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.
I disagree that everyone across the political spectrum agrees on this: Thin Blue Liners have considerable sway over politics, and they're happily on the take.
Can you provide a reference where you have seen someone take this stance? I personally have never seen it, and I think I know a lot of pro police types. I think most pro police types would see this as corruption.
I've never met a pro police type that would mention anything as corruption. If you asked them directly some would agree, but as a group I generally just hear apoligism.
How can it be corruption when it's all because of just "a few bad apples"? (Quoth my thin blue line next door neighbor.) To that world view, nothing wrong is systemic; it's all down to individuals whose behavior is not considered part of the whole.
Incidentally, I'm not sure he's familiar with the second half of the idiom ("spoils the whole bunch").
2016 essay by the president of the Fraternal Order of Police arguing against civil forfeiture reform.
> The FOP does not disagree that there is a need for civil asset forfeiture reform. In fact, we worked very closely with Senator Jeff Sessions on this issue going back to the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA) of 2000.
2017 essay by then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein praising civil forfeiture and arguing reform is not necessary.
> Some critics claim that civil asset forfeiture fails to protect property rights or provide due process. The truth is that there are multiple levels of judicial protection, as well as administrative safeguards.
4 of the 5 justices that overturned Roe v. Wade (and ruled there is no right to privacy in the US) were appointed by presidents that lost the popular vote.
Whether or not you agree with them; whether or not you agree with the results of the electoral college; I've never heard of a viable dispute to the de jure legitimacy of their appointments.
I posted that link in response to an inquiry for a single source in support of civil forfeiture. While I happen to agree with the general thrust of your complaint, it is a non sequitur. The Supreme Court is the ultimate authority, provided a Congress unwilling to hold them accountable (which it currently is).
My question of 'credibility' is not "do you like the Federalist Society" but "do you think they're in political alignment with the Thin Blue Liners and are they writing policy."
I don't think the current Supreme Court is a credible source of information about US law. The fact that many of them belong to some organization lends it negative credibility in my mind.
I mean, they essentially write and rewrite laws that come before them. They're literally an authoritative source of law. We can scream about the injustice of that until we're blue in the face, but denying the facts doesn't get us anywhere.
The fact the police unions sell or give out special signifiers for family members of police is proof enough. The fake badgers stuck to windshields in the NYC area is an obvious reminder of the corruption openly allowed by the police.
And then you have the license plates and stickers and whatnot.
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.
I don't think OP was trying to advocate any particular action, merely pointing out that a real and serious problem exists at the heart of our democracy.
Expecting people who point out a problem to also fix that problem in a single social media comment is a little unrealistic, I think, and generally not something people ask in good faith.
the classic "aha, if you're really so oppressed, why don't you take productive action about it (in a society where all avenues of productive action have been foreclosed)" to you strategy
kinda like asking a black man what he thinks should be done about jim crow, if he's so smart. the tactic really does go way back
like yea oppressive power structures systematically foreclose, neuter, and dismantle any means that might be used to counteract or escape their effects, that's why they're oppressive power structures.
it’s galaxy-brain stuff to be asking the people inside to just wave a wand and dismantle it all, like I guess you think they could have just done it all along and simply chose not to? and “self-oppression” is of course a very real narrative that is pushed in these situation, it’s really your fault you can’t escape!
Okay, let me rephrase. What should I be doing other than voting and working for causes I believe in. I’m not in an oppressed group unless you consider the entirety of the American public not part of the oligarchy to be such a group.
Bro really thinks every white person got their own personal "end jim crow button" too and everyone just uniformly refused to press it I guess lol
again, commoners of any form (let alone one single commoner working alone) are not going to be able to just do one simple trick and upend an oppressive power structure, it's a better place than being in the fuckbarrel but the point is oppressive power structures don't leave anyone a recourse, if your title doesn't begin with "senator" it doesn't really matter what you think or do.
there is of course one option, the last of the boxes. but if you aren't willing to fight for what you believe in then, yeah, you're effectively consenting to the society you are offered by political elites. consent can still be withdrawn, but in an oppressive power structure that's usually going to be a violent process.
like I am just telling you outright: soapbox, ballot box, and jury box are all effectively powerless to overturn the problems in american society, by design (that's why it's oppressive). and you can either live with that, and the society thus pressed upon you warts and all, or not. some random march for george floyd or voting blue every election is not going to fix america. keyboard warriorism (including this comment) certainly is not going to do it either.
nobody actually walks away from omelas - and omelas news network thinks you're crazy for even suggesting there could be anything better. We all - you and me and every other law-abiding, taxpaying citizen - accept this society knowing that it exists on the back of the largest slave/gulag population on the planet, and an arbitrary and capricious (and usually politicized) "justice" system that could randomly condemn any of us to that slavery and a permanent mark of underclass. We all accept the idea that our attempts at reforms will not do more than trivial and meaningless amounts of good through our lifetimes. And yet we stay and participate.
You're not helping. Why is that, Leon? Why do you consent?
(I consent to omelas too, I just want you to consciously make your own decision in full knowledge of the consequences and responsibility of your actions. Every day you wake up and go about your life, you do it on the backs of the police state and the carceral state/gulag archipelago it has imposed upon us, and even rattling the bars of your cage a bit by voting or activism will not change this.)
Or to put this in a little less dramatic way - what do you do when the leadership (C-suite, board, and middle managers) are running a company into the ground, abusing the employees, and won't listen to reason? You leave. You're not going to be able to do anything - the real world isn't a RPG where there is always a "good outcome" if you do the right thing. Sometimes all the options lead to bad outcomes.
Well, this is a situation where most people cannot really "just leave". And in fact the US expends considerable resources to make life difficult for those who attempt it.
This will not change unless until and until elites' own interests align in reforming it. And elites are pretty good at making it illegal to make their lives uncomfortable or apply pressure on them in meaningful ways.
It is possible for societies to become so stratified that this change is not possible without violence. Classically, dictatorships, but I don't think that is the only way to get there.
America is in that place, because our society is so geographically isolated and so resource-blessed that a traditional collapse is not possible. There is no neighboring country that is going to topple us if we allow our system to become stagnant and calcified. Any realistic attack would have to cross an ocean or a rainforest/jungle to do it.
So we will continue bumbling along, boiling the frog and allowing our society to become worse and worse, because the US cannot collapse and cannot reform. And there really is nothing that you, as a single voter, could possibly do about it.
Even a million man march cannot do anything about it - easier to just assassinate the commoner's leader and move on with some token reforms to shut people up. The system doesn't mind using (extralegal!) violence on you, that stigma is for commoners not elites.
Nobody would tell an Iraqi that they can't complain if they don't vote, especially if the only option on the ballot is Saddam.
Would they say the same if the only two options were Saddam and Maddas?
If the nation's leaders are being elected by a 10-20% voter turnout, it'll be very obvious what's going on. That is the thing that they don't want to happen.
> The politics of civil forfeiture were somewhat unusual. The federal forfeiture laws were introduced and pushed through Congress by Republicans in the 1980s, with some Democrats supportive and some critical.
And the dems rolled back "equitable sharing" in 2015.
> Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.
>Voting gets us nowhere with limiting state power.
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.
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 jobs.)
The opponent here isn't other citizens, it's the police and their organizations (police benevolent associations, police unions, etc.) which wield considerable political power, and to an extent also legal power (since they collectively have nearly full discretion over what laws are enforced and by what means, to the extent they can cooperate amongst themselves).
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.
Shit NYPD publicly doxed and threatened the mayor's daughter. I've always known the police were evil but that made me stop and really wonder what sort of constraints municipal politicians are operating under. Like that is very very close to "gloves off" mafia type shit right out in the open. What kinds of threats do they make against those figures in private?
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 5 billion USD.
The problem in that situation wouldn't be funding, it would be personnel. NYPD is nauseatingly over funded and could do their job with half their current budget, but you can't just pull thirty thousand private security contractors out of your ass.
How about seizing NYPD assets and calling in the National Guard after removing everyone, collecting their data in a massive database so that they get blackmarked wherever else they would go for employment? I guess there would be an inherent risk of such a draconian policy, considering it was the American MO in Iraq, but then again, that's Iraq and this is America. Just a thought.
A particular video essay comes to mind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs). Since government must ultimately be held in place by use of force no matter how you structure it, it's unsurprising that the sub-organization responsible for exerting force is the ultimate decider of what's actually allowed.
>NYPD publicly doxed and threatened the mayor's daughter
As best I can tell, that is not true.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association, a police union, posted to Twitter a screenshot of Chiara de Blasio’s arrest report, which is a public record. The arrest report report contained her address… which was Gracie Mansion. In other words, not remotely a secret. The tweet did not threaten her.
If only they were socialist. They’re arguably a lot less socialist than many actual gangs, as far as providing material benefits of their criminal activity to the people who “host” them. Not to glamorize gangs, but some have historically taken care to maintain some degree of legitimacy and favor among “their” people, including through provision of services and money or goods. While also, sure, shaking down some of those same people.
I thought this meme was identified decades ago: Whenever a town threatens to cut the fire department's budget, the FD whines loudly, and let a house or two burn down, and then they point fingers back at the mayor / town board.
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 ?
I'm in Chicago, but we have a similar situation. Voters are wise to the pattern, there's just nothing we can do about it other than firing all of them and bringing in the national guard, and we're not ready to do that. They've got us by the balls, blaming them doesn't get them to start working again
It's happened in Minneapolis as well after the George Floyd.
The solution to this is either:
- setup a second security force to gradually replace them
or
- subdivide the coverage map into different districts, suss out the districts with poor performing management, then merge the territories of bad areas under the management of good areas
or
- subdivide responsibilities between violent crime, petty crime, and mundane enforcement like traffic, with separate departments for each, and tackle cleaning them up separately.
Really the notion of taking the same "trained" cop for all the roles in an urban area is pretty stupid. Specialized enforcement roles are likely a better solution.
Shadow defunding, without calling it defunding, is also another weapon, but of course Minneapolis blew that by outright calling it defunding.
But really the drug war is what fuels corruption and excessive power. Remove the drug war, and it would kneecap massive amounts of abuse.
They'll have different duties, like traffic cop and patrol and detective, but they are all part of the same department and most go through the same training "school".
And, of course, they are all part of the same union.
By subdividing into distinct departments, it is the basic divide and conquer. And you can replace departments more readily: keep the traffic and crime investigation units, but replace the patrol cops that are refusing to do their jobs.
Interesting. Seems like the logical thing to do would be to fire the whole PD and replace them with another group. Except that's basically the model used by secret-police dictatorships (eg. Russia, Iran) and anarchist failed states (eg. Haiti, much of Africa), so it doesn't seem to work very well either.
Seems like the root problem is that we grant the state a monopoly on physical violence because the alternative (no group having a monopoly on physical violence, and hence all of them battling it out) is worse. But then like the holders of any monopoly, they abuse it. This is why we can't have nice things.
I seem to remember some city in the east coast fired their whole department and then hired back selected ones. And hired new cops to replace the guys they wanted to get rid of. And it helped.
A suggestion I've thought of before and have seen in the wold increasingly is pay cops a stipend to pay for their own insurance. If they can't get insurance they get fired automatically.
No, I'm pretty sure the political argument is "if we stop doing this we'll have to raise taxes because it makes up a non insignificant portion of police revenue"
This is one of the things I don't understand about America. If this is really true, how can it possibly happen?
I'm from one of the more stable countries in Europe. While there is corruption and abuse in the police, the average officer has greater loyalty to the system than to their superiors. Which means that if someone refuses to do their job, you can fire them and possibly charge them with crimes, and you will eventually find a replacement willing to do the job.
The only way I can see something like this happening is if the average police officer does not believe in the legitimacy of the political and legal system.
I don't know about averages, but I have known a cop who got into it for the sake of law and order, and promptly left after seeing how things were done. It must vary widely depending on the management, like any bureaucracy.
We just went through a cycle of politicians coast to coast, though less in the middle, screaming loudly to defund the police. What wasn't part of that conversation was getting rid of civil forfeiture, which is a rather amazing omission on the part of the defund the police folks.
That's true. Nobody supports civil forfeiture until the moment a politician realizes there's hay to be made from claiming that they support police efforts to prevent crime.
> In fact, I've never even heard an unreasonable defense.
I suspect like many things, there was some logic to the introduction. But it's just gotten to really batshit levels that there is probably nothing to do but stop the practice.
As I understand it, some of the origins were that for debts owed to the government, with the person not present in the country, it was much more practical to target assets that may exist within the country than try and get the individual.
Even in the introduction in the criminal context, I sort of understand the logic. In criminal organizations, there are likely people profiting a lot, that have engineered enough doubt that proving their connection to the beyond a reasonable standard is so difficult. But meeting a preponderance of the evidence standard in the civil context to reclaim those assets I can understand the argument.
So I think there are some bad and weak arguments, but they certainly don't outweigh what's happening now.
I think one of the worst argument I heard for not returning the money, was the police department wasn't able to follow the judges order, because they deposited the money into a bank account and transferred to another agency. And they'll never be able to find the exact same bills again that they gave to the bank, so are unable to follow the court order to return the money they took to the rightful owner.
Yes the basic premise for why people would support civil forfeiture is “due process let’s too many people ‘get away with it’ so we need an extrajudicial process”.
It’s the same basic rationale that all freedoms are ultimately curtailed with - all those rules are inconvenient, let’s by pass them a little bit. Then the reason for the rules start to become readily apparent again. Then the rationale takes on the old “can’t make an omelet” refrain, as if the world revolves around punishing criminals and everyone need to accept the collateral damage.
Personally I’m of the old “rather let a thousand guilty go free than punish a single innocent,” but I also don’t set policy.
Interledger Protocol works with any type of (digital) asset ledger; W3C ILP.
The FTC CAT Consolidated Audit Trail system does not uniquely identify individual bills / [ledger] dollars, either FWIU. But are photons uniquely identifiable either
> Due process developed from clause 39 of Magna Carta in England. Reference to due process first appeared in a statutory rendition of clause 39 in 1354 thus: "No man of what state or condition he be, shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law." [3] When English and American law gradually diverged, due process was not upheld in England but became incorporated in the US Constitution.
Whether it's possible to disarm and incapacitate without larceny.
Articles 11, 17, 6 and 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specify rights to Due Process of law, Property, and Equal Protection of such rights.
> Article 11: Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
> No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
> Article 17: Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
> No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
> Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
There really isn’t any reasonable defense for these examples or the lack of the speedy hearing.
But I’m not against civil forfeiture if practiced better with better safe guards.
Every year the government takes 30%+ of the money I make via taxation. Unelected administrative functionaries lay down laws that can massively change the value of your property.
I’m not going to cry if the government keeps money whose origin you can’t explain. By law, I have to file tax returns that explains my income. There isn’t a huge difference. These kind of seizures makes organized crime much easier to fight.
But again, a lot of these examples look more like straight theft.
Also, law enforcement shouldn’t get to keep the money it seizes. It’s a perverse incentive. Should just go into the general treasury.
If taxes were paid on the money then your example makes zero sense.
But yes we must explain everything to the Government. Rights aren't inherent, but are granted to us by the government if we can explain good enough why we need them. Cops should pull me over and ask how I financed my car and if I don't have a good enough answer/documentation on me they should get to take it /s
There's absolutely no reason to have civil forfeiture when criminal forfeiture exists. If you think money is the product of a crime, seize it, and charge the person with a crime. If you can't prove the crime then the money gets returned.
It might be okay if civil forfeiture were allowed as is but with the owner having an absolute entitlement to a jury case and treble damages against the police if they lose.
In theory it already is a constitutional right to Levy a civil trial against the police for forfeiture. And any civil trial with dollar value more than 20 is entitled to a jury.
The key question is "What will SCOTUS Do?" There have been numerous cases where Civil Asset Forfeiture has been overturned, but only AFTER the wronged party sued for actual and punitive damages. I wish the law required that LEOs who steal people's stuff to be automatically criminally charged for theft upon the overturn of civil asset forfeiture (along with treble damages awarded to the wronged party)... but that would make sense so it's likely not going to happen.
>> I wish the law required that LEOs who steal people's stuff to be automatically criminally charged for theft upon the overturn of civil asset forfeiture
At that point the defense would be Qualified Immunity.
Well, either the courts will circle the wagon or thats going to be backfiring soon.
People have started to try to apply Eminent Domain to the Qualified Immunity defense [1]. They're not disputing that you are a LEO acting in official government capacity but Eminent Domain requires that you compensate a private party for use of their stuff.
From what I could understand it sounds like 4 other district courts have ruled (around 31:30) on similar issues by siding that Eminent Domain does not apply on police actions while 4th has apparently ruled differently (I do not know which case they are referring to) & there were some arguments that earlier John Corp case from 5th Circuit (I believe https://casetext.com/case/john-corp-v-city-of-houston) already split the district courts.
To me it did sound like judges were taking the city side more though they did also ask for what kind of test should be implemented if they did rule in favor of Bakers.
Hopefully they do end up affirming the lower court decision but let's see.
Both those sums are further eclipsed by wage theft but that's another topic.
This is also only based on federal police statistics, because we don't have data available on state and local police forces who all participate in this looting.
That slide is confusing. The Burglary side says it takes place when people are absent, but then says it's a violent crime (and shows one person punching another). I get it's probably a legal definition of "violent" or something, but in that case showing an image of one person punching another is somewhat misleading...
Burglary isn't necessarily/traditionally a violent crime. Crime stats usually report it as a non-violent property crime, though there are parts of federal law that treat it as violent or similarly to violent crimes. It doesn't have violence as an element of the crime, but breaking into peoples' houses obviously sets the stage for more violent encounters.
Robbery on the other hand is by definition a violent crime, the threat of violence is what distinguishes it from other forms of theft or larceny.
> Robbery on the other hand is by definition a violent crime, the threat of violence is what distinguishes it from other forms of theft or larceny.
This is exactly it for me.
When I first read that the TSA would report you to the DEA for carrying large sums of cash into an airport, and the DEA would intercept you and seize it, I’ve been referring to it as armed robbery.
When the DEA asks you to hand over the $10k in your backpack, they’re doing it under threat of violence. It’s armed robbery, they just haven’t “drawn their gun yet.”
Try sticking to “I’m sorry sir, you can not have my money” and you’ll quickly see what the full weight of the U.S. Government looks like when escalated against you.
From the time they decided they wanted your money, it was theirs.
General data from the US for burglary depends on the source, yea.
If you look at victim data it's roughly it's 3 million burglaries per year, about 1/3 of which are home invasions. And about 1/4 of those (so 1/12 of total) are also violent crimes where the resident is injured.
But then when it comes time to report crime stats some stuff gets partitioned off into other buckets (I guess to avoid double counting? Idk). So e.g. some sources will take those 250k assaults-during-burglary and not count them as burglaries.
Robbery and burglary are both considered inherently dangerous crimes for which the felony murder rule can be applied. That means that if someone dies (victim, perpetrator or bystander) during a burglary or robbery, then the perpetrators can be charged with murder.
Also, I’d add that robbery can be done by trick instead of threat of violence. E.g., a robber tricks victim into handing over their wallet or purse, then distracts them while they remove valuables. The victim may not even know they’ve been robbed until later. If the victim, later noticing she has been robbed, then has a heart attack and dies, however, then the robber could potentially be charged with felony murder.
The bottom right of that slide says "victims are absent", then proceeds to show someone violently attacking a victim. Pretty self-contradictory.
The entire right side seems to be trying to redefine what "Burglary" means in everyday English. It means people stealing things, without the victims finding out right away, and without intimidating or threatening anyone.
The definition is completely overbroad, and seems like it's done with some agenda. Someone "entering with intent to commit a crime" is not always burglary, for example someone intending to defecate in a hallway or spray graffiti in the bathroom is not a burglar.
This didn't initially work for me. I changed DNS server settings tore down all my outside connections (physically), brought them back up…nada. Still infinite loop. Then I remembered I have an on-device ad filter implemented as a VPN, toggled that off and nn again, and now it works without even presenting a captcha. So, thank you for point me in the right direction!
i think this falls into the police accountability scope that have driven a lot of protests in the last few years. albeit for completely different reasons, the problem is still accountability. it needs to be addressed.
The fact that the Supreme Court is taking up this case is good news. The Court could have ignored it, but chose to consider it. The facts of the two related cases are reasonably favorable to striking down or curtailing civil asset forfeiture (CAF).
Surprisingly, part of the the right wing of the Supreme Court is skeptical of CAF: "Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch criticized asset forfeiture as an “extravagant punishment” in a 2018 decision. Justice Clarence Thomas said outright in a 2017 case that modern civil forfeiture schemes are likely unconstitutional."
The text of the 5th Amendment is fairly clear: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." [0]
The weaseling is always "but it's _civil_, not _criminal_.". Except, the premise is that a crime has been committed. But, people are being deprived of their property without due process. That private property is being taken for public use without _any_, let alone _just_, compensation.
It should be a 9-0 ruling striking it down, but we'll see...
Is it that surprising? One of the Constitution's major objectives is to restrict the powers of the government and its various entities. Being an originalist gets you there. So does not being an originalist.
The thing about right-wing politics is that half the time, right-wingers will very justifiably fear government power, but the other half of the time they'll shout about their thin blue lines. Much of the time you'll even see the "no step on snek" and "thin blue line" flags in the same place. Furthermore, a lot of the worry about government overreach is specifically about gun confiscation. While not everyone who owns a gun is a tyrant in waiting, obviously, a lot of people have specific fantasies about seizing power from governments they think are oppressive, while still saying we need to ignore power abuses of local police officers when they aren't targeted at them[0].
I call this mentality "no stop snek from stepping on other snek". It is not an ideology, but the consequence of right-wing outrage perverting that ideology. Right-libertarians do write long rants about police brutality, civil asset forfeiture, and so on; but right-wingers more broadly care solely for identity politics that benefit them. Think about how Louis Rossmann, who is very vaguely right-wing and very libertarian, got shat on by the right-wing half of his audience[2] for interviewing Sam Seder about right-to-repair.
What SCOTUS decides will likely be informed by the calculus of who exactly is petitioning them and what benefits the people who put them there. They aren't yet willing to completely shit on the concept of stare decisis[1], but we have to at least present a case to right-wingers that not only civil asset forfeiture is bad and unconstitutional, but that it's bad and unconstitutional in ways that hurt the kinds of people they are sympathetic to.
[0] Case in point: the relative lack of outrage in right-wing circles whenever black people get their guns confiscated or are summarily executed for having them
[1] The overturn of Roe v. Wade is concerning me, though
This can be fixed simply: require police and the federal government to cover legal fees when successfully recovering stolen property, require them to additionally pay penalties to the victims that match the late payment penalties for fines and taxes.
Finally, require all the, ahem, proceeds of this theft to be set aside for paying the above.
That removes the profit motive and adds substantial downside to bogus theft.
Tax payers already pay for police incompetence and malice, but at least now they wouldn't be able to steal property and then use that to pay for new toys, overtime, bonuses, etc and would have to operate inside their actual budget (rather than using theft to supplement their income).
Obviously making police overtime and bonus pools be the source of funds for lawsuit payouts might improve things - the unwillingness of police to actually report illegal behaviour by their coworkers might be reduced when that behaviour lowers their income.
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.
For example, the one case involves the girl's boyfriend and drugs. It's passed almost as an aside but no one gets that brought up if there isn't more to the story.
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.
To me, in Wilson's case it seems irrelevant if the boyfriend was a drug dealer or not, or even if she herself suspected of something. If that's the case, charge one or both of them, there's no just reason to take the car.
A hypothetical situation that could somewhat justify the police taking someone's car would be if the car was known to be stolen, but presumably she wouldn't be able to apply to get it back in that case, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
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 the state take their stuff to begin with, at least beyond what is required or might reasonably be required to pay for fines or compensations or was acquired illegally?
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.
The reasons communism allows seizure of property are with good intentions, just as the reasons the law allows the seizure of property in this case are because of good intentions.
How it's used and abused in practice in both systems is the important part. I'm not sure either system necessarily has a great track record in that respect.
Sorry, but the intentions behind these seizures are in no way benign. Maybe in the original intentions of the law, but the police are there to shake people down.
Yes, that is exactly what I said. I'm not sure how to read it otherwise. If you're going to assess how it works under communism by looking at why the government allows and and what their goal is, it only makes sense to assess other systems the same way, which is why I said "the reasons the law allows..."
Fair point. I should have been more precise, I was actually thinking of »hypothetical, never actually realized, potentially impossible to realize true platonic communists« and not of some Soviet era communists or something like that.
Eh, I'm not really pro communism, but it makes sense to me. If one of the central differences people focus on between the systems is private property, if someone sees that as somewhat of an illusion it makes sense to note it.
Means of production is not the same as the shoes on your feet. It's just unfortunately confusing terminology that leads to twisted argumentation.
Btw, the alternative to capitalist liberal states is not exclusively authoritarian marxist-leninist communism. Not all anti-capitalists are pining for another different boot to lick.
The rhetoric around the means of production was initially in reference to slaves. Communism was an offshoot of the abolition movement not in reference to at the time minimal number of factories. And in that context people did abandon slavery.
Even today factories aren’t the means of production, they don’t make houses that’s mostly people with hand tools. Nor do they make food or mine resources etc.
What point are you trying to make here? Marx’s writings were based on his observations of factories and industry in England at the time, among other things.
It just annoys me that people don’t understand the philosophy they expose.
Marx was not the origin of Communism or the phrasing around means of production. The context for his writing wasn’t simply factory conditions being so bad he created an original ideology from whole cloth. Which is why he was credited with the Marxism not Communism.
This entire thread was in response to police stealing in the US, and someone responded referencing communists. Given they context, they were clearly talking about Marxism. The guy you responded to explicitly mentioned that. And then you go off on some other interpretation of the same words, clearly misinterpreting what they posted to argue some other point.
That is an imaginary distinction which only exists to anti-capitalists to have their cake and it eat too, along with a continuation of their ongoing torrid love-affair of creating their own sophistic definitions. Everyone else says more or less "that is private property you fool!".
In theory, communism can reject the concept of private property, but in practice, all property ownership is "private", as any finite quantity of matter and space must necessarily be controlled by someone in particular at the exclusion of everyone else if it is to be used by anyone at all. So the practical differences are merely aesthetic.
The role of the police in upholding and defending capital is a well understood mechanic of capitalism. It's either naive or disingenuous or hold that they are separate unrelated phenomena when literally centuries of experience and scholarship demonstrates how they are interconnected mutually reinforcing social structures.
In this case we don't need to generalize across all systems that can be called capitalism, we have a specific instance in front of us to reason about. In the american system and its precursors, the role of the police is clear and well attested.
And people's personal property is not normally capital in the sense of capitalism, it not generally being the means of production or of reproducing capital itself. This is a really basic point which has me thinking we disagree on the fundamental terminology. Capitalism isn't a synonym for commerce, assets are not necessarily capital.
Despite being called capitalist, as a resident of the States that regularly visits other countries. I think many countries are more capitalist than the US, the US just gets called capitalist because we have fucked up healthcare and social services systems which themselves in the US to me seem like taking the worst aspects of socialism and combining them with the worst aspects of capitalism.
A little bit of fun trivia for you: state police were first founded to suppress unions and labor through violent means. Using Pinkertons caused backlash, so they integrated the Pinkertons into the government to give it legitimacy.
It's not really that bizarre. Everything boils down to human beings acting on human motivations, and humans often rationalize bad behavior by appealing to pretexts rooted in contrived ideologies. Communism is one such ideology, and the war on drugs is another.
In both cases here, the true underlying motivation of the parties involved is to take other people's stuff for themselves, but their apologists, communists and drug warriors alike, both rationalize real harm done to real people by pretending their actions are in pursuit of some utopian end state (which in both cases is an unattainable fantasy).
During the Cold War, Soviet states and the socialist economic system they had were propagandized in America as "the government can take your stuff at any time because COMMUNISM". This was aided by the fact that, in practice, the Soviets could and did do that. However, it was not at all a unique feature of socialism or communism. Police states don't care about who nominally owns the economy, they care about what can be looted from it.
Capitalism has no defense mechanisms against unwarranted seizure of property. Private ownership is a precursor to capitalism, not a byproduct of it. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways by which capitalist entities can gain government-like powers, if not totally supplant the government[0]. Concentration of wealth is a problem whether or not the person who owns the wealth claims to own it for themselves or in the name of the working class.
The way that you prevent the government[1] from stealing your stuff is to make it inconvenient for them to do so. In the US, we have presumption of innocence, right to due process, and so on. These are constitutional rights that the government broadly respects. If they regularly didn't, you'd see brain drain as people and businesses with the means to do so would escape the country. Those without such means would begin economically sabotaging the country. However, these are blunt instruments whose use entails personal cost, so people don't use them right away. The US can therefore get away with ignoring its own constitutional obligations some of the time, and in this case, that's how they get away with civil forfeiture.
Think of it like this: when Apple or Google start screwing over developers, or Reddit or Twitter start screwing over users, we don't all immediately jump ship, but some do. If they continue doing this, and they exceed a particular threshold of bullshit, they continue losing people faster than they gain. This creates a feedback loop of stupider and stupider tactics pissing off more and more people until the platform collapses.
Countries work in similar ways.
[0] The basic idea of Rothbardian ancap economics is that we should deliberately encourage this. The idea is that this would supposedly lead to competition for governance. Except this wouldn't actually happen because competition is a byproduct of capitalism, not an essential property of it.
I’m not going to go homeless, be starved, imprisoned, or killed by security forces if I stop using Twitter.
If people start organizing and forming mass strikes and unrest, all those things would, and already have, happened.
As for the rest of your comment, I have no clue what it has to do with what I posted. My point was that when talking about a system and its negative outcomes, it is pointless and often disingenuous to immediately mention another system. It blurs the topic and takes away from real analysis and critique.
Let’s talk about how this system developed in the US on its own merits, and when that is well understood, maybe then compare it to other systems.
You should read up on civil asset forfeiture - it's hilariously obtuse.
They arrest your money. You are not accused of a crime, your money is. Your money is not a person, and thus has no constitutional rights. Your money is not innocent until proven, that's a silly system reserved for persons - instead, your money must prove its innocence. And thus you get cases with absurd titles such as "United States v. $84,740.00 U.S. Currency" ( https://casetext.com/case/us-v-8474000-us-currency )
I'd love to say you can't make this up, but they did.
I remember some discussion here quite some time ago where somebody brought this up and linked to a list of the strangest cases, I still remember something like United States vs. a few tons of fish.
In the middle ages they had a lawsuit against the woodworms that ate a pulpit because a preacher fell when it eventually broke down, but one can always optimize for more absurdity.
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
What will SCOTUS do? This SCOTUS? Well, they'll take bribes from some billionaires and overturn previous decisions that will negatively affect most Americans.. And in regards to Civil Asset Forfeiture? Nothing. They will do absolutely nothing. It keeps us rabble where we belong, in the gutter.
Cities and counties can address this on their own, without waiting for the statehouse or Washington. The nonprofit I work for has a model policy and research that makes it nearly turn-key.
Most law enforcement is "above" local jurisdiction practically speaking.
Police are local militias with a near-military supply of weapons, technology, and surveillance.
Cities often seek judgement or ways to control law enforcement but police unions and silent strikes render their attempts futile.
If your city had George Floyd protests, you're likely aware of these silent strikes. The police simply stop doing their job and allow crime and lawlessness.
Without the threat of a national military coming down on them, local LE behaves like a mafia.
It's a political problem rather than a legal-powers problem; most mayors and city council members are (rightly) afraid of the local police union publicly calling them out.
That's why, even at the local level, forfeiture reform usually needs to be bundled with other, more broadly popular policing reforms. There isn't a critical mass of people lit up over asset forfeiture in most communities. Other attack vectors include:
* Qualified immunity reform packaged as a way to more easily get rid of bad cops.
* Collective bargaining transparency so the public (and even the city council) can see what tactics the union is using in contract negotiations.
Is it the property seizure laws that are bad? I'm sure some of them are. But isn't the greater problem that law enforcement and prosecution is immunized against liability for misapplying those laws?
Yes yes.. And yet many many young people in US are against second amendment. I wonder how they will be able to defend they property from criminals and goverment (police) without all those guns.
Unless they want live "easy" life (as someone famous said):
Do not own anything, so you will have no problems.
Shooting at police when they attempt to take your money is not a viable solution to this problem at all, much less such a first-line solution that it's a contradiction to also advocate gun control. It is already obvious that the government has a monopoly on violence. The entire structure of democracy is geared around spreading around that power to check it, and prevent any one actor from having greater access to it. The only viable solution is to reinforce those checks on power and remove the reins from bad actors trying to consolidate and strengthen their own access to the power.
If Elon Musk or someone else with boatloads of money wants to help society, they should take this on. Go to a city that is notorious for this, hire an army of lawyers and take every case to court. If it takes $10000 in legal fees to get back a car worth $5000, ::shrug:: Do it over and over and make it not worth it, and hopefully get this stopped.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadI'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.
Incidentally, I'm not sure he's familiar with the second half of the idiom ("spoils the whole bunch").
2016 essay by the president of the Fraternal Order of Police arguing against civil forfeiture reform.
> The FOP does not disagree that there is a need for civil asset forfeiture reform. In fact, we worked very closely with Senator Jeff Sessions on this issue going back to the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA) of 2000.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sessions-signals-more-police-pr...
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of civil forfeiture's biggest fans, reinstates aggressive federal policies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-madoff-and-the-case-for-...
2017 essay by then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein praising civil forfeiture and arguing reform is not necessary.
> Some critics claim that civil asset forfeiture fails to protect property rights or provide due process. The truth is that there are multiple levels of judicial protection, as well as administrative safeguards.
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/forfeiture-is-rea...
So, no.
I posted that link in response to an inquiry for a single source in support of civil forfeiture. While I happen to agree with the general thrust of your complaint, it is a non sequitur. The Supreme Court is the ultimate authority, provided a Congress unwilling to hold them accountable (which it currently is).
My question of 'credibility' is not "do you like the Federalist Society" but "do you think they're in political alignment with the Thin Blue Liners and are they writing policy."
And then you have the license plates and stickers and whatnot.
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-crime-preven... It's easily researchable.
Or becoming a lawyer and filing suit against police departments and other government agencies? Or financially supporting those lawyers?
Expecting people who point out a problem to also fix that problem in a single social media comment is a little unrealistic, I think, and generally not something people ask in good faith.
kinda like asking a black man what he thinks should be done about jim crow, if he's so smart. the tactic really does go way back
like yea oppressive power structures systematically foreclose, neuter, and dismantle any means that might be used to counteract or escape their effects, that's why they're oppressive power structures.
it’s galaxy-brain stuff to be asking the people inside to just wave a wand and dismantle it all, like I guess you think they could have just done it all along and simply chose not to? and “self-oppression” is of course a very real narrative that is pushed in these situation, it’s really your fault you can’t escape!
again, commoners of any form (let alone one single commoner working alone) are not going to be able to just do one simple trick and upend an oppressive power structure, it's a better place than being in the fuckbarrel but the point is oppressive power structures don't leave anyone a recourse, if your title doesn't begin with "senator" it doesn't really matter what you think or do.
there is of course one option, the last of the boxes. but if you aren't willing to fight for what you believe in then, yeah, you're effectively consenting to the society you are offered by political elites. consent can still be withdrawn, but in an oppressive power structure that's usually going to be a violent process.
like I am just telling you outright: soapbox, ballot box, and jury box are all effectively powerless to overturn the problems in american society, by design (that's why it's oppressive). and you can either live with that, and the society thus pressed upon you warts and all, or not. some random march for george floyd or voting blue every election is not going to fix america. keyboard warriorism (including this comment) certainly is not going to do it either.
nobody actually walks away from omelas - and omelas news network thinks you're crazy for even suggesting there could be anything better. We all - you and me and every other law-abiding, taxpaying citizen - accept this society knowing that it exists on the back of the largest slave/gulag population on the planet, and an arbitrary and capricious (and usually politicized) "justice" system that could randomly condemn any of us to that slavery and a permanent mark of underclass. We all accept the idea that our attempts at reforms will not do more than trivial and meaningless amounts of good through our lifetimes. And yet we stay and participate.
https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
You're not helping. Why is that, Leon? Why do you consent?
(I consent to omelas too, I just want you to consciously make your own decision in full knowledge of the consequences and responsibility of your actions. Every day you wake up and go about your life, you do it on the backs of the police state and the carceral state/gulag archipelago it has imposed upon us, and even rattling the bars of your cage a bit by voting or activism will not change this.)
Well, this is a situation where most people cannot really "just leave". And in fact the US expends considerable resources to make life difficult for those who attempt it.
This will not change unless until and until elites' own interests align in reforming it. And elites are pretty good at making it illegal to make their lives uncomfortable or apply pressure on them in meaningful ways.
It is possible for societies to become so stratified that this change is not possible without violence. Classically, dictatorships, but I don't think that is the only way to get there.
America is in that place, because our society is so geographically isolated and so resource-blessed that a traditional collapse is not possible. There is no neighboring country that is going to topple us if we allow our system to become stagnant and calcified. Any realistic attack would have to cross an ocean or a rainforest/jungle to do it.
So we will continue bumbling along, boiling the frog and allowing our society to become worse and worse, because the US cannot collapse and cannot reform. And there really is nothing that you, as a single voter, could possibly do about it.
Even a million man march cannot do anything about it - easier to just assassinate the commoner's leader and move on with some token reforms to shut people up. The system doesn't mind using (extralegal!) violence on you, that stigma is for commoners not elites.
Would they say the same if the only two options were Saddam and Maddas?
If the nation's leaders are being elected by a 10-20% voter turnout, it'll be very obvious what's going on. That is the thing that they don't want to happen.
Keep voting harder! That'll solve everything!
> The politics of civil forfeiture were somewhat unusual. The federal forfeiture laws were introduced and pushed through Congress by Republicans in the 1980s, with some Democrats supportive and some critical.
No it doesn't.
Biden was one of the co-sponsors. But the main sponsor was a Republican, and a Republican signed it into law.
But that's all petty and pointless.
> Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/holder-ends-se...
You completely leave out any reference to this bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/98th-congress/senate-bill/948.
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.
The opponent here isn't other citizens, it's the police and their organizations (police benevolent associations, police unions, etc.) which wield considerable political power, and to an extent also legal power (since they collectively have nearly full discretion over what laws are enforced and by what means, to the extent they can cooperate amongst themselves).
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 5 billion USD.
It's called the national guard.
And, they're really badly equipped to do everything NYPD does.
As best I can tell, that is not true.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association, a police union, posted to Twitter a screenshot of Chiara de Blasio’s arrest report, which is a public record. The arrest report report contained her address… which was Gracie Mansion. In other words, not remotely a secret. The tweet did not threaten her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrolmen%27s_Benevolent_Assoc...
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 ?
The solution to this is either:
- setup a second security force to gradually replace them
or
- subdivide the coverage map into different districts, suss out the districts with poor performing management, then merge the territories of bad areas under the management of good areas
or
- subdivide responsibilities between violent crime, petty crime, and mundane enforcement like traffic, with separate departments for each, and tackle cleaning them up separately.
Really the notion of taking the same "trained" cop for all the roles in an urban area is pretty stupid. Specialized enforcement roles are likely a better solution.
Shadow defunding, without calling it defunding, is also another weapon, but of course Minneapolis blew that by outright calling it defunding.
But really the drug war is what fuels corruption and excessive power. Remove the drug war, and it would kneecap massive amounts of abuse.
And, of course, they are all part of the same union.
By subdividing into distinct departments, it is the basic divide and conquer. And you can replace departments more readily: keep the traffic and crime investigation units, but replace the patrol cops that are refusing to do their jobs.
Seems like the root problem is that we grant the state a monopoly on physical violence because the alternative (no group having a monopoly on physical violence, and hence all of them battling it out) is worse. But then like the holders of any monopoly, they abuse it. This is why we can't have nice things.
A suggestion I've thought of before and have seen in the wold increasingly is pay cops a stipend to pay for their own insurance. If they can't get insurance they get fired automatically.
Which gives the ridiculous (to us) dozens of police cars flocking around a single criminal.
I'm from one of the more stable countries in Europe. While there is corruption and abuse in the police, the average officer has greater loyalty to the system than to their superiors. Which means that if someone refuses to do their job, you can fire them and possibly charge them with crimes, and you will eventually find a replacement willing to do the job.
The only way I can see something like this happening is if the average police officer does not believe in the legitimacy of the political and legal system.
I suspect like many things, there was some logic to the introduction. But it's just gotten to really batshit levels that there is probably nothing to do but stop the practice.
As I understand it, some of the origins were that for debts owed to the government, with the person not present in the country, it was much more practical to target assets that may exist within the country than try and get the individual.
Even in the introduction in the criminal context, I sort of understand the logic. In criminal organizations, there are likely people profiting a lot, that have engineered enough doubt that proving their connection to the beyond a reasonable standard is so difficult. But meeting a preponderance of the evidence standard in the civil context to reclaim those assets I can understand the argument.
So I think there are some bad and weak arguments, but they certainly don't outweigh what's happening now.
I think one of the worst argument I heard for not returning the money, was the police department wasn't able to follow the judges order, because they deposited the money into a bank account and transferred to another agency. And they'll never be able to find the exact same bills again that they gave to the bank, so are unable to follow the court order to return the money they took to the rightful owner.
It’s the same basic rationale that all freedoms are ultimately curtailed with - all those rules are inconvenient, let’s by pass them a little bit. Then the reason for the rules start to become readily apparent again. Then the rationale takes on the old “can’t make an omelet” refrain, as if the world revolves around punishing criminals and everyone need to accept the collateral damage.
Personally I’m of the old “rather let a thousand guilty go free than punish a single innocent,” but I also don’t set policy.
Account for the seized assets.
Interledger Protocol works with any type of (digital) asset ledger; W3C ILP.
The FTC CAT Consolidated Audit Trail system does not uniquely identify individual bills / [ledger] dollars, either FWIU. But are photons uniquely identifiable either
Due process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process :
> Due process developed from clause 39 of Magna Carta in England. Reference to due process first appeared in a statutory rendition of clause 39 in 1354 thus: "No man of what state or condition he be, shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law." [3] When English and American law gradually diverged, due process was not upheld in England but became incorporated in the US Constitution.
Whether it's possible to disarm and incapacitate without larceny.
Criminal Justice Reform > Arguments on criminal justice reform > Support for reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_reform_in_the...
Save the children.
School-to-prison pipeline > Alternative approaches, Mental Health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
There are 549 translations of the UDHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/search?f%5B0%5D=event_type_taxonomy...
> Article 11: Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
> No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
> Article 17: Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
> No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
> Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
But I’m not against civil forfeiture if practiced better with better safe guards.
Every year the government takes 30%+ of the money I make via taxation. Unelected administrative functionaries lay down laws that can massively change the value of your property.
I’m not going to cry if the government keeps money whose origin you can’t explain. By law, I have to file tax returns that explains my income. There isn’t a huge difference. These kind of seizures makes organized crime much easier to fight.
But again, a lot of these examples look more like straight theft.
Also, law enforcement shouldn’t get to keep the money it seizes. It’s a perverse incentive. Should just go into the general treasury.
But yes we must explain everything to the Government. Rights aren't inherent, but are granted to us by the government if we can explain good enough why we need them. Cops should pull me over and ask how I financed my car and if I don't have a good enough answer/documentation on me they should get to take it /s
In theory it already is a constitutional right to Levy a civil trial against the police for forfeiture. And any civil trial with dollar value more than 20 is entitled to a jury.
At that point the defense would be Qualified Immunity.
People have started to try to apply Eminent Domain to the Qualified Immunity defense [1]. They're not disputing that you are a LEO acting in official government capacity but Eminent Domain requires that you compensate a private party for use of their stuff.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/investigates/police-...
Note: IANAL, I'm a complete layperson.
From what I could understand it sounds like 4 other district courts have ruled (around 31:30) on similar issues by siding that Eminent Domain does not apply on police actions while 4th has apparently ruled differently (I do not know which case they are referring to) & there were some arguments that earlier John Corp case from 5th Circuit (I believe https://casetext.com/case/john-corp-v-city-of-houston) already split the district courts.
To me it did sound like judges were taking the city side more though they did also ask for what kind of test should be implemented if they did rule in favor of Bakers.
Hopefully they do end up affirming the lower court decision but let's see.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
This is also only based on federal police statistics, because we don't have data available on state and local police forces who all participate in this looting.
Previous discussion, which mods removed from the frontpage once it was at the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36975143
https://www.fakhimi.com/photos/robbery-versus-burglary.jpg
Robbery on the other hand is by definition a violent crime, the threat of violence is what distinguishes it from other forms of theft or larceny.
This is exactly it for me.
When I first read that the TSA would report you to the DEA for carrying large sums of cash into an airport, and the DEA would intercept you and seize it, I’ve been referring to it as armed robbery.
When the DEA asks you to hand over the $10k in your backpack, they’re doing it under threat of violence. It’s armed robbery, they just haven’t “drawn their gun yet.”
Try sticking to “I’m sorry sir, you can not have my money” and you’ll quickly see what the full weight of the U.S. Government looks like when escalated against you.
From the time they decided they wanted your money, it was theirs.
If you look at victim data it's roughly it's 3 million burglaries per year, about 1/3 of which are home invasions. And about 1/4 of those (so 1/12 of total) are also violent crimes where the resident is injured.
But then when it comes time to report crime stats some stuff gets partitioned off into other buckets (I guess to avoid double counting? Idk). So e.g. some sources will take those 250k assaults-during-burglary and not count them as burglaries.
It gets really confusing really fast.
Also, I’d add that robbery can be done by trick instead of threat of violence. E.g., a robber tricks victim into handing over their wallet or purse, then distracts them while they remove valuables. The victim may not even know they’ve been robbed until later. If the victim, later noticing she has been robbed, then has a heart attack and dies, however, then the robber could potentially be charged with felony murder.
The entire right side seems to be trying to redefine what "Burglary" means in everyday English. It means people stealing things, without the victims finding out right away, and without intimidating or threatening anyone.
The definition is completely overbroad, and seems like it's done with some agenda. Someone "entering with intent to commit a crime" is not always burglary, for example someone intending to defecate in a hallway or spray graffiti in the bathroom is not a burglar.
Its chart shows that burglary led from 2016-2018, but asset forfeiture was ahead again in 2023.
Surprisingly, part of the the right wing of the Supreme Court is skeptical of CAF: "Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch criticized asset forfeiture as an “extravagant punishment” in a 2018 decision. Justice Clarence Thomas said outright in a 2017 case that modern civil forfeiture schemes are likely unconstitutional."
From: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/south-carolina-supr...
The weaseling is always "but it's _civil_, not _criminal_.". Except, the premise is that a crime has been committed. But, people are being deprived of their property without due process. That private property is being taken for public use without _any_, let alone _just_, compensation.
It should be a 9-0 ruling striking it down, but we'll see...
[0] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transc...
I call this mentality "no stop snek from stepping on other snek". It is not an ideology, but the consequence of right-wing outrage perverting that ideology. Right-libertarians do write long rants about police brutality, civil asset forfeiture, and so on; but right-wingers more broadly care solely for identity politics that benefit them. Think about how Louis Rossmann, who is very vaguely right-wing and very libertarian, got shat on by the right-wing half of his audience[2] for interviewing Sam Seder about right-to-repair.
What SCOTUS decides will likely be informed by the calculus of who exactly is petitioning them and what benefits the people who put them there. They aren't yet willing to completely shit on the concept of stare decisis[1], but we have to at least present a case to right-wingers that not only civil asset forfeiture is bad and unconstitutional, but that it's bad and unconstitutional in ways that hurt the kinds of people they are sympathetic to.
[0] Case in point: the relative lack of outrage in right-wing circles whenever black people get their guns confiscated or are summarily executed for having them
[1] The overturn of Roe v. Wade is concerning me, though
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DR1AIsyzZ0&lc=UgxdShhyG9NmA...
Finally, require all the, ahem, proceeds of this theft to be set aside for paying the above.
That removes the profit motive and adds substantial downside to bogus theft.
Obviously making police overtime and bonus pools be the source of funds for lawsuit payouts might improve things - the unwillingness of police to actually report illegal behaviour by their coworkers might be reduced when that behaviour lowers their income.
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.
A hypothetical situation that could somewhat justify the police taking someone's car would be if the car was known to be stolen, but presumably she wouldn't be able to apply to get it back in that case, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
How it's used and abused in practice in both systems is the important part. I'm not sure either system necessarily has a great track record in that respect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJd4Q4u5cqU
Reminder: this is yet another piece of evidence that The War on Drugs™ does not serve us well in any way, shape, or form.
Yes, that is exactly what I said. I'm not sure how to read it otherwise. If you're going to assess how it works under communism by looking at why the government allows and and what their goal is, it only makes sense to assess other systems the same way, which is why I said "the reasons the law allows..."
Means of production is not the same as the shoes on your feet. It's just unfortunately confusing terminology that leads to twisted argumentation.
Btw, the alternative to capitalist liberal states is not exclusively authoritarian marxist-leninist communism. Not all anti-capitalists are pining for another different boot to lick.
Even today factories aren’t the means of production, they don’t make houses that’s mostly people with hand tools. Nor do they make food or mine resources etc.
Marx was not the origin of Communism or the phrasing around means of production. The context for his writing wasn’t simply factory conditions being so bad he created an original ideology from whole cloth. Which is why he was credited with the Marxism not Communism.
- police writ large
- police monopolies
- any given police policy and its interaction with capital
Anyways, if police are supposed "to defend capital", then a policy of stealing capital from private individuals is exactly not capitalistic.
And people's personal property is not normally capital in the sense of capitalism, it not generally being the means of production or of reproducing capital itself. This is a really basic point which has me thinking we disagree on the fundamental terminology. Capitalism isn't a synonym for commerce, assets are not necessarily capital.
In both cases here, the true underlying motivation of the parties involved is to take other people's stuff for themselves, but their apologists, communists and drug warriors alike, both rationalize real harm done to real people by pretending their actions are in pursuit of some utopian end state (which in both cases is an unattainable fantasy).
Capitalism has no defense mechanisms against unwarranted seizure of property. Private ownership is a precursor to capitalism, not a byproduct of it. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways by which capitalist entities can gain government-like powers, if not totally supplant the government[0]. Concentration of wealth is a problem whether or not the person who owns the wealth claims to own it for themselves or in the name of the working class.
The way that you prevent the government[1] from stealing your stuff is to make it inconvenient for them to do so. In the US, we have presumption of innocence, right to due process, and so on. These are constitutional rights that the government broadly respects. If they regularly didn't, you'd see brain drain as people and businesses with the means to do so would escape the country. Those without such means would begin economically sabotaging the country. However, these are blunt instruments whose use entails personal cost, so people don't use them right away. The US can therefore get away with ignoring its own constitutional obligations some of the time, and in this case, that's how they get away with civil forfeiture.
Think of it like this: when Apple or Google start screwing over developers, or Reddit or Twitter start screwing over users, we don't all immediately jump ship, but some do. If they continue doing this, and they exceed a particular threshold of bullshit, they continue losing people faster than they gain. This creates a feedback loop of stupider and stupider tactics pissing off more and more people until the platform collapses.
Countries work in similar ways.
[0] The basic idea of Rothbardian ancap economics is that we should deliberately encourage this. The idea is that this would supposedly lead to competition for governance. Except this wouldn't actually happen because competition is a byproduct of capitalism, not an essential property of it.
[1] or government-like entities
If people start organizing and forming mass strikes and unrest, all those things would, and already have, happened.
As for the rest of your comment, I have no clue what it has to do with what I posted. My point was that when talking about a system and its negative outcomes, it is pointless and often disingenuous to immediately mention another system. It blurs the topic and takes away from real analysis and critique.
Let’s talk about how this system developed in the US on its own merits, and when that is well understood, maybe then compare it to other systems.
Joe Biden was also a huge fan of civil forfeiture in the 80s and 90s: https://fee.org/articles/how-a-young-joe-biden-became-the-ar...
They arrest your money. You are not accused of a crime, your money is. Your money is not a person, and thus has no constitutional rights. Your money is not innocent until proven, that's a silly system reserved for persons - instead, your money must prove its innocence. And thus you get cases with absurd titles such as "United States v. $84,740.00 U.S. Currency" ( https://casetext.com/case/us-v-8474000-us-currency )
I'd love to say you can't make this up, but they did.
A federal suit under which the government unsuccessfully attempted to force the Coca-Cola Company to remove caffeine from its product.
United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Solid_G...
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
https://better-cities.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/BCP-ref...
Police are local militias with a near-military supply of weapons, technology, and surveillance.
Cities often seek judgement or ways to control law enforcement but police unions and silent strikes render their attempts futile.
If your city had George Floyd protests, you're likely aware of these silent strikes. The police simply stop doing their job and allow crime and lawlessness.
Without the threat of a national military coming down on them, local LE behaves like a mafia.
That's why, even at the local level, forfeiture reform usually needs to be bundled with other, more broadly popular policing reforms. There isn't a critical mass of people lit up over asset forfeiture in most communities. Other attack vectors include:
* Qualified immunity reform packaged as a way to more easily get rid of bad cops.
* Collective bargaining transparency so the public (and even the city council) can see what tactics the union is using in contract negotiations.
Unless they want live "easy" life (as someone famous said):
Do not own anything, so you will have no problems.