Several police districts are planning to resume aerial search operations for cannabis, a year after top brass scrapped the annual eradication operation at a national level.
Stuff revealed last year that top brass at Police National Headquarters, which provides more than $700,000 a year to fund hundreds of hours of flight time for helicopters and planes used as part of the operation, decided to scrap it.
One of the reasons the operation – which ran for more than 20 years and involved officers taking to the skies each year to find illicit back country plantations – was grounded because of a lack of appetite from the leaders of the 12 police districts.
With the increased harm in many communities arising from other drugs, particularly methamphetamine, a “one-size-fits-all” operation to hunt for cannabis growing sites from the air was no longer the best use of resources, a police spokeswoman said at the time.
READ MORE:
* Annual cannabis operation culled in shift to ‘more significant and sophisticated’ approach to organised crime
* National brands decision not to inform police minister or staff about cannabis cull ‘unacceptable’
* Police slash annual cannabis operation, blind siding frontline staff and officials
However, on Wednesday police said a number of districts were including an annual aerial cannabis flying phase as part of their campaigns to target the “illicit operations”.
For operational purposes they would not identify when or which districts were taking…
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Several police districts are planning to resume aerial search operations for cannabis, a year after top brass scrapped the annual eradication operation at a national level.
Stuff revealed last year that top brass at Police National Headquarters, which provides more than $700,000 a year to fund hundreds of hours of flight time for helicopters and planes used as part of the operation, decided to scrap it.
One of the reasons the operation – which ran for more than 20 years and involved officers taking to the skies each year to find illicit back country plantations – was grounded because of a lack of appetite from the leaders of the 12 police districts.
With the increased harm in many communities arising from other drugs, particularly methamphetamine, a “one-size-fits-all” operation to hunt for cannabis growing sites from the air was no longer the best use of resources, a police spokeswoman said at the time.
READ MORE:
* Annual cannabis operation culled in shift to ‘more significant and sophisticated’ approach to organised crime
* National brands decision not to inform police minister or staff about cannabis cull ‘unacceptable’
* Police slash annual cannabis operation, blind siding frontline staff and officials
However, on Wednesday police said a number of districts were including an annual aerial cannabis flying phase as part of their campaigns to target the “illicit operations”.
For operational purposes they would not identify when or which districts were taking…
