Inside the Chicago Police Department’s secret budget | Hacker News Reader

Inside the Chicago Police Department’s secret budget

chicagoreader.com

233 pointszmanian153 comments

I've had my property stolen by the police twice. The first time was 14 years ago when I was falsely accused of stealing two cell phones. There was a video surveillance tape of the theft, two other guys clearly did it but the store employee tried to claim I knew them. He happened to be the boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend.

It took me a year to fight it and when the charges were finally dismissed, I got all my property back except my $500 cell phone. It was a basic misdemeanor charge but I was threatened with an unrelated felony if I didn't take a plea deal. I refused and the prosecutor moved to withdraw the case citing lack of evidence, preventing me from winning via acquittal.

The fact that I was falsely accused of stealing two cheap cell phones and then the police stole my phone instilled a permanent distrust in the police.

Then recently, I got involved in a dispute with a roommate and all my property was taken to a police warehouse. When I went to get it, the police officer told me there had been a robbery and all my stuff was stolen. About $6000 worth including priceless family items.

I'm a white guy who doesn't break the law, although I am a bit politically active and rebellious. What I have experienced by the police and justice system is enraging and disenfrancising. If I was surrounded by poverty and crime, and had no hope for the future, I could see myself becoming emboldened against the police and turn into a life of crime.

The way they treat people is wrong. The plea bargin system is a worse crime than most of the petty offenses people do. The way they treat you in jail is malicious and purposely antagonistic. It's a mild form of torture that doesn't rise to sensational levels but it perpetuates and sustains an atmosphere of distrust and hatred towards authority figures.

The US justice system is one of the best arguments against the US being a first world country. In New Zealand your police force would probably be classified as a mildly racist armed gang or militia, instead of law enforcement.

And the idea that rape in jail is normal and even something to joke about? People over there need to take a long hard look at themselves.

Although of course you could say the same about the preposterous notion of a modern, developed country not having a proper universal healthcare system as well.

> The US justice system is one of the best arguments against the US being a first world country.

Also healthcare. It is one of the few "first" world countries where a bankruptcy due to a medical accident is a very real danger. Obamacare helps some but we are far away from having healthcare worthy of a civilized country.

In most countries, certainly all the english-speaking ones other than the US, even if you were homeless and came down with cancer, assuming you survived, you would walk out of hospital months later with no bill whatsoever.

"The way they treat you in jail is malicious and purposely antagonistic. It's a mild form of torture that doesn't rise to sensational levels but it perpetuates and sustains an atmosphere of distrust and hatred towards authority figures."

I was taken into jail (a holding cell in a county prison) for failing to pay a fine for a non-moving violation, and sat next to murderers, wife beaters and cop-killers awaiting transfer.

When I asked for a method to remove my contacts which were causing me significant pain and discomfort (they are NOT over nights), I was told "deal with it, this is jail".

Purposely antagonistic and mildly torturous is definitely their intent.

But I don't blame them, based on whom I was surrounded by. I wouldn't give an inch to the guys laughing and joking about beating up their girlfriends, her kids, the cops, etc, either.

I do blame them.

You're in a cage. They are outside the cage. You ask. They have no incentive to comply. The power dynamics are not in your favor and that's why they can treat you poorly and get away with it.

Poor treatment in jails/prison helps no one. Everyone who goes to jail is not a cop-killer or wife beater. Even those people do not deserve poor treatment.

I get it. It's easier to generalize then treat each individual as a special snowflake. However, some people would rather kill themselves than go to prison. This also makes the job of police officer more dangerous if people would rather die than surrender knowing all that awaits for them is torture (sleep deprivation, disgusting food, forced labor, isolation, confined spaces, rape etc.).

We do not treat criminals as human beings. We offer them no path to be rehabilitated. They cannot vote, cannot get jobs easily and are social outcasts. You'd be surprised by the amount of people who committed non-violent, victimless crimes and had their lives ruined forever by this broken system.

I understand the police officer is not exactly a social worker. They are a cog in the system but they are not helping, not attempting to improve/change the system and are to blame (along with prosecutor, the justice system and authorities in general).

It boils down to one thing: They have POWER and you don't. They play a role in maintaining the status quo, you don't. Therefore, they are to blame.

Sorry for the rant, it boils my blood when people with no power make excuses for the poor treatment they received from people with actual power.

"But I don't blame them, based on whom I was surrounded by. I wouldn't give an inch to the guys laughing and joking about beating up their girlfriends, her kids, the cops, etc, either."

But in jail (jail is a term for institutions that hold people no longer than one year, in most cases, a majority of a jails population is transient), how do they know who the murderers and wifebeaters are? Isn't that the point of our justice system? Everyone is treated innocent until proven guilty?

"But in jail (jail is a term for institutions that hold people no longer than one year, in most cases, a majority of a jails population is transient), how do they know who the murderers and wifebeaters are? Isn't that the point of our justice system? Everyone is treated innocent until proven guilty?"

I explained it too shortly in my comment in the interest of brevity, sorry.

The jail I visited was also a Prison, it served both purposes. The bottom floor was a holding center (jail) while the upper floors were a prison.

In this case, when a prison inmate needs to be transferred to another prison -- say they've completed 5 years in county and need to do 10 years in federal -- they are moved downstairs to the holding facility (the jail) that is shared with say people being picked up off the street to hold.

In this case, they stored me, a young naive programmer who forgot to pay a ticket, with hardened convicted cop killing murderers who had completed their time in the prison and were being transferred to a new prison.

This was a county prison for a top 10 metro and a major city which has gang violence, so these were convicted and often gang related criminals.

To clarify, most jails are used to house misdemeanor criminals, those awaiting trial, and transferring prisoners. If you live near a state penitentiary, it's very likely that your most of your city's jails consistently have prisoners transferring out of or into that state penitentiary.

I also have never been on the "wrong side of the law" but have a similar view of police and prosecutors. So many times they fail to do even a basic portion of their jobs and when you complain the PR department and the union call you to try and get you rescind the complaint ... Oh so and so is 4 months from retirement, you can't say he said X ....

The Chicago cops illegally towed my car for being abandoned while having only been parked in that spot for 3 days, lying about the state of the car, saying it had busted out locks (it is in pristine condition) or that it had leaves and debris under the tires (the street was swept the day before). I got my money back at the hearing, but that took another 1/2 day. If I wasn't white guy programmer who works from home, I would have been up a creek. Most people can't even take the time off to contest the bullshit.

Stuff like this has happened to me. I have been wrongly ticked for no registration sticker. Ticketed numerious times for parking illegailly. I have been pulled over for driving around 1:30 p.m. on a Friday night--at least 10 times over the years, and never got a DUI. (They were basically just looking for an easy DUI.)

When I was in college, in the eighties, I can honestly say the tickets I received, I deserved. I didn't deserve being pulled over for no reason, but that's another fight. A fight I've given up on. My father's advice, which he practiced, was just drive an inconspicuous vechicle. That was the 80's. A different decade.

In the 90's, and 2000's, I can honestly state I didn't do the things I was ticketed for. They were honest error on the part of law enforcement, or just made up violations. Or, I'm senile? I'm a bit excentric, but not senile. The violations I was tickets for I luckily got out of. The officer didn't show up, or I paid $10 to contest, and won.

I've given up on honest cops. They are basically revenue collectors in my county. If you don't look like you will fight back, you will get harassed, if you live here long enough.

My only wish is they would tie fines/fees to income levels.

A rich man gets a $500 red light right turn violation; he tells the wife over dinner. It's not a big deal. A poor man gets the same ticket; it could be the last straw.

I heard Switzerland ties driving/parking violations to income. I would like to see it done here. I'm a white guy. I can't imagine what minorites have gone through. This is not the America I was so proud of growing up. We need some systemic changes.

I was just curious how your insurance handled this? I would guess they would probe an investigation, but maybe not. At least the police would have all the records of the items stolen. Though the family items would be terrible to lose

>the police officer told me there had been a robbery and all my stuff was stolen.

He was telling the truth. He just neglected to mention that you were talking to the perpetrator!

It happened to me in the 90's in upstate New York. Cop claimed my insurance paper looked "fake" and impounded my car. Got the car back but with my CD player and other valuables missing. Seems it had been "robbed" while in the "impound yard". It sure had.

Was this Chicago, too?

Based on the name of the newly-created account (Gold Coast is a Chicago neighborhood), I would guess so.

How would one go about protecting themselves from having that happen in the first place? Nightmare material for sure.

Avoid living in certain states. Don't go outside. Don't tell anyone where you live. Maybe move to Canada.

Civil forfeiture, plea bargains and losing the ability to vote are all great detriments to our society. They prevent those who are involved in crimes from being able to get back on their feet and show an increasing number of those in the justice system don't believe in rehabilitation. It's labelling theory in practice and it's the reason the US has the highest incarceration and repeat incarceration rate of the western world.

Plea bargains reward disloyalty and often allow some of the worst people a ticket out of their crimes by implicating someone else. It's just a game and prosecutors want their stats to go up, no matter what is good for society.

I don't even want to touch the sex offender registry. I'll just say this. Australia's registry is confidential.

While I agree that the U.S. and other criminal systems do not stress rehabilitation enough (or at all), the problem with all the things you mentioned aren't rehabilitation-centered.

Civil forfeiture is plain unconstitutional. The legal idea behind it, that property is charged with a crime, and so it doesn't matter if a person is guilty/inocnent or even charged is simply absurd. Plea bargains cause people to plead guilty even if they aren't because they fear the lengthy process of litigation that is many times stacked against them. In doing so they may, depending on juresdiction, lose access to wealfare and other forms of government help that is many times vital to these people. As to losing the abbility to vote after being convicted, it's blatantly undemocratic and absurd. A person convicted of a crime loses some rights but that is done for the benefit of society and the convict himself, to allow hime to rehabilitate and become a productive member of society. A convict shouldn't lose rights if they don't directly contribute to the societies well being or his own. A person voting doesn't constitute a danger to society.

> Civil forfeiture is plain unconstitutional. The legal idea behind it, that property is charged with a crime, and so it doesn't matter if a person is guilty/inocnent or even charged is simply absurd.

Civil forfeiture isn't a punishment for guilt or innocence. It's an adjudication that, more likely than not, nobody has an interest in the property that the law will protect.

Say the police raid a mob stash house and find $10 million in cash. Even if the court cannot figure out exactly who owns the money, it can determine by a preponderance of the evidence that nobody has a legitimate property interest in it because it's more likely than not the proceeds of a crime. Same thing if the property is contraband (drugs, automatic firearms, child porn etc.) There is no need to figure out who owns the property then charge that person because nobody could have a legitimate legal right to contraband. Due process doesn't require anything more than that.

The idea that the "property is charged with a crime" is mistaking the form of the action for the underlying rationale. The cases are styled "U.S. v. 10 cupcakes" because the case is about the legal status of the property, not about any particular person's guilt or innocence.

Now, I think civil asset forfeiture creates more risk of abuse than it is worth, and we should get rid of it. But it's not based on some outlandish legal theory like you imply. If there was a sensible way to cabin it to its purpose (seizing assets that are found in circumstances where it is obvious they are the proceeds of crime), it might even be a good idea.

> Even if the court cannot figure out exactly who owns the money, it can determine by a preponderance of the evidence that nobody has a legitimate property interest in it because it's more likely than not the proceeds of a crime. Same thing if the property is contraband (drugs, automatic firearms, child porn etc.).

That really shouldn't be the standard of proof. After all, if the property does belong to someone, then to keep it would amount to a hefty fine — to impose it a criminal standard of proof should be required.

If the property itself is contraband and thus inherently illegal, then merely finding that it is itself contraband (to a criminal standard, of course) should be sufficient for the State to keep or destroy it.

If the property is legitimate (e.g. money), though, the State should only be permitted to retain it a) if the owner does not claim it or b) if it can be taken from the owner in a criminal proceeding.

I have always thought of a hypothetical where a police officer takes a stack of cash off of somebody under the name of civil forfeiture and then doesn't arrest. The victim them kills the police officer and claims self defense because he was the victim of an armed robbery. I can't say that I would find a fault in his argument.

We can certainly argue about the legitimacy of civil forfeiture, but your statement is absurd. The current law is the current law. When a police officer arrests someone that isn't kidnapping. When they take possession of property that someone gained through illegal means that isn't armed robbery.

It is if them don't charge the person. That is my point. He knows he's not getting his money back and the officer is not going to report it because he can't. It's armed robbery, plain and simple.

Civil asset forfeiture is reported in great detail.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/nypd-c...

> NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers: Despite multimillion dollar evidence system, NYPD have no idea how much cash they seize.

> The New York City Police Department takes in millions of dollars in cash each year as evidence, often keeping the money through a procedure called civil forfeiture. But as New York City lawmakers pressed for greater transparency into how much was being seized and from whom, a department official claimed providing that information would be nearly impossible—because querying the 4-year old computer system that tracks evidence and property for the data would "lead to system crashes."

So, you're technically correct. It's reported in great detail. So great they can't actually query the data at all.

Are they putting each bill into evidence as an entry or are they using a Foxpro database, or both?

You describe the theory. But look at the stories of people whose money is taken unjustly by civil forfeiture and then say the reality matches the theory.

>Civil forfeiture isn't a punishment for guilt or innocence. It's an adjudication that, more likely than not, nobody has an interest in the property that the law will protect.

"The law will no longer protect the ownership of this cash."

'Ah, cool, so it's basically no-man's land, can't count on police to recognize it as robbable, I'll keep that in mind when I take it ho--"

"NO! That is now property of the US government! Step back, thief of legitimate property!"

"This land doesn't belong to anyone; the U.S. government can therefore claim it as its own."

> Civil forfeiture isn't a punishment for guilt or innocence. It's an adjudication that, more likely than not, nobody has an interest in the property that the law will protect.

How would that apply to the opening story in the article though? There the woman was rightful owner of the car but the crime was conducted by her son. So it seems to me she would have an obvious law-backed claim to the car as she obtained it lawfully and didn't conduct any crimes with it. Yet the judge still refused to return the car.

(The judge's argumentation seems extremely strange to me anyhow though and I can't imagine it would have survived with an attorney present.

He seems to have elevated the already bizarre requirement "prove that the asset was not involved in the crime" to "prove that the asset will not ever be involved in any crimes in the future", which is insane. That case seems to be protection of asset forfeiture mixed with blatant racism.)

Even if the court cannot figure out exactly who owns the money, it can determine by a preponderance of the evidence that nobody has a legitimate property interest

Proving a negative? I think the crux of this is why an asset's existence creates a property interest of the state. I'm not sure "finders keepers" is a good trait to have in a bureaucracy.

What about filing a claim of ownership? If the prosecution doesn't formally charge you with a crime within some amount of time after such a filing, you get it back without any further work. If they do, then it's held until the case is over.

It seems like it would allow them to handle abandoned ocean ships or drugs, which are the classical cases. And it lets everyone else get their property back, if they're willing to take the risk of admitting to owning property possibly used in a crime.

What about times where it's obvious that a crime has been committed but it's not clear who committed the crime? In that case there is no one for the prosecution to formally charge.

There should be some kind of consistent legal principle that tells you when something should be seized by the government.

It can't be, "Anything which is the proceeds of a crime can be seized by the government", because 90% of dollar bills have traces of cocaine on them and would be seizable.

I believe that "Criminals should not benefit from a crime" is one. Then, if someone files the paperwork to claim ownership of some item that was used as part of a crime, and his admission of ownership is not enough evidence to charge him, then in your case it hasn't been shown that a criminal has benefited from a crime when it's given to this person.

If it's known that either a husband or wife took $10,000 to murder someone, and it's unclear who did it, then neither could claim the money without effectively admitting guilt.

If multiple people claim the item, then the problem resurfaces and the government may end up keeping it. Most of the "police seized my $10,000" cases that work people up aren't like that, though.

It's possible that there are other principles that could be used; I don't know of any others that could apply.

Every time I see one of those silly "Can you believe those wacky laws still on the books!?" articles I think, y'know, it being illegal to spit on the sidewalk in Hoboken (or whatever) is a hell of a lot less bizarre than the fact that inanimate objects can be held liable in a court of law for the actions of animate humans. The picture that goes with it should be something like a Toyota Corolla sitting behind the defense's table, with somber lawyers around it.

>The picture that goes with it should be something like a Toyota Corolla sitting behind the defense's table, with somber lawyers around it.

Heh, my go-to scenario is a stack of $100 bills on the stand, being questioned:

"Is it true, Misters Franklin, you facilitated the purchase of over a kilo of uncut Colombian cocaine, yes-or-no?"

'...'

"Aha! Their silence proves their guilt!"

(I know, Fifth Amendment and all, but still...)

> sex offender registry

If we as a society believe the person is still a danger, then we shouldn't let them out, ever. If that's not the case, then anything past their incarceration / parole is blatantly unfair.

...especially because urinating in public can land you on the list for life.

some sources for slouch's post

http://www.businessinsider.com/surprising-things-that-could-...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/09/11/us-sex-offender-laws-may...

Taking a piss in woods managed by Fish and Wildlife Services will land on on the sex offender registry, if caught. It's absurd.

> Taking a piss in woods managed by Fish and Wildlife Services will land on on the sex offender registry, if caught. It's absurd.

That's seriously absurd. Are the any instances of this being enforced in a public park? I've read of many cases of getting added to the registry from public urination, but they're all in cities[1].

[1]: And usually it's not even in "public". It'd be behind a dumpster or the end of an alley. Yes it's not something we as a society want, but who in their right mind puts that person in the same category as a pedophile.

1. http://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/you-might-be-sex-offend... mentions a few frightening accounts of arrests (one behind a garbage bin resulting in deportation), but not in parks 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/opinion/sunday/punishment-... - mentions the matter

Holy crap I didn't realize it was that easy. That's incredibly scary, because presence on that list basically destroys your life, your family's life, and your ability to ever build a life - all because it is public and used for every background check under the sun instead of obviously protected professions like teaching, etc.

It's considered exposing yourself. Yes very scary.

> If we as a society believe the person is still a danger, then we shouldn't let them out, ever.

We should recognize that we cannot always judge that correctly. So you either let people out who might still be a danger, or you keep people locked up who might not be a danger. (And, in fact, you do both - all you can do is adjust the proportions.)

But people scream really loudly if you keep people locked up who arguably are no longer a danger...

Of course we aren't going to get it right 100% of the time[1], but either they are rehabilitated & "served their debt to society" or they aren't. The whole sex offender list is a half-ass way to cover the bases. We need to get over ourselves and pick: they need to be incarcerated[2] or they can rejoin society. The list is incarceration on the prisoner's dime and puts them at the fringe forever.

Lumping all of these into one pot is another foolish idea with the list.

1) heck, we don't get guilty / not guilty right which is why I'm against the death penalty

2) in some form

> If we as a society believe the person is still a danger, then we shouldn't let them out, ever.

This is not how justice works. If you want to create some other form of government, that's fine, just don't call prison justice.

Civil commitment actually results in this.

Repeat sex offenders are effectively jailed for life.

> If we as a society believe the person is still a danger, then we shouldn't let them out, ever.

Well, no.

After multiple DUIs, someone can have their license taken away permanently. The justice system has a long history of restricting peoples behavior who are (a) out of jail, but (b) still a danger to themselves or others.

Long history doesn't make it right

According to the courts, it makes it legal.

I am talking specifically about sex offenders.

Belief is the standard for justice in a theocracy.

Cooperating with prosecutors, to find evidence against bigger fish, shouldn't result in a more lenient sentence?

When it works correctly, absolutely. The problem is that often times it doesn't lead to bigger fish but more fish of equal or lesser size since the system often values quantity over quality when it comes to felony convictions.

You'll see this a lot of times when they catch a mid-level dealer. The dealer will roll on the street-level dealers instead of their supplier since it yields dozens of easy felony drug convictions instead of one really difficult case that could eat a ton of resources and still be lost.

I read some comment that in the post Gates era the Los Angeles police stopped going after bigger fish and just started straight out prosecuting little fish. Which probably worked better.

The problem with the previous way was criminals would turn 'states evidence' and either finger other little fish, or littler fish, innocent people[1], or big fish already in jail. Then they'd get released and go back to committing crimes. Not to mention the police protecting criminals that made a career out of turning in people as a form of protection.

[1] This happened to friends of mine.

Which would still not be an argument against the existence of plea bargaining, as the OP was advocating.

Looking back I don't see that the OP mentioned the other big issue with plea bargaining: when innocent people plead guilty because it's often the best choice. My bad for adding my own context onto it.

Decent writeup:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-peop...

tl;dr: the current system incentivizes defendants (especially poor ones) to plead guilty regardless of innocence. This is caused by a combination of prosecutors/judges trying to be "tough on crime", overloaded public defenders, excessive bail, mandatory minimums and several other things.

I don't think plea bargaining is absolutely unfixable or evil but I also don't think it's a well-functioning part of the system as-is. I believe this is one of those cases where removing an option might be better for the justice system as a whole.

And (as I often argue here[1]) that's still a mispurposed argument when used against plea bargaining per se, rather than against the forces that give prosecutors so much disproportionate leverage that people take them.

It's not even a case where removing an option can have good global effects; if you remove plea bargaining but change nothing else, all that accomplishes is that disadvantaged people get railroaded harder, and choke up the courts even longer as they play out their lopsided trials.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12465613

"Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

Who, exactly, do we need protection from?

This is one argument that many anarchists make; the truth is that (at the very least) an order of magnitude more people were killed by their own governments in the 20th century than were killed by their fellow citizens. Hobbes was wrong.

Is it accurate to imply that the Soviets and Chinese had any sense of ownership of their governments? Especially with the forced starvation of Ukraine, it was practically a foreign occupation (this is muddy, Kyiv is a historic center of Russia).

I don't think it's a refutation of Hobbes that a dictator could seize control of a state and perpetrate mass murder.

Hobbes made the case that a totalitarian dictator was the least likely to perpetrate mass murder; according to his ideas, the democracies would be more violent.

Hobbes was wrong.

http://popten.net/2010/05/top-ten-most-evil-dictators-of-all...

No democratic country has killed millions of it's own citizens. Even Hitler waited until he changed the law to give himself dictatorial powers.

That's all asset forfeiture, not civil. Read your own article:

> A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.

Obviously nobody reasonable is endorsing civil asset forfeiture, but you don't have to falsify numbers to make that case.

That would be true if we found Trump was a criminal and took his $10B or whatever -- that would surely dwarf petty burglars' total thefts. The mere "is this number larger" criterion is not sufficient for your insinuation

"The judge said, 'I can't give you back your car, because it would be right back on the road with drugs.' " (Karkula declined to comment for this story.)

This is why civil forfeiture should be banned. I'm still of the opinion that any ticket money should be handed over to a superfund with strict rules on spending never to return to the police or judicial coffers.

At minimum, the money should go toward funding public defenders.

How about sending the money to social reform and outreach charities? There would need to be some money spent to ensure the money is distributed well.

Who gets to pick the charities? Who will monitor how the money is being spent? I don't want charities spending 90% of the money on "administrative" overhead.

How about not stealing the property of those who have not been convicted of a crime?

Whoa, whoa, we have to be realistic here.

> How about sending the money to social reform and outreach charities? There would need to be some money spent to ensure the money is distributed well.

That just takes the corruption and move it up one level to the politicians picking charities. Its going to be a political battle with a rather large monetary reward.

jrwoodruff's idea probably would do the most good.

How about returning it to the people? -- as in "the people vs speeding motorist".

Maybe drug rehab and mental health and other rehabilitative programs.

The UK system puts it into the general fund and actually requires a crime to have been committed.

Canada is almost as bad as the US.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/civil-forfeitur...

Ticket money should go toward public transit. Two birds with one stone.

That way they can pay more people to write more tickets.

I'm used to ticketing being handled by the police and public transit being a separate entity... is that not a common organization?

Ticket money should go to a charity of the ticketers choice and be tax deductible.

Why not all go to Charity?

Anything else is a conflict of interests. Send it to an out of state charity. I am fine with taking a car used in a crime away, but you can't give the money to the person who took the car nor the court that decides..

> Why not all go to Charity?

Without getting too political, several charities only benefit the people who set them up and picking charities is a major political exercise.

> I am fine with taking a car used in a crime away

I'm not, per the story that's exactly what they did.

> but you can't give the money to the person who took the car nor the court that decides

Any money received by the government as a result of someone doing something illegal should not be in the hands of the courts or police. I'd rather it not be decided by anyone and just used in some fund.

There are already a number of arrangements where corporations can pay penalties to 'approved' charities instead of the regulator as part or all of an agreement; these deals have been problematic, as the government officials appear to be using the arrangements to favor interest groups and potential future employers.

I am not saying your idea is a bad one, but I think it is useful to know where the potential problems lie.

Its that part of government's version of giving a contract to a company then being hired by said company after leaving government. Both should be illegal.

Too fraught with risk. Police should be treated like any other government agency -- windfalls or other revenue go right to the general fund.

But they'd still be able to justify their budget by pointing to the fines that they collect.

Fines and seizures are different.

Seizures buy fancy guns and toys, SUVs, overtime, etc. No bureaucrat wants to give money to another department.

this is interesting

http://leyhane.blogspot.com/2016/01/illinois-supreme-court-a...

Hi, I'm one of the people who worked on some of the data visualization for this story. The people behind this worked very hard and did an excellent job. I would also like to point out, this is why police transparency is very important in modern society.

The outside blue field on the pie chart has no title when you hover over it (purchases under $5000).

And having the text be upside down for half of the chart is pretty bad (another way to do it: http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2015/07/pie-chart-...)

This comment is meant in good faith, it's an important story and topic and visualizing the impact is very useful. I appreciate the work that went into it.

edit: I just noticed you can click on the fields, very cool!

Thanks for the suggestions, I didn't think about flipping the text for that half of the chart but that's a good idea. I'm not sure about the blank label but I'll look into that.

Shown here are two good reasons for why people don't respect the police anymore. They take your assets due to a subtle association to a crime. They spend it without oversight on tools of mass surveillance. Ultimately, both of these things exacerbate crime. Quite an occupying force nowadays.

There are many police departments that should be brought up on RICO charges.

They're clearly in the wrong on these things, but I wonder how hard it is to resist a strong "us vs those thugs" reaction when you're dealing with criminals day after day. Do they view this as collateral damage? There are innocent lives lost in military action. Does the prevailing attitude and a sense of permitting some collateral damage make it easier for them to excuse this sort of behaviour?

I find it absurd that civil forfeiture would be "reformed" instead of recognized as blatantly unconstitutional.

If you are found with a big pile of drugs and 100k in cash.. it is not unreasonable to take the cash away. Otherwise you would be allowed to profit from an illegal activity.

Giving that money to the guy doing the arresting or the court doing the trial is the problem....

I'll upvote because you're not entirely wrong. It's entirely reasonable to require that the proceeds of criminal activity be taken from the criminals. Whether it's a stolen car, drugs, or money made from selling a stolen car and drugs. It's all (mostly) similar.

The devil is in the details, though. The rampant "theft by cop" is where you have money, and they take it. No charges, much less conviction.

It's "guilty until proven innocent", which violates one of the fundamental principles of our justice system. It's outright corruption.

> Whether it's a stolen car, drugs, or money made from selling a stolen car and drugs. It's all (mostly) similar.

It's not that similar IMO. Stolen cars have owners to whom you can return the property, or litigants who can sue you to replace it. But selling contraband, unlike theft, doesn't have a victim that can be compensated by returning the proceeds. The government steps in and declares themselves the victims of this crime and claims the proceeds.

> But selling contraband, unlike theft, doesn't have a victim that can be compensated by returning the proceeds.

The point is largely that people shouldn't legally profit from illegal activities. Whether the profit is cash or tangible goods, the principle is the same.

So far so good.

The problem is they do it before convicting you of anything.

Actually, worse: they seize your assets so that you cannot afford to mount a solid defense at your trial. It's a lot easier to convince someone to take a plea (i.e. confess falsely under duress) if they are bankrupt and destitute and can't afford proper counsel.

Yes, this is obviously a problem. I think holding it during a trial could be reasonable, but the burden of guilt should not be "guilty until proven innocent"

That's like being found with a bloody knife and they arrest you and you say you're "guilty until proven innocent". In reality the standard is preponderance of evidence and you are ignoring the fact that courts have ruled that being found with large volumes of cash is itself suspicious.

It is unreasonable. It is legal to own cash. It shouldn't matter how it was obtained. Cash should only be confiscated in the process of executing a criminal or civil sentence against a person after a guilty ruling.

So if you rob a bunch of banks, but launder the money somehow.. it should be untouchable? Serial numbers don't match up with the robbed ones, and they weren't caught while robbing.. so good to go?

That's a fair question. So long as the owner is still the defendant and the owner is charged with an actual crime, I don't have a problem with assets being 'imprisoned' similarly to people to prevent them disappearing during a trial in case they need to change hands in a judgment/sentence. However, they should not become the property of the state, which is what happens in civil forfeiture confiscations by default. An public or private escrow service seems like the most appropriate solution in your scenario.

If you allegedly rob a bunch of banks, and allegedly launder the money somehow in some vague unclear way according to a claim made by police, then yes absolutely good to go.

That's the cornerstone of a free society.

If they can prove you robbed the banks or laundered the money, then they get to lock you up.

But yes, in a thought experiment where someone commits the perfect unprovable crime that can't ever be solved then yes they get to go free.

The difficulty of proving something beyond a reasonable doubt does not justify the lowering of the standard.

It is up to the government to prove guilt. Someone shouldn't have to protect their assets from forfeiture by proving its innocence.

Yes, but the 14th amendment says "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." You'd think that this would mean that if the government wants to take your property, they have to afford you due process. Instead, they dredge up an obscure concept called in rem jurisdiction from admiralty law. This was originally used in situations where a foreign ship came into port with contraband, and the owner was difficult to determine or couldn't be reached, so they came up with the idea of suing the property instead of the person. Then it was used in non-maritime cases where the owner of the property was unknown or dead. Then they managed to argue that since property isn't a person, it has no constitutional rights -- you're not depriving a person of his property without due process, you're just depriving the property of its liberty. It's unbelievable to me that such an obviously bullshit argument can get past the supreme court.

Has any case regarding civil asset forfeiture actually made its way up to the Supreme Court yet? I'm not sure of any or if the court has actually ruled on the constitutionality of this ever.

Interesting history about rem jurisdiction.

It's not just criminals though, the police can stop anyone with reasonable 'suspicion' and they do. It's legalised highway robbery. Canada issued a travel advisory to their citizens over it, and the police in New York don't even keep records of what they steal.

They do keep records. The article that you were referring to was about how the NY police claimed that the system that they store those records in couldn't handle something like calculating the total amount of cash seized across all records.

Basically, it couldn't handle the equivalent of SELECT SUM(cash) FROM loot but it could handle SELECT * FROM loot WHERE victim = "John Smith"

Contraband should be seized. Legal property that is connected with a crime should be seized as well.

But, the burden should be on the state to establish that the property is the proceeds of a crime.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, if I'm a criminal in the drug business, and I've got a bunch of money on me when you stop me, by the time you meet the burden of proof, I won't have the money any more. If you're going to seize it at all, you have to seize it when you've got the chance.

The best we might realistically ask for is that I get it back once the police can't meet the burden of proof...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

A particularly hilarious and brilliant take on Civil Forfeiture by John Oliver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks

When you say "found with a big pile of drugs...it is not unreasonable to take the cash away" I'm going assume you meant "were found guilty in a court of law, the money was determined to be a result of illegal activity and was put into a fund managed with transparency and oversight by elected - not appointed - officials".

The problem is the burden of proof, which is the one massive feature distinguishing the topic of civil forfeiture from the rest of the criminal justice system in which it conceptually resides.

In theory, that sounds correct. But the police shouldnt be able to steal stuff and get funding from it. That's is an adverse incentive for them to follow the rules. It's very clear this is a simple thing that they do to raise money, from the many many stories about small police departments pulling over poor people fishing for cash.

Provided you are convicted first. Otherwise you could screw people up by dumping random drugs in their yard and then calling the police.

One way it is used to day is to take the money before the trail so you cannot afford to defend yourself. Pretty effective, if you just want convictions.

This isn't even the normal situation, however. Modest houses, modest cars, and so on can get taken for relatively little amounts of drugs. Have some cash on you to buy a vehicle, and happen to have some pot in your car? Oops, goodbye car.

What you are talking about is unreasonable when you are talking smaller amounts and things.

Or more scarily, have you ever had a passenger in your car and you're not 100% sure if they had drugs on their person? Have you ever had police search your car with a drug dog or consented to a search with a drug dog? Both of those combined has been used to seize cars from innocent people because unbeknownst to them their passenger had a small amount of weed on them.

That is scary - I've been close to that situation, minus the official search. And it is fairly easy to be in that situation. Dating, car-pooling at the job, or simply giving a little-known aquaintance or a friend's family member home can land you in that situation.

My personal experience with that was in the late 90's. I took some folks home. It happened they lived in public housing in a town of around 50k. Suddenly, there were lots of cop cars and dogs about. I was getting asked about drugs and if any passengers had drugs, while being told that they know there was crack in the area and, "they found out that white folks are doing it too". (The others in my care were african-american).

At that point, I realized I didn't know these folks all that well. Youth + giving folks a ride home from a mutual location. I wasn't as worried about my car at that point because I knew nothing of civil forfeiture, but I was intensely worried about them dropping the drugs in the car and denying ownership. It would have been a nearly instant drug conviction for me, from what I understood at the time.

"Civil forfeiture" is theft. It's also plainly unconstitutional.

Except, it's plainly not. Seriously. It's been around since the 1600's and every supreme court that has ever existed in the US has found it constitutional.

You can claim they are all wrong, it's literally not unconstitutional, because in our system, that's what the supreme court decides.

Now, there are more reasonable arguments that some of the current approaches do not comport with due process, but that's not as blanket a statement as you are making here.

It galls me so much because I'm usually the one arguing your position, but when it comes to civil asset forfeiture I have to say there's no possible way the SCOTUS has it right. You would honestly be hard-pressed to find too many other legal practices in such regular use today that so fly in the face of any plain or complicated reading of the 4th amendment.

It's not even a little bit wrong, it's staggeringly wrong. It's not a weird technical nuance of law. It's not something the framers never addressed, or an issue that's only come up since the drafting. Yes, the practice of it has a long history that extends long before the US but so did/does slavery, government-sanctioned torture, genocide and collective punishment but nobody's wandering around saying we should allow those because starting the 1700s someone thought they were good ideas.

It's unjust, particularly in it's current implementation, and it completely circumvents due-process.

At least in the US, which wasn't a nation in 1600, this is a prohibition-era deterrent that was reinstated by Reagan to punish drug users, and has been more currently used to fund law enforcement agencies in an astonishingly offensive manner.

Sure, i'd agree it's unjust in some of the current implementation (there are something like 800+ federal statutes that have some form of asset forfeiture, so you'd need to be more specific which you think are unjust)

While i think, policy wise, it's as dumb as the next guy, I'm just pointing out this is being painted with too broad a brush from a constitutional standpoint

Civil forfeiture must end. But until it can be ended, the least we can do is to make certain that any forfeited funds do NOT go to the police departments which hold power over deciding these cases. The funds should go to the federal government so that there is no local incentive to unjustly seize assets from citizens. That much should be obvious, in a democracy, right?

Governor Brown signed a massive civil forfeiture reform for California today.

https://www.aclunc.org/news/gov-brown-signs-historic-bill-re...

Woah, seems crazy that the police can keep something that was technically stolen property and not return it to the original owner. How can a judge argue that it will just be used to transfer drugs again, it's not the drug offender's property and she wasn't accessory... That's not relevant to the case, the owner isn't using it to traffic drugs.

IANAL, just confused.

I'm also perplexed about this. Anyone's car could be stolen, and then used to commit any number of crimes. Maybe the woman in the article didn't report the car as stolen?

maybe, because it was her own son and she didn't want him to face more jailtime? I thought it didn't matter though, I thought the owner could choose not to prosecute, or tell them to drop the case.. or maybe that's on a state-by-state level.

I wonder if there are any statistics on race vs. forfeiture.

My interest in race here is that these practices were probably inflicted on blacks _first_, probably without white objection.

It's decades later and the laws that allowed police to terrorize blacks are gradually being extended to all races. I worry that this pattern will repeat itself.

This is how the vast majority of freedom-limiting laws have been implemented in the US.

Marriage licensing, gun control, and drug prohibition immediately spring to mind. Gun control in particular is a topic I'm invested in - see JPFO's video "No Guns for Negroes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaX3EM-fsc8

Hi, I am one of the primary authors of this story. We attempted to FOIA for this data and the State's Attorney rejected our requests for this information.

On what grounds?

Unduly burdensome. collecting that data would be too much work.

I'm sure there are, but let's be real: you don't have to bring race into the argument to convince anyone this is immoral and unconstitutional.

Depending on the result, bringing race into it might lead to people feeling insulated from it, and therefore not care as much ("it only happens to black people. But, I'm not black").

I agree with you on that point. An unfortunate artifact of drawing correlations along tribal lines.

Good point, but I wonder if there is not a stronger correlation to income (the lower your income, higher the chance to get caught in civil forfeiture).

While not related to race, cops have been caught tracking the rich to seize whatever cash they had in their cars.

This is why we need to stop only caring about the presidential election and focus on local politics.

All the other reasons in the thread why civil asset forfeiture is bad aside, it seems to me like a cood vehicle for corruption, too.

Imagine I run a drug cartel and want to make a deal with some corrupt cops. How can I pay them without raising suspicion? Simple:

- Open a new bank account and transfer the payment to it;

- Given an "anonymous" hint to the cops that the bank account is connected to the cartel; (indeed it is)

- The corrupt cops could seize the money using asset forfeiture and even make a nice PR show how it allows them to make progress in the war against drugs...

$19000 for one month's use of cellphones? Sounds like corruption to me.

Nah, Chicago's a big Verizon town.

"Routine> 18.6 million"

Holy crap.

Why is this on HN? Who cares how Americans abuse their poor? Whats that to do with technology?

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