Any confiscated cash needs to go into state level or even federal coffers, not to the agency or local cops that did the confiscating. That removes the immediate incentive for abuse, while retaining the tool for what it was intended for: actual criminals.
(I don’t have the sources but read years ago that states that let the cops keep the cash have ridiculous levels of abusive confiscations, whereas states that have the money go to the state coffers basically don’t)
(Most civil asset forfeiture is done by local cops stopping people on the highway and similar)
The DoJ has established a workaround for this, and it's called Equitable Sharing. Local cop seizes assets on behalf of the DEA or other federal agency, assets are held by the federal agency rather than the local agency, the federal agency sends a kickback payment to the local agency and takes over prosecution, local agency washes its hands of the matter, enjoys the plunder, and goes off and robs more subjects.
I suspect the DoJ understood this and non ironically did not consider the problem of exploitation by corrupt cops to be a meaningful one. Because they're the DoJ. Many of them are or were basically cops themselves. It's very hard to recognize when your own people have become the bad guys. This is what we came up with checks and balances and separation of powers for, but I guess Congress is checked out on this one.
It wasn't an accident that abuse was not considered, it was intentionally designed this way, to keep local cop buddies happy and complicit.
It might actually also make things worse, as local cops only get a small kickback, they need to confiscate more to get to the same levels for themselves.
Why not require due process and 4th amendment rights to be respected?
If the government convicts you of the crime and proves the money is the proceeds of the crime you are convicted for, them maybe it makes sense for the government to seize the funds. Absent that, it should be taken for what it is: armed robery.
The whole exigent circumstances exception is required to stop a crime which is highly probably to already be in progress and for which evidence could be lost to the prosecution. Especially at international airports this is highly likely to happen. The problem is that the system is set up in a way that encourages corruption.
What about your phone? Perhaps it's a stolen one. Would you mind if the airport crew keep it in custody for a few years until you prove it was adquired legaly in a court?
If they have reasonable suspicion that it indeed was. For example a case with a unique color pattern that is similar to a phone known to be stolen. Or if you can't unlock it.
This ship has sailed quite some time ago - resist TSA or border control to unlock your phone, and they either confiscate it or turn you back. These powers are unlikely to ever be curtailed again in the name of security. But I also think that TSA and border control should rather focus on people actually violating immigration law and compromising travel security.
I like how the first two paragraphs under the intro (History) is basically outlining how the British doing it to American colonists was a catalyst for violent revolution to come…
…and then the third is describing how American courts immediately recreated the laws with these inspirations to increase their budgets.
While that's true, you absolutely don't have to settle for monarchy because a lot of democratic countries don't have this problem. Start with Canada (ignoring its namesake monarch). Civil forfeiture is a US specialty.
While perhaps specifically Canada does not have this type of asset forfeiture, I’m not sure they’re a good example of financial liberty that we should aspire to here in the US.
As a Canadian I'd like to take this opportunity to ask you what you know about Canada.
Like what do you really know about Canada?
Because I'm getting the same "Montreal is the capital of Canada" vibes that I got from an American tourist when I was a little kid visiting the same tourist town that they were on summer vacation.
It astounds me how confidentially incorrect Americans (I'm assuming that you're American) are when it comes to their close neighbour.
I'm not an American, and instead of asking an open-ended counter question you could try to address the issue
Did they not freeze bank accounts of people donating to the freedom convoy? Please note that this is a question of facts and not opinions. It is also completely removed from whether you (or I for that matter) support this cause or find the means that they chose legitimate.
Not refuting it at all, just find it hard to see the relevance to the thread.
I would imagine that the funds that Canada froze in a unique situation are a rounding error compared to the funds some random US state seizes in a year.
Whatever their flaws so many other countries including Canada are so much better at this thing than the United States.
This is whataboutism. Both are bad, so where's your argument?
And this is relevant precisely because it's an example that shows the lack of financial liberty, that you could fall prey to in Canada. I thought it's a fitting answer to the parent comment.
No, its not whataboutism, because corruption in America is literally the subject that we're discussing.
How many people were affected by this issue? Again, it's a rounding eror compared to the number of people who are affected the corrupt practice of civil forfeiture.
These things are night and day different. A one off event compared to a systemic issue.
I think it exists in Ireland too. I suspect it may be a legislative flaw that can be exploited in all common law countries (with the buy in of legislatures of course).
I dunno, there's some stuff like French ferme générale private tax collectors that weren't constrained in their profit-margin [0] or privateers with letters of marque and reprisal that went after civilians from other countries. [1]
The Sheriff of London paid the monarch for their position, ￡300, and paid for this (as well as stashing away some for themselves) through taxes and fees or fines assessed by the sovereign.
This would have certain parallels to contemporary civil forfeiture.
It's an irrelevant move. For this voyage Drake traveled faster than news of him. That's a big part of why him and his crew were so successful again and again.
It abstracts it away by one level. Without appropriate third party oversight you're going to be playing whack a mole until you have the President himself managing the operation.
To solve this, I would go further: any money seized by the government, whether asset forfeiture or a fine (but not fees or taxes) must not go into any government funds, and should instead be removed from the money supply, if there isn’t a “who it should be returned to”.
Well, maybe if money from fines was allowed to go directly to paying for something that directly addresses the specific type of harm that the type of crime the fine was for tends to cause, that would be ok. Like, if someone is fined for damaging the road, that money can go towards fixing roads.
Just make it a criminal case. "Transporting more than $10,000 cash in service of a crime." Now the government has to prove the details of the case beyond a reasonable doubt, rather than simple preponderance of evidence, and the accused has actual constitutional rights which dictate the process. A key piece there would afford the accused legal representation if they cannot afford it and would allow them to make constitutional arguments about the nature of the search and seizure.
That would require evidence and due process, which is exactly what is not desired by the gov’t here. Because money is fungible and proving some specific money came from some specific illegal activity is hard.
Making someone else prove it came from a legit source before it disappears is much easier on them.
Especially since drug dealers (or most other folks) are not really all that interested in the scrutiny involved in a civil trial. Civil discovery is potentially incredibly invasive, with few of the protections of a criminal case.
Or just publicly burn the cash. This retains the punitive element of seizure from actual criminals, eliminates the perverse incentives from LE treating seized funds as a revenue source, and causes actual pain to LE if/when a court determines that they owe restitution for unwarranted seizure.
> Any confiscated cash needs to go into state level or even federal coffers
If I was king.. all confiscated cash must go to organizations such as ACLU and EFF (not a comprehensive list). That way it can still be done when sensible, but the more it happens the more money goes to organizations who strive to reduce abuse.
This moves the problem one level up and makes returning it more difficult since they are now muddled with other assets. A safe deposit box would be required, with the court handling the keys.
I can't load the article, so this is likely off topic, but the memory came rushing back when I read this headline.
I attended a wedding that got hit by a major flash flood that required a rescue operation by boat and helicopter. Thankfully no one was seriously injured. A half dozen people were swept away and rescued from trees. The rest of us got to higher floors of the building and they were concerned about us waiting out the flood because cars from the parking lot floated and rammed the first floor of the building. It was featured on an episode of I Do, Redo.
They brought in busses to transport the 61 people rescued to the local high school where they had activated the Red Cross and provided us dry cloths and food. I can't say enough nice things about the Red Cross volunteers and the staff at the high school, and same with the fire department and EMS.
However, when we were loaded into the busses, the police held the busses until they had a drug dog come into the busses to walk up and down the aisles, and only after that let the busses take us to the high school. While no one was seriously injured physically, people were traumatized from the flooding event and many attendees suffered from PTSD for years.
It was so cruel for the police department to do what they did with everyone in the mental state that we were in.
For reasons I do not understand, we were not free to leave the high school, and even the people that did not lose their cars to the flood were required to go to the high school on the busses. I can't recall how long they detained us at the high school, I'd guess 3 to 5 hours, and then they let us leave. The friend that came to pick me up (I did lose my vehicle to the flood) got to the high school not long after I did and had to wait in the parking lot for hours.
We wanted to feel safe once we got to dry land after the ordeal we went through. I did not feel safe until I got home.
If this happened as you described it, worst part is that this evident lack of judgement would be detrimental in fighting real crime. If they were legally compelled to do it, there also is a political problem.
Maybe there is a silly explanation about the bus being confiscated from a local drug lord and people needed to be protected, but otherwise I don't see a way how you officials could come out here not looking like idiots.
quite simply to screen drugs from reaching the emergency shelter, which is also a school, and save you from special prosecution applied to these situations and protect themselves politically from something the media will monitor closely. if they screened you at the shelter, its worse for everyone if they find anything on premises. emergency shelters will house anyone affected, including vulnerable elderly, children, mentally ill people, and unhoused heavy drug users. everyone was likely checked which also protects you while sheltering. i volunteered for a shelter during katrina and it gets out of hand very fast with just one delusional person or drug user. i stopped a robbery within 3 minutes of starting my first shift. a deranged person was aggressively drug seeking, and robbing pill bottles away from an elderly woman in a wheelchair. could have been your mom or grandma just caught up in it. so- check everyone as a protocol, as its for public shelter safety. seek therapy for ptsd, its never too late to heal. if you have heavy bias against law enforcement, perhaps consider joining a community program or volunteering - do it as a therapy to yourself to help improve your insight which will help everyone work towards improving the situation in your community.
Naah, hard to say what exact proximate cause (excuse) they entertained in their fucking skulls, but yes, it comes down to budget.
Police budgets are a farce, and this is what the US gets. Public services are (in too many cases literally) criminally underfunded.
And .. obviously the last ~50-60 years of "tough on crime" dogwhistling (as the civil rights movement successfully moved the discrimination boundary) is the new heuristic for quasi-segregation. Of course it's was not invented overnight back then, as it has been ongoing since ~1866. The post-Reconstruction culture and policy changes all boil down to "X while Black" and occasionally "or poor".
> Public services are (in too many cases literally) criminally underfunded.
Finish the job and end 'em. The US isn't a compatible platform for that kind of thing. It's a decentralized libertarian wild west with low social development, as intended from the start. Meanwhile, our taxes are going to waste in ignorance of that or in pretending we can (or even should) change it.
Unfortunately not consenting and knowing your rights doesn't help because they will search your belongings anyway. You can only delay the search which usually will not work in your favour. It happens in many developed "rule of law" countries. Something similar happened to me in Germany when traveling alone by car. When they noticed I have multiple smartphones with me they went hysterical. Luckily I had no cash on me, neither drugs of course. They were pursuing some criminals and perfectly wasted half an hour on scrolling my smartphones. Not even a single nude photo, just sunsets and travel photos with my girlfriend. Great job Kriminalpolizei from Dresden.
German polizei search culture blows my mind though.
When festival buses are going to Fusion Festival (think Burning Man), it's common knowledge that half the buses will be stopped and "controlled", i.e. warantless search of all the passengers' belongings. That my German friends think this is normal or acceptable just blows my mind.
Searching buses and passenger cars is quite common in Belgium as well, "probable cause" is enough, and we all know how easy it is to find probable cause.
it’s getting even worse, in addition to warrantless action, they are getting looser and looser with granting warrants. A few years back, someone called their Mayor a willie/"pimmel" on twitter and got his house raided.
You say as if "consent" means anything in such situations. They told me to unlock the smartphones. The plain-clothes policeman was so aggressive and rude that I felt the devices would be confiscated otherwise, he was already holding them in his hands. I was only transiting, didn't feel like looking for a lawyer in Germany or even speaking German. They refused to identify themselves when I wanted to note it down before finally driving away. I know they were real policemen because regular uniformed police patrol joined them during the search.
I've never had any experience like that luckily, but nowadays I only travel with disposable phones. They want to confiscate it? Let them. And If I do decide to grant access, anything important is never stored on the phone itself.
This is about a U.S.A citizen on a domestic flight. I'm wondering, in similar situations what kind of rights - if any - do non-U.S.A citizen have on domestic flights? or international flights to/from the U.S.A?
The 4th Amendment doesn't mention citizenship. It covers the entirety of the people of the United States. So U.S Citizens, U.S. Nationals, and permanent resident aliens all have the same rights as far as the 4th Amendment is concerned. It does get more ambiguous when you consider undocumented aliens, temporary resident aliens, and nonresident aliens.
The one encounter with the DEA agent reminds me of cheap, sleazy, sales tactics used at car dealerships. High pressure tactics to force an action.
Civil forfeiture is absolutely insane. The “war on drugs” needs to end. Legalize all drugs. Dissolve the DEA. Tax all drugs. Earmark part of the sales towards drug addiction treatment and mental health.
Most governments let them win. People just don't want to admit that losing comes with consequences so they think the war still exists.
Few countries won their war on drugs and it's amazing the benefits that a drug-free society brings. In fact, not even benefits, but the lack of obscene negatives.
No junkies on the streets might be a good baseline criterion.
Ideally you'd want a world where it was effectively impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization. Singapore has managed it, though being much much smaller helps a lot there.
Singapore has not managed it by being a "much smaller state", it managed it by being a highly repressive and authoritarian state. Myself, I prefer the junkies on the streets.
I actually grew up in another relatively small state that had a huge heroin problem in the 80s: Portugal. Portugal solved it by decriminalizing drugs and by making treatment modalities available for the people who needed help, namely methadone. This worked spectacularly well.
By the way, if you want to make it "impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization", I imagine you will want to include one of the most dangerous hard drugs there is: alcohol. We all know how well that worked the last time it was tried...
Thank you for using this term instead of calling Singapore a dictatorship (as many others are wont to do). It's a much more accurate description of Singapore's style of governance.
Singapore hasn't managed it, even in a ridiculously small land area with extremely aggressive laws against drugs they are seeing an increase in usage by youth.
It simply does not work to fight it aggressively. Junkies on the street can be managed but probably not eradicated in the next few decades, the issues the USA sees with drugs are extreme, and the root cause is usually much deeper than the drugs themselves. A lot of other developed countries have managed to help their drug addicted homeless population, the USA seems to be on a downward spiral on that front for decades...
Attacking the surface of the problem is a game of whack-a-mole, a Sisyphean task that won't ever come close to solving the actual problem.
That’s fair, and I agree that a multi-pronged solution is probably the best one.
You need programs to address the root causes (homelessness, poverty) as well as aggressive enforcement of drug laws. I’d argue the two are not necessarily at odds, and actually would complement one another.
> I’d argue the two are not necessarily at odds, and actually would complement one another.
How would that work in reality though? Aggressively enforcing drug laws push people to the margins (being arrested, having a felony charge, etc.), living on the margins of society is a major factor into pushing people into despair, despair fuels drug addiction.
Aggressive enforcement of drug laws is not compatible with an empathetic approach to drug abuse, it also creates many consequences which could've been unforeseen when introduced but we all live in the world of such consequences. Removing freedoms in name of pushing anti-drug laws, for what ends specifically? What are we trying to achieve by being tough on drugs in the end?
Singapore hasn't managed its war on drugs? Lol what? Of course they have. They have managed their wars on a lot of things. Affordable housing, immigration, congestion, cultural division. Drugs was probably the easiest ones to manage..
It does work. It works extremely well. Extremely well. The problem is that if you don't actually want to win the war, it works poorly. As is evident in the US and many other first world nations.
No, fixing the problems that just letting it run rampant is whack a mole. You're spraying for cockroaches when you find them rather than fumigating the house.
It's okay, most people from leading countries of the world think their situation is the best and they need compassion for all the amazingly negative aspects of drug use. Junkies, aggression, organised crime involvement, etc. The truth is that your governments don't want to fix the problem and it's obviously snowballed out of their control. It's easier to lay down and admit defeat than actually tackle the problem when it's this far gone. Good thing places like Singapore never let it get to that point.
They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
Their own statistics show (by their definition of) drug abuse increasing in 2023 [0].
Even with all the repressive stance, death penalty, they still see an increase. That isn't what I would consider "working" for such harsh penalties.
> They've won the war on drugs. It's not even a contest which is better, the drug free environment is way better. You just have to experience both to realise.
There are absolutely no "drug free" environments in the world, absolutely none so your statement is impossible to assert in reality.
I prefer to live in a society where death penalties do not exist, even less for the cases of substance use/abuse.
That sounds like your ideal. Mine would be when there is no authority that says which plants or substances I can put in my body. I don't want/need an authority to enforce "what's best for me".
And what side-effects do you think that making it "effectively impossible to buy drugs" will have on society? I'm genuinely interested in your opinion on this.
Korea, Japan, China, Singapore. It seems to be a thing that is well managed in countries that actually control their populations in some form, whether by immigration or strong laws.
It's amazing too. It's weird how many people are for drugs when such environments exist.
The madness stops when you win the war? What do you mean what does it mean to win the war? What do you think the war is? It means you eliminate the abuse and criminal behaviours of drugs. This is easiest done by eliminating drugs themselves as a societal problem. Obviously it's impossible to eliminate every single instance, but it's quite easy to eliminate virtually all negatives to society.
The same way when does anything end? When you reach the level that is what you can feasibly resemble as "the end". So in this case, drug-free.
>What target needs to be reached for the war on drugs to stop?
You need to eliminate the negatives that society has to deal with related to illicit drug use? It's not that hard.
When is a newly built house finished?
>Then why has nobody done it?
Huh? Many countries have done it. Why many others haven't is because they don't want to.. Drug usage is a problem for the lower rungs of society, not the government or higher ups. The government must want to improve the life of their citizens at the cost of themselves. Like most objectively good government decisions.
> The same way when does anything end? When you reach the level that is what you can feasibly resemble as "the end". So in this case, drug-free.
You seem to be unaware that you're cyclically defining "the end" to be "when it's over".
War generally ends when the other side capitulates, or when both sides run out of resources and come to a peace agreement. In war on drugs, there's no "other side", there's just an invisible black market that you can get more and more visible by introducing more and more survaillence.
That's because the purpose of the war on drugs is to "disrupt" and "criminalize" black and leftist communities. Obviously you can't just say the quiet part out loud, even though they have:
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” - Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, 1994.
The goal of the war on drugs was never to remove drugs from society or eliminate drug use. The US government introduced LSD to the 1960's counterculture through MKULTRA and crack cocaine into black neighborhoods. The US government funnels arms and money through drug cartels. The US government wants drugs on the streets, and wants them to be illegal, and wants drug laws to be arbitrary and cruel, because they know the specter of the angry black man and the dope-smoking communist will scare the mainstream so bad that they'll beg the government to be as violent and authoritarian as they like just to keep "law and order."
Doubt it. It may have started with this, but it didn't live its life like that.
Drug free societies are way better in every measurable way. You only have to live in one for long enough that returning from that place seems absurd to be ridiculed with drugs.
only big farma companies are allow to destroy human lives by selling narcotics and should be allowed to hide the profits when brought to court. isn't it obvious?
This video linked in the article (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XBzV0bDZdQ) makes me want to donate to Institute for Justice to maybe help stop this practice. But a bit of Googling shows that IfJ were also one of the legal forces behind the Citizens United decision, which is something I really don't want to support.
The "Citizens United" ruling simply said that citizens who pool money to pay for political media do not lose their first amendment rights by doing so in the form of a corporation. (or other entity). In this case it was a group who funded a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton.
That's it.
Citizens United was a fundamentally pro-first amendment, pro-human rights ruling.
I wonder if you can mount a defense of the idea that government has the right to ban people from making videos that criticize political candidates without government approval?
The counterargument is that allowing the very rich to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, without even full transparency as to where the money is coming from, makes our nation far worse.
You can tell that’s an opinion held by most of the people in this country by the fact that we had a set of campaign finance laws that were gutted or basically made moot by various recent developments like Citizens United. We have those adorable quaint little limits (4 figures) that a person can give to a campaign per election cycle. The point of that is that as a person, there probably ought to be a limit for how much money you can give a campaign.
And entities other than people, just like they aren’t entitled to votes, aren’t entitled to be able to stuff money into campaigns. Even if they pretend they’re independent.
None of the campaign finance laws we have mean anything when you can use these loopholes big enough to drive an oil tanker through. Also, I think we’re the only ones among advanced democracies who have this stuff. I don’t think it’s making our democracy healthier.
It's disingenuous to frame it as being simply about "making videos"
The ruling barred restrictions on corporations, unions, and nonprofit organizations from independent expenditures, allowing groups to independently support political candidates with financial resources.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the court's ruling represented "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government"
The people collectively have not submitted a constitutional amendment
and I’m going to be selling ad space to SuperPACs every 2 years until they do. I really thought for sure that one would provoke a tweak to the constitution, but nope!
Technically true, but irrelevant in this case. The supreme court decided that people working together have the same first amendment rights that they do working individually. I think it was the correct decision, even if the fallout from it isn’t good.
That's a different argument. And one profoundly flawed in its own way.
A corporate entity (that is, any entity comprised of two or more people) might have a need for legal rights, but there's no reason acceptable to me that it has to be on a notion of equivalence to "personhood", equivalent to human rights. And calling it that merely compounds both error and confusion.
Courts are not infallible. And the Santa Clara v. SPRR US origin is its own ball of bullshit.
on the contrary, illegal recourse often dramatically increases criminality on the part of government. individual illegal recourse is 'lone-wolf terrorism', organized covert illegal recourse is 'organized crime', and organized overt illegal recourse is 'insurgency' or 'civil war'. all of these situations almost invariably open doors to mass human rights abuses (criminality) on the part of the government, because it makes that criminality popular. typically, even if the insurgency wins, the increased level of government criminality persists across the regime change, often for decades or centuries
I see none of those as 'chill', so ye. Maybe actual boring liberals in a American context. When I was younger I despised social democrats, but I realized I would not want eager young people like I was decide things.
At least in some states if the cops bust into someone's house without a warrant the person has the right to shoot them, but I guess that doesn't apply to cars anywhere.
Has anybody mentioned the fourth amendment? All this talk of rationale is misguided. The plain meaning of the 4th has been undermined by our corrupted court system.
But I believe these cases are not leveraging the 4th amendment. Civil Forfeiture has levied a flaw in the 6th amendment, where only people have a right to a trial and other procedural protections while assets do not.
So they try to separate the person from the asset, and launch a case against an asset as if it can call a lawyer and defend itself. They don't charge the person, they establish some weaker level of review against the asset.
The problem is that the corruption has built up so much, and so many generations have grown up being "educated" by propaganda on TV like "Law & Order" that they think this is not corruption at all.
But the 4th amendment is clear, they need a warrant. They never get one. And when they do, they are almost all fraudulent/invalid warrants.
But since government is the only one that gets to enforce the laws, it is not a surprise that government tends to let government get away with criminal activity.
> ...every traffic stop, is a felony under 18 U.S. Code § 241 ... or or 18 U.S. Code § 242...
I strongly disagree with this. Traffic stops are absolutely not a felony. Properly-motivated traffic stops (think: "Stopping a driver who is operating his vehicle erratically" or "Stopping a driver whose vehicle is obviously in dangerous disrepair") are essential to maintaining the safe operation of our public roads. What should absolutely be a felony are warrantless searches conducted as part of a traffic stop, properly-motivated or not.
If the cops can't get a warrant over the phone, then they should not be permitted to do the search. They're not pressed for time! It's not like you're going to be going anywhere, they've ordered you and your passengers out of the vehicle. And if you run on foot, they still have the vehicle that they can search if they get a warrant.
I wonder what would happen if large amounts of travelers started carrying movie prop money? Could we churn out large numbers of plaintiffs with standing against the government, without losing substantial amounts of actual money?
I've seen one of these searches happen to another passenger first hand it's absurd.
The typical route for movie productions now, since modern film resolution is too high to easily use fakes that fit the legal requirements, is to use stacks of blank paper of the right color with a single actual bill on top.
Sorry to be a downer, but I doubt prop money would look like real money on an X-ray. I’ve seen bundles of cash on a TSA X-ray and it has a distinctive look.
on the plus side, things designed to look like bundles of cash on an x-ray, but not visually, would clearly not be 'counterfeit' and therefore much safer legally
Stupid question, but what happens if I carry my cash in a container that requests access to an attorney and, if not given it, calls an attorney itself? (Let's say it's a pouch that can't be opened without destroying it, with a basic android phone built into it, that will also document its own destruction as much as it can if it comes to that).
Bonus point if we give it a plaintive cute kitten voice so that the recording shows it pleading for its life.
(If you want to buy one of these, I'll gladly sell you it)
The police have plenty of options for being nasty to you, short of by-the-technical-definition "torture".
Data point: I tried Googling for "police misconduct"...but by the time I'd typed "police miscon", Google was already suggesting half a dozen search strings - all of which amounted to "find a nearly lawyer to help you with your police misconduct case". Sounds like a booming business, eh?
The police are more than happy to have you sit outside in the cold/bake on the pavement/shine excessively bright lights into your eyes/scream un-followable directives at you/deny you the use of bathroom facilities, etc... while 'conducting an investigation'. The internet is RIFE with videos of beat cops using tactics that could certainly qualify as informal psychological or physical torture, or in some cases, literal formal torture (look up Rankin County Goon Squad).
You make a fair point[1], but I'd still like to know about the prevalence of this. Not saying I don't believe there's a problem, but I think that media reporting is skewed towards sensationalism, and any kind of misconduct makes for clickable news.
In a country with more than 300 million people, there's bound to be bad ones, and some of those will become cops. I'd be happy if you could point out some comparative studies between countries, that take this into account, but I guess that's something I could just search for online
The free country where cops can mug you under threat of state backed violence, steal your money, and you won't get any due process, it's just gone. Ok.
You get due process in the sense that you can sue for your money back and possibly even win. Due process does not imply fair process.
You'll get no due process in the sense that the "authority" who took your money and deprived you of it's use will suffer no consequences due to "qualified immunity."
I can't believe it's been 6 years since I wrote this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17395675#17398314 ... It basically explains local cops and "civil forfeiture", and how it ruined an innocent man's life, someone close to me. This was back in the early/mid-90s; "civil forfeiture" was brand new, and talk of "due process" - well, that just didn't exist.
I question this use of "possibly" here: can you? Not hypothetically, but can you actually win rather than the case being dragged out until you drop it or the judge sides with their government?
Yes, you absolutely can win these cases, but you must have essentially air tight evidence as to where the money came from and that was in fact the money that was seized. You can also appeal any judgement which prevents the money from leaving custody until the appeal is complete.
The chances are very small due to the way the case is structured but it is entirely possible and it has been known to occur. The main issue is it's a _civil_ case against property and the rules of a civil trial massively over benefit the government and effectively ignore fourth amendment property rights.
land of the free was written by an amateur poet while he had an America-boner watching actual soldiers fighting
his poem was adopted posthumously 120 years later to boost morale
it has nothing to do with anything and relies on comparison to the most mismanaged countries in the world to justify a perpetuation of its flaws
we’ve gotten lucky with 1st amendment rulings over the last 100 years to perpetuate strong protections there and haven't had a military coup, but thats pretty much it. case in point, by 1910 the supreme court ruled that motion pictures had no 1st amendment protections, not overruling itself until the mid 1950s. anything can happen unless we button up the constitution with finely tailored amendments
If the DEA knows you are about to board a plane back to Columbia with copious amounts of cash after a 24 hour vacation to the States, it's questionable if it's really "your money".
The three options are (a) the feds hold the cash until its origin is found to be legit, (b) they hold the person until the cash is verified legit, (c) the suitcase of cash and the person fly away never to be seen again.
I guess the 4th option would be making it much easier and faster for the DEA to obtain a warrant; but this just leads back to a, b, or c.
n.b. I am totally against local cops holding any amount of discovered money during random searches. That's a huge conflict if interest. I'm mainly commenting on the original post.
True, true. If they are really shaking down passengers for the hell of it to steal their money, that is obviously messed up. It will certainly make me reconsider traveling to Indiana with a duffle bag filled with wads of hundreds.
When you say criminals, who do you mean exactly - someone who very recently committed a crime? And by catching someone... catching them do what?
I know several officers, and can safely say they are as varied a group as any other profession. Their day-to-day typically consists of responding to 911 calls, backup to other officers, or traffic duty. I think they generally are interested in catching people breaking the law - particularly the really bad ones. And sure, they would prefer it to be easy, who wouldn't. They get paid like $60k/yr and their day-to-day involves stuff like responding to a domestic violence calls with belligerents wielding various weapons. My biggest challenge most days is finding a parking spot.
It's astounding to me that every conversation about police pay never brings up their extremely generous pensions, lifetime of healthcare provided at taxpayer expense, ability to conceal-carry a gun nationwide, PBA cards to show other cops you shouldn't get a ticket. I'm sure there are other benefits I'm not including.
Yeah what on earth do you mean when you say cops aren't interested in catching people who broke the law, but are interested in catching "someone". That makes no sense.
Where did I say anything about justifying power abuse?
it is better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person suffer. you are arguing for a legal standard of 'guilty until proven innocent'. while, yes, that would allow the dea to catch more drug traffickers, other seriously bad effects would ensue, effects that are much worse than the addiction epidemic
i mean we've tried this hundreds of times in different countries; it's not a new idea. we know what the results look like
closing your bank account and withdrawing the contents in cash is not only legal; it's the foundation on which the trust of the banking system rests. a colombian doing that would presumably not want to hang around in a potentially dangerous foreign country any longer than necessary
Charlie Munger “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.”
If there were a law that directs confiscated money to one of: pay for medical bills of the poorest, rehabilitation of those with prison history, federal disaster relief fund, gender affirming care, phone bills in prisons, etc. None of these are my actual positions, these are just examples to remove the perverse incentive to steal.
This somehow reminds me of the TV show "Supernatural" where Angels need 'consent' of the people to possess their body. Which basically is "they said yes", and often how they get the 'yes' contains a lot of deceit (pretending to be someone else etc) misdirection and even torture...
Yeah... They use to pay 10% of the "bounty" seized. Not sure what the going rate is with the heat now and days. The war on drugs lol.. war on peoples rights. Warrantless GPS trackers, then it was stingrays.. quite an intersting organization. They use some .. unique software. Penlink use to publish their software updates publicly was a good read. (you can probably find it on wayback machine) Interesting software to say the least.. https://www.penlink.com/digital-intelligence-original-work-2...
I've always thought that when they ask the questions of, "did you pack this bag? and "has this been in your possession?" that it is more about drug convictions than safety.
Indeed. I regularly cross international borders with devices holding the (heavily encrypted) keys to wallets holding 7 figures, but I get nervous at the airport with $4-5 k of cash in my bag.
(I don’t have the sources but read years ago that states that let the cops keep the cash have ridiculous levels of abusive confiscations, whereas states that have the money go to the state coffers basically don’t)
(Most civil asset forfeiture is done by local cops stopping people on the highway and similar)