongings in their first home, resulting in damages worth nearly $6,000. In the end, they found no evidence of marijuana farming.

They then allegedly shifted their attention to Hwang and Wu’s second home, which sits in the same subdivision. Hwang, who was present, did not consent to the warrant-less raid, but the deputies allegedly took photos of the residence and raided its garage for up to 15 minutes.

Granted, “raiding its garage for up to 15 minutes” seems a bit hyperbolic, but coming on top of the first raid and, well, even a warrantless search of a garage for 1 minutes is unlawful, it still counts.

At the time, Wu spoke to Sgt. Julio Olguin — who was leading the search — on the phone and asked them to leave. During their conversation, Olguin allegedly “admitted that the searches of the homes were illegal.”

What then, you might wonder, did the deputies plan to do if they engaged in a flagrantly unlawful warrantless search of the houses, since any seizures would be subject to suppression by any mildly competent lawyer? The likely answer makes the conduct even more reprehensible, as the Riverside deps would claim, after having found a pot grow house, that they smelled the “poignant” odor of unburnt marijuana and feared the evidence would be destroyed, creating exigent circumstances to search without a warrant. Would it work? It has in the past.

On the bright side, the couple sued and the case settled for $136,000, which ought to cover the electric bill for a month or two.

H/T Thomas Johnson