Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him
vox.com
vox.com
Also, don't forget, here in the US many people cannot qualify for a simple checking/savings account at a bank, meaning they use check cashing services to cash their paychecks and only have cash. There is absolutely nothing is illegal about them only having cash. If anything IMO it is immoral that these people are iced out of the banking environment because of past credit mistakes etc. Immigrants and minorities are almost always the worst affected, how is that right?
Civil asset forfeiture is horrid and needs to be done away with permanently and nationally. If you want to take someones property prove it was involved in a crime and directly contributed to or tied to the criminal act. If the property is properly seized through the courts, the proceeds should first benefit anyone directly afflicted by the criminal act, then secondarily pay for the court and legal fees to reduce taxpayer obligations.
I've never seen a bank that wouldn't take money, especially when they can charge account maintenance fees.
Assuming you are a US citizen, I highly invite you to come over to Switzerland and try and open a (savings) account if you wish to experience it in person. I'm currently living here, and talking to my US colleagues, I've found that it is near impossible for them to open an account, even though they would bring money to the banks here.
Reasoning? Issues of the US with the Swiss banking system has made these customers more of a pain than a benefit. I'm sure a similar argument can be made for people who (perhaps accidentally) have a bad credit score
But of course that wasn't enough. The FATCA law requires foreign institutions to also report back to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
> The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is a United States federal law requiring United States persons (including those living outside the U.S.) to have yearly reported themselves and their non-U.S.financial accounts to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), and requires all non-US (Foreign) Financial Institutions (FFI's) to search their records for suspected US persons for reporting their assets and identities to the US Treasury.
Note the last part. The burden imposed by FATCA on those institutions is so high, that they are refusing to have any US related people as customers. Heck the FATCA law is so wide reaching and onerous that a friend in Sri Lanka was bitching about having to implement it at their company, even though they don't employ a single US related person.
The net result is US citizens living abroad are giving up citizenship rather than deal with all this crap. It is noticeable how under represented Americans expats are, and there will be increasingly fewer. (As a counter-example, you will find Brits everywhere.) This will harm the country and its integration into the rest of the world (economically, politically etc).
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24135021
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/06/fatca-hurts...
Renunciation of US citizenship was free until July 2010, the same year that FACTA went into effect. At that time US embassies started charging a $450 fee to renounce citizenship. In September 2014, this fee was raised to $2,350.
So an American family of four, living abroad, who wants to renounce their US citizenship needs to come up with $9400 to do so.
https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expa...
You know, people in US laugh at opressive regimes who they don't allow people to leave the country to travel. Yet US is doing the same in a way with respect to citizenship.
1. Credit check, poor credit makes you a risk and they don't like it, but this can sometimes be overcome more easily then the others.
2. If you had a prior account and it was closed forcibly or your SS# still shows up in the checking system as risky. There are a few national clearing houses that track your checks to see if you are a good/bad risk for accepting checks for retailers. Those same systems banks use to determine if they will give you an account.
3. If you have been convicted of a crime of dishonesty in the past, e.g. shoplifting, charged for a bad check, fraud etc.
4. If you do not have a permanent address or your address isn't a permanent residence, e.g. you live in motels day to day.
It isn't that these reasons aren't valid for banks to have concerns about you, but to totally ice you out or charge outrageous fees just because doesn't seem right to me. There are other options, like a savings account with no checks and cash withdrawal only etc.
The stated reason was an inability to document my income and a lack of credit information.
Similarly, I've been denied credit cards and bank accounts since this "co-ownership" has mixed my financial information in LexisNexis [and similar services] with that of my parents and I don't always know the questions they ask to verify my identity and/or claim that I'm not me.
For instance, I shutdown my Chase account because one part of Chase insisted I wasn't me [to the point of denying me access to services I had paid for] while the other part of Chase held my money. I'm not going to trust Chase to hold 5 figures of my cash if they are simultaneously going to insist over the phone I'm not me because I can't answer questions sourced from services like LexisNexis. That'd be insane.
> Similar proportions of previously banked (33.2 percent) and never-banked (32.8 percent) households report that they don’t have a bank account because they don’t have enough money for one; this was the most common reason given by both groups. The second most common reason was not needing or wanting an account, although a larger percentage of never-banked households (26.0 percent) cited this reason than did previously banked households (15.6 percent). This finding implies that households that have had a bank account in the past may place more value on a banking relationship than those that have not.
> For nearly 10 percent (9.5 percent) of previously banked households, the main reason they do not currently have an account is that the bank closed their account. Another 5.5 percent of previously banked households cannot open an account because of identification (ID), credit, or banking history problems. This suggests that about 15 percent of previously banked households may not choose to be unbanked but face institutional barriers related to opening or maintaining an account.
> High bank account fees or minimum balance requirements were the main obstacles to account ownership for slightly more than 5 percent of unbanked households. However, recently unbanked households were more likely than others to cite fees as an obstacle: more than one in ten (11.1 percent) households that had a bank account in the last year were currently unbanked because of high fees and balance requirements, compared to 6.0 percent of previously banked households that had an account over a year ago. ...
However, watching John Oliver talk about how ridiculous the civil forfeiture laws are in the US just makes me want to laugh so much.
I know of all the great things happening in the US, and I'm not calling you a bad country. But it's so hard not to categorise you together with North Korea, China and the United Arab Emirates with how trigger happy your police are, how easy it is for them to steal from the population. How terribly you treat your sick and poor, and how fascinated you seem to be with groping people at the airport.
select from countries group by police_score;
select from countries group by freedom_of_press_index;
People are responding to your exact comment, not guessing what you might be thinking.
I do acknowledge the issues raised by OP; my quote: "...exposing and criticizing the very issues you mention."
I read the original comment as a generalization that the US is grouped in with those other countries due to these issues. My reply was simply to refute that primarily on the fact that we have the ability to discuss and solve these issues that those other countries do not have. It is an important distinction in my opinion.
Maybe I misread the intent - it appears from some of the fiery responses I've received that may be true. :(
Edit: Sorry, still on my first cup of coffee. Here it goes: the purpose of news is to objectively inform you of facts. The purpose of these comedy shows is to make you laugh, often by distorting or exaggerating the facts. By getting your news from comedy shows, you are receiving a distorted view of reality, which you seem to admit in your post. However, I see this as a greater problem with some youth.
Which news source does that? Fox News? the NYT? Al Jazeera? the WSJ? Democracy Now? the Washington Post? RT? The Guardian? Der Spiegel? No matter which one you pick, others will point out failures.
No news source can give you all the news. As commenters have long noted, the selection of facts to present is itself subject to bias.
For example, during a contract negotiation between a company and a union, does the news source report the facts as management sees it? Or as the union sees it? If it presents both sides, but one side is likely lying, does the news source report the lie, or let the reader decide, or interview a third party to have that third party point out the lie?
It sounds like you are in Norway, it might just be impossible for you to think of these solutions because of the lack of context. Not putting you down, it would be just as impossible for me to have a valid opinion about anything going on in Norway because I am completely ignorant of your laws and environment.
I am not disputing these problems are in a range from less-than-ideal to horrible. However, the term often used in product design "form follows function" might be applicable here.
For example, our police force's "form" is a result of the "function" they have to serve, which includes a country with 300 million guns, higher crime rate than a lot of countries and, currently, a situation where segments of the population are advocating killing cops. And, in fact, cops have been killed just sitting in their cars doing absolutely nothing more than existing.
Again, not proposing this is the police force I want. Yet one has to understand things in context before forming an opinion. I know lots of cops. I train at a local Aikido dojo that is run by a retired FBI agent. Probably 80% of the students are in law enforcement (police, CHP, correctional, anti-terrorist units, FBI and undisclosed). A number of them are friends. We go have lunch and dinner together and talk about these things. They are very concerned that every time they put on their uniform they become targets for maniacs. They'd love to be able to walk around without their guns when in uniform but, today, in the USA, that would be suicidal. And today, in the USA, for a cop to approach contact with a civilian not prepared for the potential of a gun being pointed at them would be just as dangerous.
That, BTW, is one of the problems we have today in this country. Nobody talks to anyone in an effort to understand what's going on yet everyone has an opinion. Sit down with a cop for a two or three hour heart-to-heart conversation and your view of their reality will be very different. Don't think of them as an image on TV. Think of them as your brother, sister, father or mother.
The sick and the poor? That's an entirely different problem. Again, go through the mental exercise of developing a solution --a realistic one-- before forming opinions. You can't just say "do it like Norway" or "do it like France", because we are not Norway or France. We have our own laws, problems, culture and dynamics. And so, the solutions have to be had in the context of an entire society.
In my opinion the USA is going through some of the phases Latin America has gone through in terms of what's happening with government and the poor. In order to understand what I mean you have to understand Latin American history going back to 1492 and probably a bit before that. I am not going to go into the details, there's an excellent set of videos that paint a strong evidence-based image of the problem. If you don't speak Spanish you can turn on subtitles and google translate (not a great translation but it might do). Here they are:
Short one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkYEXS16dZA
In depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WylR8EvhnE
There are a couple of lines in these videos that hit the "poor" problem in the US right on the head. Please remember the context here is Latin American history, not US. I am simply proposing there are important parallels (not a match, parallels):
"Populism: It's the shortcut through which politicians play with people's passions, dreams and ideals to promise them the impossible, taking advantage of the people making decisions outside the bounds of logic and reason as they focus in their misery. It plays with necessities of the population to impose a dictatorship."
"Populism has such love for the poor that it multiplies them."
The latter one is particularly powerful. When politicians play the people for their own benefit nothing good can come from that. I feel very strongly that the Latin American historical experience is a time machine for aspects of the US experience. They are probably fifty years ahead of us in populism and it's effects.
A populist uses the population for votes during elections yet needs them to stay poor and miserable after winning the election or they lose their "base". They do this by promising to fix their problems and, ultimately, not doing anything for them. The poor staying poor is good for the populist. They appease them with gifts that might feel good but do not, ultimately, solve the real problems. YouTube is full of videos going back to 2008 with people in absolutely rapture about the Obama era solving all their problems. Obama promised the parting of the oceans and beyond and, of course, just like any good populist, delivered almost nothing. The poor are still poor, the uneducated are still uneducated and we have worst problems than we had seven years ago.
And so I ask, before forming an opinion about anything --not just the US, anything in your life-- take the time to really understand it from the inside and develop solutions on paper. Opinions without solid context and deep solution analysis aren't very valuable.
BTW, we are all guilty of this. Most of use react to things rather than taking the more difficult road of investing time and mental effort to dig deep into something before shaping an opinion. People will, for example, down vote this post without investing the four hours, or more, that it would take to research and truly understand. Nobody is going to go to the local police station and engage a cop in a conversation to understand what being a cop feels like. And nobody is going to devote a couple of hours to watch those videos and another two or more hours to research what they learned and develop context. That's just the way things are. Again, we are --me included-- all guilty of this, which is part of the problem.
That comes with the territory of participating in a violent criminal gang. Perhaps if, collectively, they behaved more like police instead, it wouldn't be as risky for them. Unfortunately, the cops have been giving people lots of good reasons to be defensive and/or seek vengeance, and their actions have eroded trust and respect even in those who aren't their usual victims.
It may be a small percentage of cops that are bad while the rest just support them, but because their coworkers don't bother to stop them, and they are unaccountable and immune to any form of punishment for violating the law, and they take advantage of that to victimize the citizens, they (and their fellow gang members) are naturally going to be at risk of their victims fighting back. When their victims can't get justice through the justice system, it is going to be messy frontier justice.
> form follows function
And effect follows cause. We should address the cause.
Stop letting police commit armed robbery under the fancypants name "civil asset forfeiture" and start holding them accountable for behaving properly and respectably. Teach them that throwing flashbangs at babies, shooting at protesters, stealing from people, and randomly arresting people for not being white are not proper respectable behavior. Teach them about the constitution and the laws of our land. It'll be a long and difficult change, but de-escalating (something police are supposed to do) sure beats the alternative of escalating further.
Hundreds of years ago, we had problems with corruption in law enforcement. That's why we have explicit laws against this: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [...] 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"
While the police are acting as a violent criminal gang, they will be perceived and treated as such. When they stop doing that, or at least justice occurs, then the problems will be greatly reduced and the police themselves will be much safer.
Their jobs are unimaginable to most of us, particularly when they work difficult areas. One of the cops from my Aikido dojo is in a gang task force. One day he entered this room (I can't give too much detail) and had a full clip emptied in his direction just as he closed the door. To this day he has no clue why not one bullet hit him.
Not one of us outside law enforcement or military service is equipped to understand what it would mean to wake up every day and go to work doing THAT job. It's far too easy to be angry at videos on youtube from behind a keyboard.
Again, I am not pushing back on anything you said. Your opinion could be exactly on point. I don't know and I won't take sides other than to say, perhaps take the time to go talk to a cop or two human-to-human in order to understand their plight. Buy them a cup of coffee and tell them there are a few things you'd like to understand. You know, they are sons, daughters, fathers and mothers, they are people, just like you and I. And yes, there are assholes in there just like in any other population.
I am not defending the assholes, but, yes, the vast majority of good cops out there deserve our thanks and respect for doing a job most of us might not want to do. Let's walk in their shoes a bit and avoid lumping them in with the assholes you see on youtube.
But my point is that, while most cops have good intentions, instead of punishing and removing the few assholes so that people can feel safer with cops around, we're rewarding them, giving them heavier weapons, institutionalizing their assholery, and possibly turning good cops bad by encouraging them to do unethical/immoral/illegal things. That makes people feel threatened by cops, and that makes it more dangerous for the cops. Citizens and police should not be an adversarial us-vs-them relationship.
Least we have startups, right?
United Arab Emirates... trigger happy? You have no idea what you're talking about. The police there are extremely pleasant to deal with. You actually feel safe talking to them.
On a different note, my takeaway from this story: pick your battles.
Sure, you can go into an airport with $11k in cash. Maybe you're a Sikh and you want to carry a kirpan [0] into the airport, or you're a high school kid working on a science project and you have a bunch of C-cell batteries taped together with wires hanging out the ends of them (experience talking).
You're probably increasing your odds of getting stopped. Sometimes it's worth it, maybe for strong religious beliefs, or you feel strongly about the exercise of your democratic rights. But fighting the collective weight of "normal", shared perception, culture, etc. is costly. You'll be delayed, people will ask lots of annoying questions, in general you'll expend a lot of energy on stuff that is in some sense, entirely avoidable.
I felt this way recently when trying to get a loan for a house from Wells Fargo. Quit my W2 a few months ago for a large contract. I couldn't convince the bank my income was solid even though the payment was about 1/8th of my taxable income and I had almost the entire mortgage balance in semi-liquid retirement accounts. Sometimes the message the world sends is, "conform".
The Supreme Court only takes cases it wants, usually because different circuit courts (the level below the Supreme Court) are at odds with one another. The Supreme Court also sometimes takes cases which they are certain will have circuit splits, ones of particular importance (Bush v. Gore), and those which are causing a body of law to be developed which the SC justices believe to be incorrect. Because of these facts, you cannot force a case on to the Supreme Court docket; they are probably waiting for the right case to take.
Anyway, that's relatively rare and doesn't justify suspending the property rights of individuals without due process.
It is not as rare as you might think, but even if it were very frequent, it would not justify taking people's property for no good reason.
State's Attorneys will typically drop Civil Asset Forfeiture cases before they get to the Supreme Court for that reason. It's better to give up a few cases here and there than to fight them and risk taking down the whole system, I guess.
Well Congress could just pass a law and get it down with quicker. No need to wait for any convenient case to go to Supreme Court. But Congress, and guessing local state legistators, are not putting this on the top of their agenda.
Police usually seize things from minorities, those who perceived do not have the power or resources to fight back. You don't see cops pulling Trump or Gates on their way to a fundraiser and confiscating their cash. They probably don't hang out in multi-million dollar home neighbourhoods doing it. Because in that case, shit will hit the fan very fast. But nobody cares if a black kid with $11k gets his money taken. Look at him, he smoked pot, most people 50 and older see a druggy criminal type alread, mix in some deep seated racism, and you are close to "good, he deserved it" mentality.
Conform is the word of the day for travel. Wish it wasn't. I've since learned to avoid batteries. Most of the other stuff won't be at issue. There is no significant mass, and that means no significant threat. (mostly)
Your advice basically boils down to: "If I could go to a bank with a saner management, surely you can go to a country with a saner government." That may be the case, but some people would prefer the government to do the going.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/05/07/m...
https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/09/this-map-details-whether-...
Edit:
> Originally, it was designed for situations in which the court would not have jurisdiction over the person, so it's an action on the property itself.
Oh, interesting. So it is a bug in the law itself that nobody has any interest in fixing; but people who've already been robbed at gunpoint.
Most people use checks or credit cards for big purchases. Most people are paid by check, and the exceptions are usually near minimum wage.
Nobody does big transactions in cash anymore -- even if you want to pay tens or hundreds of thousands in cash for a car, a house, or college tuition, if you show up with a briefcase full of cash, then your counterparty will tell you to put it in a bank and come back with a check because they're not set up to handle cash on their end.
Government policies are designed to encourage inflation, yet the government stopped printing $500 and larger bills in 1945 and has never continued them.
Most of the people who were old enough to remember the Great Depression and hoarded cash throughout their lives because of their experiences are old enough to be dead or in an old folks' home, and their hoards of cash have already been deposited in the banking system by their families. Living through the Depression hasn't been a "mainstream" experience for many decades, and the actions of those who did have been dismissed as "silly, irrational things that old people do."
Basically it's become so abnormal to have large amounts of cash that a lot of people agree with the government -- "if you're using a lot of cash, that's so abnormal, you must be involved in something illegal." It's so abnormal it activates our tribal instincts which cause us to de-humanize -- "That's not something that I would do, or anyone I know would do" -- it's much easier to accept the demonization of people who use cash.
Of course, this is just how the government and big business wants things to work -- all those bank deposits and credit cards are much easier to track. Think about all the junk mail you get based on your credit rating -- the marketing departments in those companies love the amount of information you're giving away about your finances.
Using virtual Money is obviously much better than paper money. The difference is should it be centralized or de-centralized and anonymous ?
The paradoxical economic problem with decentralized money is that the govt has no control over it. Which means during bad time its going to be very difficult for the govt to enact changes. We learnt it the hard way During the great depression when money was pegged to gold and the govt was unable to use inflation to restart the economy.
Its a deep economical problem for which there is no known theoretical solution. Is it possible to have a decentralized monetary system that can also be controlled by a representive govt ?
This is a not a paradox nor even a contradiction; indeed to advocates of many decentralized currency solutions, this is the killer feature.
> Which means during bad time its going to be very difficult for the govt to enact changes. We learnt it the hard way During the great depression when money was pegged to gold and the govt was unable to use inflation to restart the economy.
Of course you realize that this narrative does not enjoy consensus.
Far as cash-only business risk, there's protections for that, too, that are pretty effective. The range from drop boxes to time-lock safes to our 2nd amendment security solution. One gets to choose his or her risk level with minimal, external influence with cash.
And then there's the darned civil forfeiture laws...
Police dogs are magical beasts -- you just point the dog at the thing you want searched and wait for it to "signal" that it's found something.
I really wish that the Supreme Court had had the chance to review the accuracy of drug dogs in their case this year (Rodriguez v. US).
How many times can a dog signal a false positive before you recognize that the drug dog is trying to please its handler? The police have no incentive to count.
The dog "alerted" for drugs, but the dog can't testify as to why -- because it actually smelled drugs or because it sensed its handler wanted it to.
http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/crime-courts/legal-challen...
I just don't understand what point you're even trying to make. Just seems like you want to talk/criticise drug-dog evidence even though it has no relation to this case at all.
If the guy arrested and whose money was taken says he used drugs right before arriving at the airport I, for one, believe him. He has more to lose by saying that than he does by lying about it.
There's nothing strange about this. On one the features of a drug sniffing dog is that it is supposed to be able to distinguish between a lingering odor, a passing odor, the presence of residue, and the presence of actual material - in a way that a human can't.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/supreme-court-con...
I suppose in these (and many) cases, it's simply that this feature is turned off; probably regarded as a bug by the user.
So indeed, the feature appears, at least according to his source, to be available. And it also appears to be regarded as (or mistaken for) a bug by the users.
"We ran his name and found out he was a Pisces. That gave us grounds to search. He had money. That gave us grounds to seize it."
Have you got any citation for this? I am wondering how is it even possible.
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
I'll keep this email brief because either you'll know about the issue already, or you'll want to do your own research (or ask your staff to do so). Most people won't take the time to email you, but this is probably the #1 most important issue for law abiding citizens at this time.
Civil forfeiture, which permits cash or property of US citizens to be seized by police without being convicted of a crime, is completely opposed to all the principles of democratic government. If someone is convicted of a crime and the cash or property relates to the crime, sure, take it. But I am reading more and more stories in the news about merely unlucky fellow citizens having their cash stolen from them by the police (I use the word stolen because the seizure is unjust in this case) merely because "carrying a lot of cash is suspicious".
You might be interested to read the Peelian Principles of policing a democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles) which were created for the Metropolitan Police Force in London in 1829. The same principles would be effective today for maintaining public support for the police.
When the people we as citizens entrust to keep order create the impression that they are not trustworthy and are a potential danger to us, this is a serious problem. When citizens see a police car or see a police officer walk by, they should feel safe, not fearful. That is less and less the case.
Thank you.
I wrote my Congresswoman and Senators, asking them about this case. I urge you all to do the same.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2015/01/22/despite-h...
Which is an awful thing to say about the police, but is probably reasonable advice to give.
1. Civil forfeiture laws need to go away. They are completely unfair, and a major conflict of interest for the police.
2. Don't carry $11k to the airport, just to avoid this issue.
That doesn't excuse the seizure, but I don't see how it's worth our time to get mad about people experiencing bad outcomes when they take stupid risks.
There are many other examples that make a better case against civil asset forfeiture.
Also, free alternatives? Elaborate. And certainly they aren't free from surveillance.
We should encourage and treat the carrying of $$$$$ in cash as a normal thing to do.
If it weren't the state, it could just as easily have been an ordinary mugger, or an airline employee theft, or simple airline incompetence.
>And certainly they aren't free from surveillance.
If you want a financial system free from surveillance then you need to get the public on board with ending taxation (and consequently all public services). Good luck.
And, as we saw, moving cash on an airplane is the most heavily surveilled and scrutinized way to do it.
Suggesting Bitcoin in its current state of evolution as a free and "vastly safer" alternative to carrying cash is CRAZY. Whereas having the cash on you carries the risk of being mugged (I understood the story that he had the cash directly with him when the police arrived, it wasn't in the checked luggage, therefore the airline risks you mention do not apply), using Bitcoin carries much higher risks of:
- exchange going bust,
- exchange being hacked,
- exchange rate going down violently,
- Bitcoin wallet being stolen from his computer via malware,
- exchange's banking accounts being seized.
To a layperson unskilled with Bitcoin, walking with 11,000 USD in pockets through airport, using taxi/Uber and arriving in front of your door in a non-ghetto neighbourhood compares to Bitcoin as putting that cash into transparent bag, hanging it on your neck and walking through deserted city at night yelling "look, I have cash".
And even when you are skilled or take (a lot of) your time to read about everything starting with comparing various exchanges, securing your computer, using paper wallets, etc., you are dependant on very volatile exchange rate.
I generally support Bitcoin for various purposes (e.g. e-commerce) based on various reasons. But no, it certainly is not "vastly safer" for storing or even merely transferring your life savings, especially for a non-skilled person.
Fast forward in time and somebody had a very "clever" idea to outlaw paying more than 5,000 EUR in cash. Now, I have to wire transfer the funds in advance, wait for the transfer to clear and then come in to get the car. I certainly don't risk being mugged on my way to the dealer (in broad daylight, without advertising everyone, e.g. on social networks, that today I am buying a car and waving the wad of cash in a selfie). But if the limited liability company with 6,000 EUR liability deposit bankrupts, I will have neither the money (wire transfer have nothing like cashback on credit cards) nor the car until a lengthy legal process hoping that they have enough funds and property to pay out all creditors... You don't risk mugging but have to do way larger due diligence, check finance health of the company, ask around for customer feedback on the company, etc.
We, as a society condemn muggers and thieves. We, as a society hold airlines responsible for safely transporting baggage without losing it or its contents. We lock muggers and thieves in cages to discourage such behavior and isolate those who perpetrate it from everyone else. We require airlines to pay compensation (up to $3000 in the US) to people whose property they lose.
We should similarly condemn the state behaving in a way that produces the same result as a mugger.
That's not to say I support the actions taken here, of course.
"The Catholic priest took $15,000 in cash to Skid Row and doled it out to hundreds of the city's most down-and-out residents outside the Fred Jordan Missions" - http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Priest-turns-90-handin...
"Dr. Berlin took $15,000 from the cash received in wedding gifts, leased an examination room in another doctor's office and worked nights and weekends over the next decade to build a thriving private practice all his own." - http://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/28/us/clinton-s-health-plan-s...
"“Once you’re in Cuba – as an American – everything has to be paid in cash. American credit and debit cards do not work — hotels, meals, taxis AND the cost of the footage all had to be paid for in cash. We took $15,000 in cash. To make things more difficult, we could not pay in $U.S. for the footage. We had to transfer our dollars to Cuban pesos." - http://www.documentarytelevision.com/sweet-spots/fidel-castr...
"During the criminal trial, Chatfield testified that Brown had met with her several times and lured her to his house, hinting that it might be for sale. Chatfield said she brought $15,000 in cash as a possible down payment on June 15, 2012." - http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/midwest/2014/08/12/253190....
"Baltimore Woman Posted a Stranger’s $15,000 Cash Bail To Get Him Out Of Jail" - http://www.barstoolsports.com/dmv/woman-posted-a-strangers-1...
"The woman’s $3000 Louis Vuitton handbag was stolen with $15,000 inside while she was waiting for a green light on the corner of Chesterville Rd and Bernard St at 2.15pm on Monday. ... the woman reported the money as “business takings”." - http://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/inner-south/louis-vuitton...
These are just cases where one person had the money in public. I left out places where an organization raise $15K in charity, or someone won $15K in cash from a raffle ticket, or people found $15K in someone's home after they died, or in one case in Australia where the husband put $15K in the oven and the wife, not knowing that, turned on the oven to preheat it.
And of course you don't hear about all the normal cases where nothing notable happened.
The doctor received $15K in cash from wedding gifts. How is that weird? Is it because your baseline doesn't include people with rich relatives?
The "Baltimore Woman [who] Posted a Stranger’s $15,000 Cash Bail" was because of a judge's order:
> But in addition to criminal charges a judge had imposed a strict “cash only” bail condition on Wilkes. The so-called “cash only” restriction bars suspects from using a bond or personal property to make bail.
Had it not been an anonymous person, and one of the family members brought in the $15K, it wouldn't have made the news.
At the very least, it establishes that a judge thinks that walking around with $15K in cash is not beyond the pale.
I'd expect them to take an electronic transfer, or a cheque in the name of the bank.
> CASH BAIL - a person who is required to post cash bail must put up money, either cash or money order/bank check, to be released. If the funds are not posted with the court, the person may not leave and will be jailed. - http://www.courts.state.nh.us/district/criminal/
According to http://www.24jdc.us/bail-bonds/ :
> CASH BAIL: Cash for the total amount of bail in the form of cashier’s check or money order delivered to the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center. If the defendant shows up for all his scheduled court appearances, the bail is returned at the conclusion of the case. If the defendant fails to appear, the bond is forfeited to the court.
I now think it's more likely to have been cashier’s check or money order than actual physical cash.
Thanks for that out.
Why would you have 'culpability' for carrying your own money? Why would you have culpability for not always doing the normal thing - it's also not normal to be an religious minority, a homosexual, or a member of the Green Party; do they also deserve the blame for whatever arbitrary measures that the government chooses to take against them?
I think that you're saying that it's wise to treat your government as hostile, and to hide anything that you do that is out of the ordinary. Fine. But the idea that that makes it a bad case against civil asset forfeiture is like saying that the best cases for religious/racial discrimination should be to defend white Protestants.
The fact that it's risky considering the fact that crime is impossible to eradicate is one thing.
The fact that we have a publicly sanctioned version of this crime enshrined in law is another, and plenty of reason to get mad.
I'm glad there are more sympathetic cases. This is sympathetic enough.
The government should subsidize accounts and account fees for poor people.
All kinds of unlucky things could happen with a) such as losing the baggage/wallet/jacket with the money in it or being robbed. But because of b) and in a state where I believe cannabis is illegal, the mere unluckiness can be imagined to be amplified tenfold and one of the results is a catastrophe such as his.
Being stupid does not make one deserving of being a victim, but it still does leave one being stupid.
Theoretically, you should be able to walk into a Hell's Angels biker bar at 11pm on a Saturday evening and shout aloud "Only assholes ride a Harley!", then walk out. Theoretically you don't pose a credible threat to anyone and you merely state your opinion. In an ideally perfect world you should have nothing to worry about. But it just might be the most stupid thing you can do in ten seconds.
There's a difference between saying the consequences are completely the victim's fault versus thinking that the victim should have a license to do stupid things and yet get away with it against some, if not all, odds.
What happened to the guy who got his money confiscated is completely unfair but there was a wide range of choices he could've realistically made to avoid the unfairness from taking place. That's not victim blaming.
So stupidity is now a crime? Because he wasn't charged with for a or b.
>losing the baggage/wallet/jacket with the money in it or being robbed
Police took his money because they believed they can get away with it(pothead like him would be to afraid to do anything about it), so just because it is legal, it doesn't suddenly make it not a robbery.
I suggested that it's stupid to carry large amounts of cash while smoking weed, because that can easily get you into a bigger trouble combined than merely carrying lots of cash or only smoking weed.
Factor in the unfair and unpredictable behaviour from the police and while you've done nothing wrong, you have a lot of explaining to do to the officers who really aren't that interested in hearing your explanation in the first place.
People’s stories sound shady all the time. In Canada, in my lifetime, there have been four different men whom everyone was certain had murdered people, and it turned out that they were innocent.
In many cases, people are so sure that shady people are guilty, they make up testimony to make sure the bad guy goes to jail. This is why we need incredibly high standards for convicting someone of a crime. And we still get it wrong.
So when someone “seems shady...” I stop far short of assuming that they are shady. And even if they are shady, I stop far short of thinking that the police, with the incredibly asymmetric power relationship, should be at liberty to enrich themselves based on someone seeming to be shady.
Someone who is blissfully unaware of how out of control the state agency is, probably.
It is not "shady" in any way, shape, or form to want all of ones private financial affairs to be completely untraceable.
No one should, ever, under any circumstances, be required to justify or explain possession of cash or items of high value absent clear, tangible evidence of wrongdoing.
Furthermore, eleven thousand dollars is chump change, and not only that, these criminals and thieves with badges are harassing people for carrying as little as $500.
Inadvisable? Absolutely. And I'm sure there's plenty of other examples of people moving around large amounts of cash for dubious reasons. So, if they lose the cash or get robbed, some degree of "I told you so" is absolutely in order. But getting robbed by your own government should not be on the list of possible consequences of dubious (but legal) ideas.
1. https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/2012_unbankedreport.pdf...
Your attitude towards other people's business offends me about as much as the actual seizure. Its attitudes like this that make the US more dangerous since "Shady" is the same reason SWAT teams are used to throw flash bangs in houses and server warrants. That attitude escalates the danger to us all.
What's wrong with "untraceable"? How is it anyones business what anyone does with their money unless they are actually committing a criminal activity or defrauding someone? If those were happening and charges were brought and a guilty conviction happens, then fine seize the money, but not until.
As a Brit, all these stories about people carrying around huge chunks of cash seem completely outlandish to me. But then, we have free bank-to-bank transfers here.
For things like paying employees, paying my taxes, or spending other people's money: I want maximum electronic and paper trail. Bank fees are hardly a concern.
For my own spending, I want no third party records even if banking fees are 0.
Friend bought a $15,000 truck in cash. We were a bit vigilant about that one. Rural US still has a lot of cash and handshakes.
We do not have free bank to bank transfers and are ornery enough to not want to pay the damn fee.
But 15k for a used truck, all cash? No thanks. I don't suppose your friend also totes a shotgun around with him just in case someone decides they want that 15k too?
[edit] where the heck do you live that muggings are commonplace?
Also the gov is gonna know you bought the truck when you register it, anyway.
We didn't see it as a risk. It was just a bit odd to have 150 $100 bills. Puts a little weight into the cost of what you're going to buy. Good thing he bought it too as his old truck (which I drove back, that's why he brought me not as some security) needed about $3,000 in repairs. He sold it to a farmer who did the repairs himself. My friend kept the truck for about 2 decades.
1) I remember his receipt pad. It was styled like something I imagine came out of a Dickens story. He basically bought wrecks and stuff in garages and restored some or built mods out of others. Pretty good retirement gig.
I'm not saying the cash was evidence of wrongdoing, but the elaborate excuses this thread is making for this guy's behavior are only highlighting how absurd it was.
A Wells Fargo checking account can be had for $10/mo, a fee that is waived given 10 or more transactions a month or $500 or more in direct deposit a month or a minimum balance of $1500. Would people with non-existant credit be ineligible for an account like this?
The gag is that you'd think $11,000 would be enough to fix this problem. Usually people who have it couldn't put a few hundred together to close out the old account.
This is coming from someone who is very well-served by the banking industry; for someone less well-served, I can even more readily understand it.
I would bet you so much, not a soul on HN would dream of carrying 11k in cash through an airport.
It's ok though, we should make sure people have the right to do that, since 300 years ago before we even had ACH transfers or airplanes the constitution guaranteed us protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
There are cases where I sympathize a lot with the victims of civil asset forfeiture, but this is not one of them.
So instead of charging him with any crimes, they just took his money? All the fun, without the need for that pesky innocent until proven guilty stuff? Nice.
It's guys like these, that although inadvertently, when they get snarled in asset forfeiture and choose to fight the system, they slowly induce change. And that matters. This is why states like Minnesota, New Mexico, and North Carolina, with Ohio on tap, are banning the practice before conviction.
(Disclaimer: I don't downvote either. I can't downvote right now anyway, but I think it detracts from the conversation.)
I've carried over $11k through an airport dozens of times and occasionally carried $30k or more.
(I used to be involved with a professional blackjack team. :-) )
> I had approximately $30K on me, but luckily I was wearing it.
> The airline x-ray detected approximately 100,000 dollars in cash and casino chips.
and a 2014 article titled "Poker Players Get Robbed Under Guise of Civil Asset Forfeiture" - http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/17922-lawyer-for-poker-... :
> The fancy legal term may be ‘civil asset forfeiture,’ but for a couple of poker players who saw Iowa police take $100,000 of their money it is just straight up robbery.
> In April of last year, poker players William “Bart” Davis and John Newmerzhycky were driving west through Iowa with out-of-state plates after a poker road trip. In their car was a lot of cash,