High Electric Bill? Watch Out

First, my apologies because I can't find the original source of this story, although it could have been from a link I saw at the San Francisco Chronicle.

However, I was reading this morning about how a Carlsbad, California mom had her home and her son's school visited twice by police who were sure she was running a pot farm because of the family's high electric bills. According to the article, it's standard practice to monitor the size of our electric bills to determine whether we might be growing drugs (or plants used to make them) and to get a court order to perform a search on any home or building just on the basis of the high bill.

What police found, however, was a household where kids routinely left lights and appliances on and where the mother does an unusually large amount of laundry each day.

That one unsettled my stomach for a bit. I mean, my bills are - I suspect - higher than most homes in my neighborhood, but because I run power in three different buildings (each the size of a large full house) to operate two businesses. While not all of our computers are on all the time, there are at least four running - with a host of peripherals - at any given time. Electricity provides some of my heat. Several of our appliances are older, too, and probably not as energy efficient as I'd like.

The way power was set up here, there are no separate power accounts for each business as opposed to the household, so it's all lumped together into one bill. After reading that story, however, I'm inclined to rethink this. I mean, it just seems silly to get embarrassed and inconvenienced just because you have a high power bill.

But I'd also like the police and government to rethink a system where we're constantly presumed guilty of something before any evidence is offered. The police, in this case, apologized to the Carlsbad mom, but she wants a public, written apology, and the police don't feel that's warranted. They had a right to suspect her, they said.

Hey... remember to turn the lights off when you leave the office after reading this. Smirk.