61–70 of 179 posts
I have a feeling there is more to the story than the two or three examples show. I also feel the same issues don't apply to the majority of cases but the article is written as if they do.
Isn't this, these days, just one of the reasons to stay as far away as possible from the "land of the free"?
Limit the ability to charge unincorporated property. The government can charge persons: natural and artificial. But random property? no.
Expand constitutional protections to property based on being owned by a natural or artificial person.
Expand the 5th amendment right to just compensation, making the government pay for property is seizes and not considering civil asset forfeiture to fit the due process exemption.
And this is all for the consideration that random municipalities will try to find a way around any outright ban on civil asset forfeiture
I think the lack of seizures from financial institutions merely suspected of a crime is a damning enough indictment of the practice
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case anyone is interested in the power dynamic in Imperial Rome between the Emporers and the Legions, this is is an analogous situation.
This kind of power dynamic between the civilian administration and 'the military' would not be considered to be healthy, if it were happening in a sovereign polity. Could a sufficiently wealthy mayor (like Bloomberg) push through privatisation and deunionisation, while using their personal funds to pay for private security for the whole city in case there is a strike? The department's annual budget seems to be around…
Wait, what? In the US law enforcement can just take peoples' stuff and then the people have to prove that they are innocent in order to get their stuff back? Should this not be the other way around, law enforcement has to prove - within some reasonable amount of time - that the person is guilty, otherwise they get their stuff back, plus some compensation for incurred costs? But even if the person is guilty, why can t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally speaking, the political argument against is "If you do anything that gives even the appearance of curtailing police powers in any way, we will create the illusion of a crime wave, attribute it to you, and absolutely hammer every form of media with that narrative." (If, God help you, you manage to pass a law that actually curtails police powers, they'll generally act in open defiance instead of doing their j…
It's not just an empty threat either. It's happened numerous times in NYC when the mayor or city council has attempted to reign in the NYPD, they simply stop responding to calls for service and then blame it on the politicians. Even if it doesn't lead to an uptick in crime, it still angers voters that police won't respond to their calls and they take it out at the polls.
Once voters know the pattern, they're hep to it.
So what's with the NYPD ? No voter control ? Should NYers start proposing referendums ? Are referendums even possible ?
Wait, what? In the US law enforcement can just take peoples' stuff and then the people have to prove that they are innocent in order to get their stuff back? Should this not be the other way around, law enforcement has to prove - within some reasonable amount of time - that the person is guilty, otherwise they get their stuff back, plus some compensation for incurred costs? But even if the person is guilty, why can t…
yes, just like the communists. the state can seize anything with no compensation. private property assurances were masqueraded as a distinctive tenet between the systems but they’ve both converged on a discretionary ownership reality.
Severely limiting the scope of civil forfeiture seems like one of those political issues that everyone across the political spectrum can agree on. I'm constantly hearing horror stories like the ones in this article and I've never heard any reasonable defense of our current system. In fact, I've never even heard an unreasonable defense.
Biden was one of the "architects" of modern civil forfeiture: https://fee.org/articles/how-a-young-joe-biden-became-the-ar... Voting gets us nowhere with limiting state power. Like falling for a good cop bad cop routine. It provides consent for both sides of the aisle abuse like this. edit: I don't know fee.org. Here's a more neutral reference to widely-known facts: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/bidens-cri…
You have to make a habit of finding out who the incumbent is and not voting for them. Do this every election and it will get better after a decade or so. You have to scramble the shady alliances by inserting new people every election. It's better than what we've been doing.
How do I know this will work? Incumbent politicians were starkly against simply marking who the incumbent was on ballots a decade or two ago the last time it came up.
I have a feeling there is more to the story than the two or three examples show. I also feel the same issues don't apply to the majority of cases but the article is written as if they do.
Assuming nothing in the story is an outright lie or fabrication, I don't know what additional details could justify any of this.
The first story sounds more innocent but how do both of these apply to the volume of other cases? The article makes it sound like all of them would be similarly innocent.