Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
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Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#2I still don't understand why this kind of thing has not yet led to violence.
Edit:
> Originally, it was designed for situations in which the court would not have jurisdiction over the person, so it's an action on the property itself.
Oh, interesting. So it is a bug in the law itself that nobody has any interest in fixing; but people who've already been robbed at gunpoint.
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#3It this began with a ticket agent (who generally gets a cut) and a "drug-sniffing" dog.
Police dogs are magical beasts -- you just point the dog at the thing you want searched and wait for it to "signal" that it's found something.
I really wish that the Supreme Court had had the chance to review the accuracy of drug dogs in their case this year (Rodriguez v. US).
How many times can a dog signal a false positive before you recognize that the drug dog is trying to please its handler? The police have no incentive to count.
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#4It this began with a ticket agent (who generally gets a cut) and a "drug-sniffing" dog. Police dogs are magical beasts -- you just point the dog at the thing you want searched and wait for it to "signal" that it's found something. I really wish that the Supreme Court had had the chance to review the accuracy of drug dogs in their case this year (Rodriguez v. US). How many times can a dog signal a false positive befor…
It wasn't a false positive, he admits himself that he smoked weed on the way to the airport. That's really not the point of the article however.
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#5I'm not saying the police are right, the whole seizure thing is ridiculous, but this story is so shady. You have 11 grand in cash and want to move it from A to B. The obvious and safe way is to deposit it in a bank and get a cashier's check or do an ACH transfer. Who in their right mind would carry it with them or even worse, put it in a checked bag that airlines notoriously lose? The point of the story is valid, but the example is ridiculous. Sounds like someone wanted an untraceable 11 grand. Shady.
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#6The main reason why the War on Drugs is so popular in police departments.
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#7It this began with a ticket agent (who generally gets a cut) and a "drug-sniffing" dog. Police dogs are magical beasts -- you just point the dog at the thing you want searched and wait for it to "signal" that it's found something. I really wish that the Supreme Court had had the chance to review the accuracy of drug dogs in their case this year (Rodriguez v. US). How many times can a dog signal a false positive befor…
It wasn't a false positive, he admits himself that he smoked weed on the way to the airport. That's really not the point of the article however.
My point is that it can still be a false positive, even though "detecting weed" and "using weed" both occurred.
The dog "alerted" for drugs, but the dog can't testify as to why -- because it actually smelled drugs or because it sensed its handler wanted it to.
http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/crime-courts/legal-challen...
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#8Now I'm not sure if Norway has similar laws, but I haven't heard of any.
However, watching John Oliver talk about how ridiculous the civil forfeiture laws are in the US just makes me want to laugh so much.
I know of all the great things happening in the US, and I'm not calling you a bad country. But it's so hard not to categorise you together with North Korea, China and the United Arab Emirates with how trigger happy your police are, how easy it is for them to steal from the population. How terribly you treat your sick and poor, and how fascinated you seem to be with groping people at the airport.
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#9I'm not saying the police are right, the whole seizure thing is ridiculous, but this story is so shady. You have 11 grand in cash and want to move it from A to B. The obvious and safe way is to deposit it in a bank and get a cashier's check or do an ACH transfer. Who in their right mind would carry it with them or even worse, put it in a checked bag that airlines notoriously lose? The point of the story is valid, but…
And therein lies the crux of the problem with these things being subject to zero checks or balances and such a low standard of proof.
People’s stories sound shady all the time. In Canada, in my lifetime, there have been four different men whom everyone was certain had murdered people, and it turned out that they were innocent.
In many cases, people are so sure that shady people are guilty, they make up testimony to make sure the bad guy goes to jail. This is why we need incredibly high standards for convicting someone of a crime. And we still get it wrong.
So when someone “seems shady...” I stop far short of assuming that they are shady. And even if they are shady, I stop far short of thinking that the police, with the incredibly asymmetric power relationship, should be at liberty to enrich themselves based on someone seeming to be shady.
Re: Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
#10I still don't understand why this kind of thing has not yet led to violence. Edit: > Originally, it was designed for situations in which the court would not have jurisdiction over the person, so it's an action on the property itself. Oh, interesting. So it is a bug in the law itself that nobody has any interest in fixing; but people who've already been robbed at gunpoint.
Because the government and businesses have slowly but surely been eroding the role of cash in our lives.
Most people use checks or credit cards for big purchases. Most people are paid by check, and the exceptions are usually near minimum wage.
Nobody does big transactions in cash anymore -- even if you want to pay tens or hundreds of thousands in cash for a car, a house, or college tuition, if you show up with a briefcase full of cash, then your counterparty will tell you to put it in a bank and come back with a check because they're not set up to handle cash on their end.
Government policies are designed to encourage inflation, yet the government stopped printing $500 and larger bills in 1945 and has never continued them.
Most of the people who were old enough to remember the Great Depression and hoarded cash throughout their lives because of their experiences are old enough to be dead or in an old folks' home, and their hoards of cash have already been deposited in the banking system by their families. Living through the Depression hasn't been a "mainstream" experience for many decades, and the actions of those who did have been dismissed as "silly, irrational things that old people do."
Basically it's become so abnormal to have large amounts of cash that a lot of people agree with the government -- "if you're using a lot of cash, that's so abnormal, you must be involved in something illegal." It's so abnormal it activates our tribal instincts which cause us to de-humanize -- "That's not something that I would do, or anyone I know would do" -- it's much easier to accept the demonization of people who use cash.
Of course, this is just how the government and big business wants things to work -- all those bank deposits and credit cards are much easier to track. Think about all the junk mail you get based on your credit rating -- the marketing departments in those companies love the amount of information you're giving away about your finances.