New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick painted a grim picture of the city’s police headquarters at a City Council hearing on Monday.
Beyond malfunctioning plumbing and pervasive mold, the building is home to a thriving rodent population, which apparently developed a taste for the station’s confiscated cannabis stored in the department’s evidence room.
“The rats are eating our marijuana. They’re all high,” Kirkpatrick said. “It is not just at police headquarters. It is all the districts. The uncleanliness is off the charts. The janitorial cleaning (team) deserves an award trying to clean what is uncleanable.”
While Kirkpatrick joked about the rats being high, the situation is far grosser as the New Orleans Police Department headquarters crumbles under the weight of neglect from a combination of plumbing problems, heavy mold and deteriorating elevators and HVAC units, reports NOLA.com. And now rodent droppings and stoned rats are adding to the already low morale within the department, according to Kirkpatrick.
The deplorable conditions, Kirkpatrick told the outlet, are a major deterrent to recruitment and contribute to officer dissatisfaction. She has proposed relocating the headquarters entirely.
The City Council is considering a plan to rent space in a different building, an approach viewed as a more cost-effective alternative to the estimated $30 million price tag for renovating the existing headquarters.
While Louisiana lawmakers have been inching closer to legalizing cannabis for years, only limited medical marijuana is available to patients with a qualifying condition and then only at 10 dispensaries across the entire state. The law also does not allow dispensing weed in smokeable form, which is the most economical to access. Hence, no doubt, there is a thriving illicit market in the state.
Dead goats pointed deputies in Calhoun County, Michigan in the direction of a larger investigation when they were summoned on Saturday for an animal welfare complaint and found four dead goats at the back of a property. The welfare check quickly turned into a drug bust.
After obtaining a search warrant, deputies went back to the property on Sunday when, instead of ailing goats, they found a large, illegal cannabis grow operation in one of the buildings.
Over 140 marijuana plants and growing equipment were removed from the property, according to the sheriff’s office, reported KATV.com. No arrests have been reported as yet.