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

IANAL, but I'd suspect that the usual logic goes: Usually a person carrying a large amount of cash is a criminal who got the cash illegally. So, anyone with a large amount of cash is likely a criminal, and we will treat them as such.

The gap here is that the person so treated need not have done anything wrong and are being prosecuted due to the crimes of others.

I doubt that there is a law saying that having $20,000 in cash is illegal.

So, if are going to prosecute Joe, then need to do so from something Joe did, and prove he did it. That most people with a lot of cash got the cash illegally doesn't mean that Joe did anything illegal, and there's no law against having a lot of cash.

I've learned my lesson: Often the police are enforcing social norms and attitudes instead of laws and are enforcing these against people who are not in the center of the respectable middle class.

E.g., since I'm doing a startup, I'm keeping down spending and driving an old car. Since the car still, with a lot of maintenance, is fine, I can keep driving it.

But recently I had occasion to go to a poor, largely Black, section of town. On the way out of that section, I was followed closely by a police car. I just drove in a very legal and normal way, and, by the time I was out of that section of town, the police car quit following me. But, I learned my lesson: At least with an old car, stay the heck out of a poor, Black area of town -- that's the real law.

More of the real law is to participate in church, JAYCEES, Lions, school board, be well known and liked, make contributions to political campaigns, contribute to the Fraternal Order of Police and any police charity drives, have some associated decals on the windows of my car, drive a late model, family car, dress well, no beard, hair short, be known to the local political power structure, etc. Be known to the police in my neighborhood. Ah, they didn't tell me such things in civics class.

For more, get rich and be a very anonymous donor to some legal efforts to mount well funded challenges to such highway robbery in the courts.

AFAIK, that's just basically how things work in the US. In some other countries, the citizen either (A) is too poor to have anything anyone would want to steal or (B) has some money and keeps paying off the political power guys.

Apparently that we could actually follow the Constitution seems to be mostly a long shot.

In the meanwhile, the power structure wants (A) bend the Constitution and slap down the drug dealers, and likely anyone else they don't like, so that when anyone looks at all suspicious just steal any of their valuables and (B) put up with excesses by the police, especially since the excesses are mostly toward poor people.

So, the real law is, for any poor and/or Black stopped by the police, look like the old movie character stepin fetchit, be passive, submissive, subordinate, subservient, obsequious, act like a harmless child, hang head, don't make eye contact, keep hands in plain view, make only slow motions, and let the egotistical, bully thugs, with their dark, aviator sun glasses, SS like uniforms with lots of shiny metal attachements, get their jollies and let the power structure be happy with an orderly rhythm to the community.

Otherwise the police have wide latitude to enforce the laws, act as prosecutor, judge, and jury, proscribe and execute sentences, all on the street, based just on anything, no charges, no due process, nothing. So, all with no due process at all, the police can embarrass, insult, humiliate innocent citizens, steal their valuables, insert things into their rectums and/or vaginas, beat them with clubs, shock them electrically, and, for any reason or no real reason, just shoot and kill them.

The power structure and the police can expect that some citizens will object.

Our Founding Fathers understood kings, dictators, secret police, bullies, thugs, etc. and gave us a good Constitution. We need to stop making incredibly contrived, complicated rationalizations why the very clear words in the Constitution don't mean what they very clearly do say.

Of course, the solution is democracy: When enough citizens get angry enough, there will be changes.

Another solution is a lot more video from smartphones, dash cams, etc.

And, just now, that the mainstream media (MSM) likes ad revenue from eyeballs and stories about scandal so much, the recent examples and video of police killing unarmed citizens has gotten a lot of attention. Now in courts, commonly a community with some police who went way too far gets slapped with a judgment of several million dollars.

So, any layer of government with a police force will need an insurance policy, and the rates will tend to show the risks. A police chief whose force causes such a several million dollar judgment will get to look for a new job far from police work. Or, money talks, and it will be talking loud and clear soon. And along the way, the increased attention may also stop the highway robbery.

If the people from whom the property was seized were denied (or not notified of) their rights to contest the forfeiture action, that would be something to be upset about. I don't see why we should be upset that the government took civil action without filing criminal charges; the civil burden of proof is lower than the criminal burden of proof because things like imprisonment, execution, loss of voting rights, etc., aren't on the table with similar actions; consequently, the level of evidence with which it makes sense to initiate criminal process is different than that for which it makes sense to initiate civil process.

> The problem is that legal standard is that the government merely has to establish "reasonable suspicion that there was a crime", while the person has to establish "a preponderance of evidence that there was not".

The initial seizure proceeds based on reasonable suspicion, but the goverinnment has the burden of proof to show, by preponderance of the evidence, that the seized property is subject to forfeiture under the law.

(The owner may have the burden of proof for defenses that apply to prevent forfeiture of property that is otherwise subject to forfeiture, such as the "innocent owner" defense, where the property was subject to forfeiture because of its relation to a prohibited act, but the owner was uninvolved in the act.)

> A quick summary is that a couple was indicted of a crime and successfully defended themselves. In the process the government seized a home through civil forfeiture, and the forfeiture stood because the couple was unable to prove the crime did not happen.

Er, no. What that source reports on is not that at all. It reports on the couple being indicted of a crime, and, as a consequence of the indictment, property that would (according to the government) be forfeitable under criminal forfeiture (which has the criminal burden of proof) being seized so that it would be preserved. The couple, arguing that the seizure order was overly broad, sought a hearing on whether the seizure was in error, arguing that the broad seizure impaired their right to counsel of their choosing for the criminal trial; this is what the Supreme Court turned down.

This isn't a case about civil forfeiture (the original seizure was to protect civil forfeiture, but the appeal was about the broader seizure under the superceding indictment which was to protect assets targeted for criminal forfeiture), it doesn't address a target acquitted of a crime and where forfeiture still occurred (this does happen in civil forfeiture, but this isn't an example), and it doesn't have anything to do with the owner not being able to prove a crime didn't happen.

Bill, being unbanked, does not have the benefit of bank paper trails to prove where his money came from if challenged. It's also the reason that he to keeps, transports, and transacts with cash.

Being a banked white person, almost all of my money has a paper trail closely associated with it. If I ever have a wad of cash, I can point to records showing where I got it.

So, being banked or unbanked matters here, since it speaks to the existence of 3rd party evidence that can be use to back up claims about the source of the money.

> No need for loads of evidence - opposing counsel likely cannot refute anything he says. A judge would then order his money returned. It is that simple.

What if he can't show up in court for whatever reason? He loses his sized cash, right?

Someone made a good point upthread: these seizures end up reversing the traditional burden of proof: they money is assumed to be "guilty" until proven "innocent" (even if that burden of proof is really low). If someone has their money seized, the burden of proof should be on the state to connect them to a crime and charge them to justify the seizure, if it can't do that, the state should hand-deliver the money back to the person it was seized from.