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Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

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Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#121

Post by gherkin0 »

Fezzik wrote: post #106

Ugh, so much misinformation. Having lurked here for a while HN seems to think civil forfeiture is the boogie man. To clarify a few things, at least on the county level: 1) There are always drugs when property is seized this way. I review every single civil forfeiture in a rather large county, and the affidavits officers submit read something like: "I stopped Bob after an informant purchased a large amount of heroin f…

> To clarify a few things, at least on the county level: > I review every single civil forfeiture in a rather large county

Which county is that, and is your county representative of all counties in the US?

> the affidavits officers submit read something like: "I stopped Bob after an informant purchased a large amount of heroin from Bob, Bob had syringes, heroin, weed, a scale for weighing drugs etc... on his person, and a rolled up wade of bills". The money is then seized as proceeds of criminal activity.

If that's usually the case, why wasn't Bob arrested? In your scenario, he had illegal drugs in his possession, so an arrest seems more appropriate than a simple seizure.

I think most the criticism of "stop and seize" stems from the the cases where a seizure was made without an arrest, perhaps under a dubious theory like "cash == drug money".

> IT IS NOT DIFFICULT TO CONTEST A CIVIL FORFEITURE > saying the forfeited property is not proceeds of a crime. They then have to appear in court, before a judge, and demonstrate this fact. The bar is not high, but I have never once seen this happen.

Lets say Bill, who is unbanked, wants to buy a car. He saved the money for it in cash under his mattress, and now has $3000. He's transporting it, and a cop pulls him over, thinks "CASH == DRUG MONEY" and seizes it.

How exactly does Bill go about demonstrating to the court that his money was not proceeds of a crime, are they just going to take him at his word? What if he employed irregularly or informally or doesn't meticulously keep his receipts? What if he physically can't make it to court? What if he's just not smart enough to make an articulate argument and is too poor to hire a lawyer?

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#122

Post by Fezzik »

abtinf wrote: post #114
Fezzik wrote: post #106

Ugh, so much misinformation. Having lurked here for a while HN seems to think civil forfeiture is the boogie man. To clarify a few things, at least on the county level: 1) There are always drugs when property is seized this way. I review every single civil forfeiture in a rather large county, and the affidavits officers submit read something like: "I stopped Bob after an informant purchased a large amount of heroin f…

"They then have to appear in court, before a judge, and demonstrate this fact." We fought a revolution over this sort of garbage and enshrined the presumption of innocence as a core principle in our constitution. How about we seize all of your assets, give you a "single piece of paper" to enter a not guilty plea, then force you to prove in court that these powers are not widely misused. "The bar is not high", but som…

It would be as easy as saying "I have a job" or "my grandmother gave me $2,000 for rent and necessaries". It could be done by a self represented person easily. And again, the person who has property seized from them always has drugs... police are not just randomly taking money. Drug legalization is another another matter (I am pro, FWIW), but for now it remains illegal.

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#123

Post by bionsuba »

Loque wrote: post #54
joshfraser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unconstitutional, but our government stopped following that document a while ago. Just look at civil forfeiture, the NSA dragnet, journalists being sued by the Whitehouse administration, NDAA authorization to kill Americans w/o trial or the existence of Gitmo.

Unless it is to defend gun ownership? (clueless UK citizen here)

Tons (if not all) of gun laws exist in the US that are unconstitutional. You many not know this as a UK citizen but the gun industry in the US is very regulated, e.g. creating a gun from scratch by yourself and selling it to someone else is illegal.

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#124

Post by javajosh »

pessimizer wrote: post #117
javajosh wrote: post #86

Actually, the core problem is that when (usually) white, middle-class America sees a police boot on someone's face their instinct is to say, "Well, I guess he deserved it." This is particularly the case for working middle-class mothers. Based on anecdotal conversations, when they see a story about the police shooting an unarmed man in the back, they think, "Well, the guy was probably going to grab someone's little gi…

> Another problem is when (usually) black America sees a police boot on someone's face, and notes that statistically it's usually a black face, and their instinct is to say, "Well, I guess it was because he was black." When confronted with stories where the face is white, they say nothing. This is nonsense that you're using to generate a false equivalence. White American media has absolutely no interest in what black…

If that's true, that's great. I would love to see more (well, any) black leaders talk about police brutality in general, and not in relation to race. Do you have any links? In truth, every time I've seen anyone speak in front of TV cameras about the police, it's always about race. Maybe it is selection bias. But somehow, I don't think so.

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#126

Post by alistproducer2 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #109
alistproducer2 wrote: post #96

Serious question. We're all problem solvers here. There has got to be a better way to get our elected leaders to pay more immediate attention to blatantly immoral and unconstitutional stuff like this. As developers and engineers we should come up with a technology to force issue on things like this. I'm pretty tired of reading a story like this and feeling helpless to change it,

elected leaders There's your problem. Why are you electing people? That's completely backwards. Electing people is allocating labor and incurring production costs without evaluating demand signals. It is ideas that must be debated and voted on, and have people fill in to execute them. Only by having information on what policy is desired will you able to properly apportion the production costs and allocate the represe…

So direct democracy then? That presents it's own problems like the majority being in favor of something horrible, like the internment of muslim citizens after a terrorist attack.

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#127

Post by alistproducer2 »

woah wrote: post #100
alistproducer2 wrote: post #96

Serious question. We're all problem solvers here. There has got to be a better way to get our elected leaders to pay more immediate attention to blatantly immoral and unconstitutional stuff like this. As developers and engineers we should come up with a technology to force issue on things like this. I'm pretty tired of reading a story like this and feeling helpless to change it,

Get out there and join political organizations. Another website just isn't going to change things.

I don't know twitter is "just a website" and it's helped change lots of things all over the world, so......

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#128

Post by soylentcola »

humanrebar wrote: post #78
geon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As George Carlin said; your rights can be taken away whenever convenient. Thus, they are not really rights at all, but temporary privileges. http://youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4

Some rights are inalienable, so they cannot be taken away, just violated. The right to justice is one of those. The right to life. The right to free expression. It's pretty obvious that they exist, otherwise nobody would really care about murder, rape, theft, fraud, lying, etc. So the burden of proof is on those that want to limit or deny inalienable rights. George Carlin is hilarious (at least in general), but ironi…

I think his intention wasn't so much to say this is a positive thing but rather to cynically (and humorously) point out that "rights" are a human construct and susceptible to all of the associated weaknesses in practice.

You can claim a right to something and if you can get enough people to agree with you, you can enforce someone's claim on the right to something. But it's not like there's a natural force that ensures, compels, or mandates these rights.

I guess my point is that taken less cynically, rights (as we understand them) only exist in practice as long as you can demand them and have sufficient power (whether through numbers or threat of force) to keep them. The sad reality is that without the continual effort to maintain these rights, they can and will be taken away.

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#129

Post by bionsuba »

commentzorro wrote: post #24

This is the Republican Dream. Shifting taxes to states then to localities and finally to each group within the locality. As the nation moves farther and farther to the right expect the to happen in every state and local agency out there.

> As the nation moves farther and farther to the right

What country do you live in? Surely it can't be the US, who has been enacting very leftist policies for a while now, who has had a leftist president for almost eight years now, whose youth is advocating for a self-identified "democratic socialist" for president, and the country where the most popular republican candidate by far is a centrist RINO.

Re: Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

#130

Post by javajosh »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #119
javajosh wrote: post #86

Actually, the core problem is that when (usually) white, middle-class America sees a police boot on someone's face their instinct is to say, "Well, I guess he deserved it." This is particularly the case for working middle-class mothers. Based on anecdotal conversations, when they see a story about the police shooting an unarmed man in the back, they think, "Well, the guy was probably going to grab someone's little gi…

The police are public servants, our servants, there to keep the peace, and stop violence from happening. They are public servants, but not "our servants" - such a possessive pronoun implies the police are obligated to protecting individuals comprising a populace. They are not (Castle Rock v. Gonzales). Rather, they exist to enforce some relative order as defined by a state entity in the jurisdiction the police is beh…

I refuse to accept this as a forgone conclusion. Clearly there is a place for a healthy, helpful police force in modern society. It's probably not even that far from what we have - the key being the "broken windows" policy applied to the police themselves, and some critical changes in policy (making it illegal to lie about the law, or to coerce behavior based on a misrepresentation of the law). And of course, reforming the justice system to give citizens the kind of justice our founding fathers intended to give them.

Technologies ability to record interactions and play them back later has already had a (positive) impact on police behavior, and I can only see that getting better.

I also think that technology will revolutionize the justice system - I've been thinking a lot about what a distributed, remote jury trial system would look like, especially when there is excellent sensor data surrounding any contentious event.

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