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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

#101

Post by jessaustin »

the-dude wrote: post #84
jessaustin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libya, Iraq, Afganistan, the list goes on. Afghanistan has had problems for some time, but Libya and Iraq both functioned as nations before ill-advised adventurism on the part of Western powers. This "list goes on" shit is particularly chilling to those who value peace, life, and national solvency. What other functioning nations must be broken to feed the military-industrial complex?

> ill-advised adventurism on the part of Western powers Let keep the picture clear: ill-advised by the USA. It was the USA who wanted the conflicts and did everything in their power to 'persuade' their allies to bomb along. It was all lies and just see what we got in return.

You are correct about Iraq.

With respect to Libya, memories seem suspiciously short. For a long time Obama was uninterested in Libyan regime change. (I suspect because the generals were so sure it would be easy, which set off alarm bells, but none of that was ever made public.) For personal reasons that no one could discern, "French celebrity philosopher" Bernard-Henri Lévy was rabidly pro-war, and lobbied constantly for it. For reasons that probably make sense if one is French, both the French public and Nicolas Sarkozy found his case convincing enough to take the lead and let the USA "follow". (That lasted about a week, because France, but whatever.)

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

#102

Post by rayiner »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #55
joshuaheard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one would argue illegally obtained money cannot be confiscated. A bank robber cannot keep his stolen money, or someone selling stolen goods, or a drug dealer. The trouble with civil asset forfeiture, as its properly known, is that the burden of proof has been shifted to the accused. So, instead of the state having to prove your money is illegally obtained, or that any crime was committed, you have to prove there w…

>The trouble with civil asset forfeiture, as its properly known, is that the burden of proof has been shifted to the accused. So, instead of the state having to prove your money is illegally obtained, or that any crime was committed, you have to prove there was not. It is worse than that. The money is what is charged, not the person. So the money has to prove itself innocent, which is pretty much impossible. If you h…

The money isn't "charged." The case is just styled as In re $35.00 of US Currency because the case is about the ownership status of the property, not about any specific person. The money doesn't have to "prove itself innocent." The legitimate owner just needs to rebut the government's argument that it was illegally obtained.

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

#103

Post by kbenson »

hfourm wrote: post #92
joshuaheard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one would argue illegally obtained money cannot be confiscated. A bank robber cannot keep his stolen money, or someone selling stolen goods, or a drug dealer. The trouble with civil asset forfeiture, as its properly known, is that the burden of proof has been shifted to the accused. So, instead of the state having to prove your money is illegally obtained, or that any crime was committed, you have to prove there w…

I think another big negative here is just the fact that it shifts police org's focus towards crimes where they can "fund" themselves. I repeat this statistic a lot, but the solved murder rate has fallen from ~90% in the 60s to ~60% in recent years. You'd think with all our new forensic technology and lower overall murder rates it would be opposite.

There's lots of ways to read the numbers. Total murders is about the same as the high in the 60s, ~14k, but instead of 200 million people, we have well over 300 million[1]. That's over a 33% drop in per-capita murders.

1: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

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

#104

Post by geggam »

15charlimit wrote: post #68
Loque wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The only real reason blatantly anti-constitutional law such as blanket seizure/confiscation hasn't happened on a large scale yet (because they've sure as hell tried) is that, if such laws were passed, the powers that be would suddenly find themselves in front of an enormous number of very angry gun owners who (hopefully) would be less than willing to cooperate peacefully.

I doubt the sheep are that ferocious.

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

#105

Post by StavrosK »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #55
joshuaheard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one would argue illegally obtained money cannot be confiscated. A bank robber cannot keep his stolen money, or someone selling stolen goods, or a drug dealer. The trouble with civil asset forfeiture, as its properly known, is that the burden of proof has been shifted to the accused. So, instead of the state having to prove your money is illegally obtained, or that any crime was committed, you have to prove there w…

>The trouble with civil asset forfeiture, as its properly known, is that the burden of proof has been shifted to the accused. So, instead of the state having to prove your money is illegally obtained, or that any crime was committed, you have to prove there was not. It is worse than that. The money is what is charged, not the person. So the money has to prove itself innocent, which is pretty much impossible. If you h…

Isn't the money innocent until proven guilty?

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

#106

Post by Fezzik »

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 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 prohibited conduct.

2) IT IS NOT DIFFICULT TO CONTEST A CIVIL FORFEITURE. The defendant is given a single piece of paper, that is insanely easy to understand, and simply has to sign the paper 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.

3) The money does not all go directly to the seizing agency. Much of it goes towards drugs programs, oversight for civil forfeitures, and other programs. See, for example: http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/131A.360

Perhaps at the federal level things work very differently and the process is abused, but every time I see these articles it really feels like an anomaly of a story is used to paint an entire program as being demonic, with little to no data to back up the conclusion.

edited for clarity, the statutory language is "prohibited conduct" not "criminal activity"

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

#107

Post by hristov »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #17

I disagree with the author's attitude towards mercenaries operating in foreign countries. Having read "The Modern Mercenary", by former Blackwater merc, Sean McFate, I am fully convinced that mercenaries have a desirable and necessary place in future conflicts. Take Afghanistan for example. It is a nation at a major geographic crossroads that truly acts as a set of tribes and alliances, not a Westphalian-style state…

Bullshit. I am sure the ~100k mercenaries in Iraq did a great job of stopping al Queada.

In fact mercenaries seem to encourage terrorism because they tend to be responsible for abuses and unlawful killings on foreign soil. Mercenaries were responsible for a lot of the abuses that happened in Iraq.

And I how you get to the parallel between the TSA and merceneries is beyond me. The TSA are government employees strictly subject to the law and with very limited powers. What in the world do they have to do with mercenaries?

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

#108

Post by ska »

drabiega wrote: post #93
15charlimit wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real reason blatantly anti-constitutional law such as blanket seizure/confiscation hasn't happened on a large scale yet (because they've sure as hell tried) is that, if such laws were passed, the powers that be would suddenly find themselves in front of an enormous number of very angry gun owners who (hopefully) would be less than willing to cooperate peacefully.

Most gun legislation dies pretty quickly in congress. I don't think the threat of violence from gun owners has particularly affected that process.

To me it seems unclear that the threat of this sort violence from gun owners has actually been a significant consideration or relevance for many decades, despite the mythology surrounding it. As opposed to the demonstrably effective threat of organized political action by gun right advocates, say.

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

#109

Post by vezzy-fnord »

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 representative labor in fulfilling said policy. Otherwise you suffer from principal-agent problems in having to trust proxies to execute their ideas, with the proxies you are capable of electing being highly limited in their ideological diversity by result of optimizing for the wrong information.

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

#110

Post by rayiner »

runako wrote: post #69
rayiner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're essentially saying that no one has a legitimate cause to hold thousands of dollars in cash, so they must be doing something illicit, so we have cause to take it. Think about it statistically. The standard is "more likely than not" the money is obtained illegally. If you pull over 100 people with large amounts of cash, what percentage obtained it illegally? If it's greater than 50%, then you can always seize…

Arguments like this are why it's a good thing we don't base our criminal justice system on statistics. "Innocent until proven guilty" is very different from "Guilty because most people in similar situations are guilty, so let's not bother to prove it in this case." The cops would have a field day, for instance by arresting college students at random on the weekend because statistically most will test positive for con…

"Proof" by evidence is an inherently statistical process. E.g. cops find a DNA match between a suspect and skin cells found under a murder victim's fingernails under circumstances where it is clear she tried to fight off her attacker. Does that "prove" guilt? No, it proves that under similar circumstances, guilty is highly likely. The problem is not that the justice system is statistical. That's unavoidable. The problem is the unfortunate confluence of the low standard of proof ("more likely than not" versus "beyond a reasonable doubt") combined with the high ratio of illegal versus legal reasons for carrying large amounts of cash (i.e. a high prior odds ratio).
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