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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

#111

Post by chewbacha »

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…

The oversight of civil forfeiture is financed by civil forfeiture? Is that true? Sounds like a serious conflict of interest.

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

#112

Post by splat »

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…

With regards to point 2, at the federal level things do seem to work very differently. Here is a flowchart outlining the steps you would have to take to reclaim your assets from federal forfeiture:

https://reason.com/assets/mc/2015_06/forfeitchart.jpg

Regarding point 3, part of the problem, too, is that the federal government engages in sharing programs with local agencies. So if most of the money from a local-level forfeiture does not go back to the agency, the agency has a strong incentive to bring the feds into it because then they will keep a considerably larger fraction of the proceeds.

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

#113

Post by Fezzik »

chewbacha wrote: post #111
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…

The oversight of civil forfeiture is financed by civil forfeiture? Is that true? Sounds like a serious conflict of interest.

Not entirely. I would have to search hard to find the exact information, but it is primarily funded by the general fund. This is all at the state/county level though; I have no familiarity with federal civil forfeiture.

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

#114

Post by abtinf »

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 somehow I doubt you would succeed.

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

#115

Post by popeshoe »

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.

You reminded me of this article: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertaria...

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

#116

Post by jessaustin »

kbenson wrote: post #75
jessaustin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tough one because in most cases, I believe, the seized property is not worth enough to warrant a case making it to the Supreme Court. When they do run into someone with enough gumption and resources to appeal, they immediately drop the charges against the money and return it minus fees, just to prevent the creation of specific precedent against the practice.

That assumes they are working in concert, and it's not a big set of affiliated but largely separate organizations working in their own best interests. I think it's far more likely that it's not cost effective to fight for the police if the person they seized from is motivated, unless really large amounts are at stake, in which case the possibility it was entirely legal is probably somewhat lessened, so the case isn't…

The symphony plays without a conductor. We're talking about a system that presents a particular set of incentives to parties with particular motivations. They can work perfectly well in concert without resorting to secret cabal meetings. In law enforcement more than most other professions, those who do something different are punished for it. That's all it takes for LEO practice to be trapped in some truly sub-optimal local maxima, such as that under consideration here.

Hanlon's Razor is bullshit, by the way.

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

#117

Post by pessimizer »

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 people have to say about anything but black, race-related issues. An (assumed by me) claim that lack of media coverage proves that individual black people aren't saying anything about incidents of police abuse of white people is offensive. Without that claim, it's just completely made up. Letting it go may save your poor heart some sorrow.

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

#118

Post by the-dude »

jessaustin wrote: post #101
the-dude wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I stand corrected, my memory about Libya was hazy.

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

#119

Post by vezzy-fnord »

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 beholden to. As a result, they enforce policies favorable to a state, not to a community. If the latter was the goal, then policing would be a decentralized per-neighborhood activity with rules of conduct set by the neighborhood or community. In practice, this means police forces fundamentally must operate through a system of fear, intimidation and coercion in their enforcing of standards that are non-negotiable by the subordinate community. It should then come as no surprise they are increasingly militarized, since their structure lends itself to paramilitary.

Police forces then are optimized precisely for people who are not "the best of us", since there is no particular requirement for anything but systematized and mechanical use of intimidation to control populations and curtail protests.

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

#120

Post by mywittyname »

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…

We each can only elect two people to represent our interest in Congress.
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