Disgusting but Necessary

Trash Pull!

All police and military units are comprised of individuals that require two things:

1. Individual Skills

2. Team Cohesion

Trash pulls need to be a tool in your investigative toolbox to retrieve facts from your target.  Tune in for a down and, literally, dirty, on the legality and tactics to be successful dumpster diving!

I hate them, but I do them, because they work.

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Good morning. It's Leo. Welcome back to the show. Let's get into trash pulls. Probably the most underused and disgusting police technique. So when the narcotics episode released, I talked about how that's kind of like a team sport, and it's comprised of a bunch of individual skills. So trash pull is an individual skill or an individual technique. It's an investigative technique, and I'll go into the Fourth Amendment aspect of it, which is very brief. And then I'll go into kind of the tactics and the ideas behind it. So regarding the Fourth Amendment, which is the individual citizens' protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, specifically by the government, by us, by the police, they are protected in places where they are found to have a reasonable expectation of privacy, or REP, as we like to shorten it to. On the street, the trash cans have been found to not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. So if you're investigating someone and they live at a certain house and their trash cans are up next to their house on the side of it, or up right next to the front door, you cannot go up during the night and take the trash out of their trash can. However, on trash day, when they roll them down there to the street, you can go and take all the little bags you want. The courts have found once it's off the property or rolled down to a place for the trash people to take it, you are now allowed to go in and take it. That has become no longer their stuff. They are no longer protected with that stuff. So the idea is to get their trash and hope that they've thrown away something that can be used as evidence. So that's that's the very short, down and dirty version. Again, this show is not supposed to be legal advice. So do your own homework. Don't do something stupid and say Leo told me to do that, or just be misguided by me. By all means, do your own work, talk to your prosecutors, figure out what they want and what they expect. Uh so that's the Fourth Amendment side of it. Once it goes out there, it's no longer protected. You don't need a search warrant on that bag of trash. You don't need to be in hot pursuit of that bag of trash, none of that. You can just take a couple bags of trash. So as far as the reasoning behind it, and I'll give you a couple examples of successes that I've had firsthand. I can honestly say, thinking back, I don't remember a trash pull where I got nothing useful. Obviously, there's a wide range of usefulness. I mean, I've gotten crazy stuff that I immediately had a search warrant on the house, and I've gotten minor stuff that just kind of slightly corroborated what I was doing or furthered my investigation. I've gotten something as minor as a phone bill, and it gives me a phone number or an account number. And I, and I'm then able to do some kind of legal work, be it historical sell site warrant or, you know, anything, pull tolls, pull, pull subscriber info on that number, whatever it is, with the phone bill, I can get some information that I didn't have. And like I said, I've gotten stuff. I remember one where I got it was just a bunch of big vacuum seal bags. And the guy was selling kilos or, you know, half kilos or something. And so small amounts of coke and crack didn't really matter to him. So there were uh there were little bags with little bits of coke and crack all through this trash can where he had, and then there were the larger vacuum seal bags that were empty and had weed and coke residue. So getting that that gave me a search warrant on that house. That was my target house. This was meant to be a brief investigative step. And I just I like hitting doors. So I just kind of ended my investigation there. Like, all right, we got a search warrant. It's kind of funny. The guy, I still remember that house in Savannah, Georgia. And I was just this morning, I woke up super early, which is probably what made me think of trash bowls because you do those early. And the guy whose house it was, I was just doing my Leo guy post early morning, and I saw that a cop was indicted for not framing him for murder, but exaggerating the evidence and misleading a grand jury and misleading prosecutors. And a cop was charged because this the guy I was investigating was a bad dude. He was involved in murders forever. He was always shooting at somebody, or, you know, he's a bad little joker. And so kind of ironic. Maybe that's what reminded me of it. Maybe it's the early morning, I don't know. But I wanted to hit his house. I got cocaine out of his trash can. I mean, it's hard to deny that somebody put all that stuff in there. You got your mail in there tying you to the residence, you got cocaine in there, you got vacuum seal bags with weed residue. I mean, I could take any patrol officer off the street and they could articulate the probable cause on that search warrant, especially given his background. So that's obviously a higher end yield. That's ideal, is that you get something like that. But it can be used in all kinds of investigations. I mean, violent crime investigations. Are they likely to throw away bloody clothes? Yeah. We all think of them like throwing them out the window or going to some apartments, but people get panicky when they do a crime and they may put stuff in there. If you're working a burglary, they may there may be stuff from that burglary in there that they just in a panic threw away. Or, you know, maybe five guys that did it, and one of them's leaving the house, and he just throws some little bits of it away. You know, he throws away a handful of junk and you can tie it to your burglary scene. So I used it primarily in narcotics and gun investigations, federal investigations. I would go out and do trash pulls, but you can use it for anything where you need to further your case. One thing about them, every single time I've ever done a trash pull, I'm not gonna pretend I've done a billion, I've done less than 20 where I've been out and been sneaking around. But every time I have sworn that I'm never gonna do it again. And I mean, I policed along the coast in the south, and consistently it was diapers and some kind of leftover seafood that had been sitting for several days in the heat. And it is awful. There's maggots, it's just absolutely gross. So I would suggest wearing gloves. Just kidding, that's obvious, but uh yeah, it's bad. It smells bad. You might curse my name for it, but it will build your case. There's a very good, even if it's as simple as tying somebody to a house, even if it's that simple. Now let's get into the tactics of a trash pull. I also have a funny story about this, which I'll go into after I brush over the tactics that I like to use. First off, you need somewhere to put the trash. If you got a pickup truck or a van or a, you know, a Jeep Cherokee or something, somewhere that you can toss it without slamming a trunk. Because what you're gonna do is you're gonna pull up and you're gonna try to very quickly grab a couple of bags out of that trash can, load them up, and drive away. And you're gonna go back to your office or your spot. It's gonna be early in the morning. You have to find out when that neighborhood's trash day is. And then whenever they have trash day, you're gonna go in at, you know, 3:30-ish in the morning. That's when I like to do it because people stay up and hang out. You know, it depends on the neighborhood. If it's a nice neighborhood, people may be in bed by one. You may be able to just stay up late. But if you're in a rough neighborhood, there may be people walking until three to four in the morning. And then some people start popping up at 5:30 and going to work or doing whatever they're doing. So you need to figure you need to kind of know the neighborhood and figure out your timing and know the trash day. And then you'll pull up and you'll grab a couple bags of trash. It should be a five to 10 second operation once you're on scene and you load it up. And then you drive away, you go back to the office, you glove all the way up, put on hazmat suit if you need to, whatever it is, and you go through that trash piece by piece and you see what you find. You take pictures of it before, you take pictures of it once you find evidence, all that. You treat it just like a little crime scene, kind of. You write your report on it, describe what you got, and then you throw away all the diapers and crab legs, lobster tails, whatever they're eating. So when you go out there, you don't want to get caught, but you might get caught. Obviously, you should be aware beforehand if they have a security system, if they have cameras that are going to go off when you pull up, you probably need to redesign your op because you don't want them to wake up to their phone dinging and a video of you hopping out grabbing their trash. That burns up the operation. So the goal is to just grab them discreetly and get up out of there. I believe it was in the show The Wire, where they went around passing out trash bags in some apartments. It might have been a different show, and they gave their target apartment different color trash bags. It was like, hey, we're a trash server, we're selling trash bags, and they gave their target pink bags and everybody else had blue bags. It had a little cardboard thing on it that said, like, Mr. Happy's trash bags. Find us at your local Dollar General. Like they were trying to promote it. And that was some apartments. So then they went to the apartment dumpster and they took the pink bags. I've never done anything that crazy. I just go snatch bags from houses. So back to trying to be discreet. Obviously, I always do this with two people. You don't want to get confronted and you're alone. So there will be two of you in the car when you go to snatch the trash. I took a guy out when I was in narcotics and I was training my buddy, love you, JJ. Took him out on a trash pole. I would try to get, you know, when I was training somebody, I would try to get them to do everything. So I might do a trash pole on a case where I wouldn't normally do a trash pole just because I didn't want to release them as out of training and properly trained without having done that. And then, you know, somebody says we're doing a trash pole, and they're like, what is that? I've never done that. Oh, Leo trained me. They're like, who trained you? Leo. And they don't even know what I'm talking about. So I don't want to just tell them about a trash pole. I wanted them to do a trash pull. And luckily with my boy, we did, and it was really funny. So we pulled up to this house. I said Jeep Cherokee earlier because that's what we had at that time. And we pull up, uh, it's early morning, you know, it's probably 4:30. We came in early, met at the office, jumped in a car together, and we pull up in this Jeep Cherokee to the house and no cameras on it. We're good. Nobody outside, lights are all off. And I told him beforehand, he was just off patrol, and he still kind of had that patrol mindset where he was kind and professional and yes, sir, yes, ma'am. And he was just, he was very much a cop. And I'd been, I saw it in him quick. And I was like, hey, man, I'm glad you're squared away. You're by the book. I know you're gonna follow the rules. Like, you're not, you're not gonna drag me into some weird shit because like you're a good, honest cop. I see that. You're not one of these guys that's been dying to go to narcotics so you can grow a huge beard and you know, slime around the projects and buy crack rocks all day. Like you'll be running cases pretty much, not doing undercover work, but you still got to have a little game to you. I need you to develop your swag a little bit because you ain't got no swag right now. And I need you to be able to move in a plain clothes capacity. Even if you're not gonna do undercover, I need you to loosen up on surveillance. I need you to be able to talk to people that are from the streets. And so I was I was kind of working on loosening him up a little bit. And I told him before we started this trash pull operation, I said, hey man, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna boom, boom, boom, we're gonna pull up, we're gonna get this trash, we're gonna be up out of there, we're gonna go back to the office, we're gonna cut this open, we're gonna put the diapers off to this, we're gonna find some crack rocks in this trash. It's gonna be a good day. We'll probably cut out a little early because our shift started at four. So we'll be done by like 12, 12:30. So it's gonna, unless we got something going, and then we'll make some OT. And I'm kind of hyping them up. Like, man, we're about to have a good day. Don't even worry about it. So we go out there, we pull up to the house, nobody outside, it's dark, like I already said. And trash cans are by the street. It's like, man, we got this good. So, oh, and I talked to him beforehand about, hey, we need a story. Like, this is what I like to do. I got a story if they catch us, like on the one in a million chance they catch us, or one in 50 or whatever it is, what are we gonna say? I asked him that. I'd asked my trainees, like, let's hear your plan. How do you want to do it when you're an agent? Like, what you, what you gonna do? If if they walk outside, say, who are you? And so we decided on there was a college nearby, we were kind of young, and we were like, hey, we're gonna say we go to SCAD, Savannah College of Art and Design, and we're doing a project, and so we needed, like, I look kind of homeless, but he looked kind of clean and young. So we decided to say, like, we're college students and we're doing a project where we need like some bottles and cans and trash and stuff, and like we're just up working on it early. So, like, that's what we were gonna say if we got caught. Like, no, we go to SCAD, like you can keep your trash. Like, what I ain't trying to fight with you, but we just need some trash like for our our project. Because SCAD, they do weird stuff like that. Like, you could honestly believe, if you knew SCAD, you could honestly believe, like, okay, maybe they're out getting trash at 4 a.m. Like these kids probably just smoked a bowl and they're out doing their their art project or whatever. It's an art school. So we pull up to the house and we think we're good. And then our target steps out of the shadows. He was smoking a cigarette in the damn dark on the side of the house. So we get out and we're just caught red-handed. I mean, opened the lid quietly, got the car out there, trunk is open on this Jeep Cherokee, and we're lifting bags out, and we just hear, what's up? And we look over and he's stepping out of the shadows. Now we can see the cigarette amber burning. And my pa, I'm getting ready to, I'm waiting for him to lay out the cover story. Like, do your fucking job. Like, I we just talked about this, and he goes, Good morning, sir. And then looks at me and goes, Let's go, let's go, let's go. And he throws the trash in the back and slams it and jumps in the driver's seat. And I was like, Oh, bro, that was some police ass shit right there. You just did. So we leave, we get back to the office, and I'm like, what do you think he thinks right now? And he was like, I don't know, he's in the red a little bit. He's like, I don't know. And I was like, he thinks we're the police. He thinks he's under investigation. You said good morning, sir. What happened to the plan? But the wheels came off because he got worked up. He went back to being a patrol officer. He was a sturdy professional with that guy, but he needed to probably switch it off a little bit. He ended up being a really good narcotics investigator. He just he his transition to acting like a dirt bag was not smooth, which I would take over someone that very smoothly transitions to acting like a dirt bag because they are a dirt bag. So trash pulls to recap, excellent tool, excellent investigative tool. Underused, I mean, if you can get three or four bags of trash, there's probably something in there. And if you can get a search warrant off just that, I mean, the the effort to reward ratio is excellent. If you can avoid doing bye walks, sending informants in the house, doing surveillance, doing pickoffs, doing wiretaps, you know, if you can get that same target by stealing their trash on trash day, then you've put minimal effort with a search warrant outcome, which is really what I like. That's generally always been my goal is can I get a search warrant? You know, you get into higher level cases, you may be chasing something different, but if you're doing street level enforcement, the goal is generally search warrant on residents. And it can give it to you. Hope you guys enjoyed. I'd love to hear your stories of trash poles gone wrong or trash poles gone right and what you got out of it. So hit me up on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, any of that crap, and send your stories to me. And thank you for listening.