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Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

> A controversial law that allows police in Minnesota to take and sell someone's personal property is coming under more scrutiny after the state patrol seized a woman's car during a drunk driving stop late last year, even though she was not driving or charged with a crime.

> ...

> Troopers seized Dietrich's car under Minnesota's forfeiture law that has allowed police agencies across the state to take close to 14,000 vehicles, generating nearly $10 million for those departments in just three years, according to a review of statewide data by 5 INVESTIGATES.

How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country?

The system of "checks and balances" that we're taught (maybe not anymore) has clearly failed here and in hundreds if not thousands of other cases, ranging from ravenous petty theft of private property owned by people charged with no crime:

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

to secret courts and clear violations of the constitution:

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790281142/scathing-report-put...

This is not what freedom looks like. It resembles another system, though. One that gets trotted out pretty regularly to smear political candidates and organization that try to effect change.

View on HN

It boggles my mind that there’s any debate about whether there are systemic issues with police when we literally have laws on the books that explicitly allow cops to steal from civilians.

A law meant to deter crime instead gets used as a budget booster. Proposing to change that law in support of personal property rights and nothing else, and you will immediately be tagged with supporting de-funding of the police. They will cry about how they use this system to prop up their budgets when the local governments fail to adequately fund them.

In fairness, "systemic" is not well-defined, and it's routinely used as a weasel word. For example, if we're talking about police shootings of Black Americans, and I invoke "systemic racism" to imply that police are prejudice against blacks in their killings and thus America is a racist ethnostate, you could point out that police kill whites and blacks at comparable rates when accounting for crime rates, at which point I would retreat to "'systematic' refers to whatever system is causing blacks to commit crimes at elevated rates, i.e., legacy of slavery and racism" which is probably correct but supports an opposite set of moral implications and solutions.

In my experience, people who are willing to be honest, precise, and consistent in their terminology tend to have more reasonable and productive debates. They can often agree on many things with the people who are supposed to be their enemies and the disagreements are more understandable. Notably, most Americans probably agree that this law is heinously unjust.

EDIT: People are fixating on the example and assuming that crime rate disparities are manufactured or a result of law-enforcement bias, but that doesn't hold up to the criminology literature, which controls for LEO bias in a number of ways, including by comparing data sources against victim surveys. So while it's fair to argue that criminologists are failing to account for something, we're not talking about ignorant people making stupid extrapolations. If we're going to go off-topic, then let's at least make it a productive, enlightening digression.

I'm not coming into this as an expert, but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate', because law enforcement is discretionary and also/therefore racist... I mean it is not by accident. There was a concerted effort to consolidate white power after the civil war, and police were always part of that. Divide and conquer.. restrict where they can live, police their neighborhoods, put them in jail. Criminalizing blackness and then calling 'blacks' criminals was literally and explicitly part of the plan. Obviously not part of everybody's plan, but it's a continuation of the devil's bargain in our constitution: loyalty from the south in exchange for chattel slavery in our city on a hill. It's disgusting but ofc history is dead people, we can choose to recreate these institutions or dismantle them... but...

Being honest, precise, and consistent in your terminology isn't too helpful if you choose to ignore american history.

'Systemic' racism is the appropriate term because it must be understood as a whole for the parts to make sense. Your misunderstanding kinda illustrates this. Cause really the remedy for police killings and for high "crime rates" among "blacks" are in fact the same, and relate to the manner and amount of policing.

> but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate', because law enforcement is discretionary and also/therefore racist

This is why homicide rates are useful. For most cases, it is pretty obvious a crime of some sort occurred.

Okay, but you can't extrapolate homicide rate to find the rate of e.g. drug use.

This is a complicated issue with many interwoven contributing factors. There's no one magic figure you can point to that explains or disproves everything.

It doesn't disprove anything, but it puts the onus back on those who claim that the police are racist, that we live in a racist ethnostate, and that we've improved very little with respect to institutional racism since the antebellum period.

> it puts the onus back on those who claim that the police are racist, that we live in a racist ethnostate, and that we've improved very little with respect to institutional racism since the antebellum period.

No, it doesn't.

You're mistaken.

> but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate', because law enforcement is discretionary and also/therefore racist

> This is why homicide rates are useful. For most cases, it is pretty obvious a crime of some sort occurred.

Tldr; homicide conviction rates are subject to other artifacts and can't support either side very well without additional data.

Law enforcement is discretionary not just in deciding what counts as a crime but in who they decide to investigate and other tactics employed. Not that this hugely affects any relative statistics, but the murder false imprisonment rate is estimated at 4-11%, and false imprisonment (as far as we can tell from subsequent DNA exhoneration and whatnot -- this might not be representative of all murders) disproportionately affects black people. Not that this necessarily says anything about broad crime racial statistics, but it could throw any direct comparisons off.

More importantly though, 30-40% of murders go unsolved, and it's probably not reasonable to assume that distribution to reflect the distribution of successfully convicted murders (if for no other reason than the race<->income correlation). That's such a huge monkey wrench in any comparative statistics that murder conviction rates without any additional information don't strongly support either side of things.

Criminologists consider homicides to be reliable because it's difficult for police to ignore homicides. Moreover, these data also gel with victimization surveys--victims also report disproportionate black offenders, especially in violent crimes. Further, this violent crime rate disparity exists even when controlling for SES (socioeconomic status) differences between the races (contra your "race<->income correlation" remark). There's probably some error, but all sources suggest that crime rates are considerably higher among blacks than whites. Note again that virtually no one is arguing that blacks are inherently criminal, but that these disparities are a vestige of centuries of severe institutional racism--it would be shocking if no disparities remained only 60 years after the formal end of Jim Crow.

> these data also gel with victimization surveys

> this violent crime rate disparity exists even when controlling for SES

That's exactly the kind of additional data I was asking for. I just didn't think murder conviction rates by themselves were sufficient evidence to support the claims they were being thrown against.

> Criminologists consider homicides to be reliable because it's difficult for police to ignore homicides.

That side-steps my point a bit doesn't it (in hindsight I should have been more clear)? Being difficult to ignore makes homicides generally reliable for some kinds of comparisons (e.g. comparing violent crime between countries), but that reliability doesn't transfer well. E.g., when a plausible suspect is thrown in jail the spotlight is removed from everyone involved. I gave specific examples where despite a high reliability in overall murder rates, piggybacking on that reliability to lend credibility to the racial distribution of conviction rates isn't justified (without additional information). The rest of your comment notwithstanding (I did appreciate it and do generally agree with you), rebutting by reaffirming points I already agree with and pulling in criminologists as experts in the vaguest way possible isn't satisfactory.

> Note again that virtually no one is arguing that blacks are inherently criminal, but that these disparities are a vestige of centuries of severe institutional racism--it would be shocking if no disparities remained only 60 years after the formal end of Jim Crow.

No argument here. I tend to agree with the claim, but the evidence (based on murder conviction rates) was suspect.

Yeah, it sounds like I was reading too far into your point. I think we agree.

> but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate',

First of all, it was only an example for how "systemic" can be used as a weasel word. That said, the higher crime rate for black Americans is well-documented--it shows up not only in law enforcement reporting but also in victim reports (note that the majority of victims who report a black offender are themselves black), media reports, and homicide statistics (these are regarded as highly reliable because it's frequently easy to tell that a crime has occurred).

> Criminalizing blackness and then calling 'blacks' criminals was literally and explicitly part of the plan.

As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, we can (and criminologists go to great lengths to) control for this by taking into account non-law-enforcement sources, especially sources who are least likely to be racially biased.

> Being honest, precise, and consistent in your terminology isn't too helpful if you choose to ignore american history.

History isn't ignored in the claim, "Racial disparities in police killings largely reflect disparate crime rates which are likely the effect of centuries of slavery and institutional racism". This is the moderate position. But again, this was all an example to illustrate how "systemic" is used as a weasel word; I'm not trying to veer off-topic into a race debate (although I'm perfectly happy to talk about it when it's on-topic).

> 'Systemic' racism is the appropriate term because it must be understood as a whole for the parts to make sense.

It's may be an appropriate term, but it's ambiguous and weasels regularly take advantage of that ambiguity. This undermines its utility.

> Your misunderstanding kinda illustrates this. Cause really the remedy for police killings and for high "crime rates" among "blacks" are in fact the same, and relate to the manner and amount of policing.

Big [citation needed] that current police practices principally drive crime rate disparities and not the prior centuries of institutional racism and slavery. No doubt that current practices play a role, but that they are a primary driver beggars belief. Note that 80% of blacks don't want less policing (only better policing): https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r....

I want to believe you're coming to this in good faith, but in your last paragraph you mention "institutional racism", which is the same thing as systemic racism-- institution == system. This is not confusing because that is what it always means. 'Institutional' racism doesn't mean, like, racism at a university or something. You seem to be muddying the waters unnecessarily (intentionally?). Forgive my paranoia in these troubled times but could you be a paid shill come to waste our energy?

This is the problem; depending on who you talk to, "systemic racism" has a different definition. Kendi defines "systemic racism" as "anything that causes disparate outcomes between racial groups". People who make the claim that racial disparities in rates of police killings probably mean to imply that police exhibit racial prejudice in their killings, but given that disparate crime rates seems to explain the disparity in police killings, they can claim that they're technically correct in that centuries of racial oppression have created a system (presumably a cultural system) in which blacks are more likely to commit crimes (assume this is true for sake of argument; this has been litigated thoroughly elsewhere) and thus more likely to suffer police violence. They're technically correct, but it doesn't support arguments or conclusions that police are racially prejudiced (e.g., "more anti-bias training for police", "calling the cops on a black person is a death sentence", etc). It's important to be clear and accurate on this point because these two very different implications suggest very different remedies, and black lives hang in the balance.

> Forgive my paranoia in these troubled times but could you be a paid shill come to waste our energy?

Alas, I'm not a critical theorist.

Worth noting that police typically "randomly" drug search black people/drivers at a much higher rate than white people, even though white people are just as likely, or more likely to have drugs on them.

It's then easy for (ignorant) people to point at those numbers and say look, 80% of the time when police search someone for drugs and find them, it's a black person, so obviously black people are more likely to have drugs on them so we should search them more.

It's like a higher-level version of being arrested for resisting arrest (by asking "what are you arresting me for?")

I'm curious on what evidence you base the statement "white people are more likely to have drugs on them than black people." When controlling for socioeconomic status I would expect no difference by race, and honestly when controlling for socioeconomic status I would only expect which drugs were found to change, and not necessarily the rate at which they were found.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/polic...

> For years, police records have shown that black drivers tend to be less likely than white drivers to turn up with guns or drugs when searched at traffic stops. At the same time, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be subjected to these searches, according to a 2013 federal survey.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traff...

> Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

> Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.

That's still not the same thing, though. If, among the 1% of African Americans pulled over, 10% have drugs, while among the 0.5% of White Americans pulled over 20% have drugs, it doesn't actually say much about the overall rates of drug ownership. Maybe police are really bad at figuring out which African Americans are carrying drugs, and the overall rate in that population is 10% - while the police manage to pull over everyone else carrying drugs, leading to a population rate of 0.1%. (Or you can flip this around too)

The point is that you're measuring after a selection effect, and measurements after a selection effect are worthless. Imagine comparing income between racial groups, but only surveying people buying sports cars - it's just not useful.

Most of these stops are in high crime areas, which also have high rates of poverty. It would make sense that blacks are stopped more than whites since blacks, as a percentage of population, tend to be poorer than whites.

> Worth noting that police typically "randomly" drug search black people/drivers at a much higher rate than white people, even though white people are just as likely, or more likely to have drugs on them.

White people are more likely to have drugs when searched for drugs because police are less likely to search white people for drugs for reasons other than having real reason to think that they have drugs.

They may also be more likely to have drugs because they are less likely to be searched out of the blue, but the difference simply due to blacks being subject to more harassment searches is probably the bigger factor.

I would like to point out that there is a plethora of literature and research which defines and studies "systemic racism", not to mention many people who have spent their entire careers on the topic, and have done so while being "honest, precise, and consistent."

The way you have worded your comment implies that those who use the term are doing so to weasle out of honest debate, and I think this is a very uncharitable characterization. Furthermore, the dialogue you've used to exemplify the debate does not seem to honestly reflect what any reasonable expert would actually say. At best, it's what a person might say if they were poorly informed and had an incomplete understanding of systemic racism.

Really, this makes me question whether you are being honest with yourself about your own understanding of systemic racism, and the body of work upon which we draw when discussing the topic. I feel that if you had a more accurate understanding, your response to the parent comment would be quite different in its priorities, so I would highly recommend you reflect on this, and perhaps read a bit more deeply on the subject.

You're conflating two distinct claims:

* "Everyone who uses this term is arguing in bad faith"

* "Many people who use this term are using it in bad faith"

My claim was the former. No doubt many people use it in a precise sense, take care to define it well, and don't move semantic goalposts. But many do, and this is (in my opinion) a big reason why the debate around the term is so low-quality.

> Really, this makes me question whether you are being honest with yourself about your own understanding of systemic racism, and the body of work upon which we draw when discussing the topic.

How can I be "dishonest with myself about my understanding of 'systemic racism'" when I don't know what the claimant means by 'systemic racism'? What about asking someone to define their terms connotes disearnesty?

I feel like you've misunderstood my point. It was not my intention to conflate those two claims, I assumed when reading your comment that you are referring to some subset of people, not all people. As I mentioned, the type of interaction you described sounded less like someone arguing in bad faith, and more like someone who is under-informed. Yes, many people are in fact under-informed on this topic, especially since many are learning about it for the first time as a result of recent events. Accordingly, I would expect that there are many more people fitting this description, than there are people who argue in bad faith. This on its own would be a reasonable explanation for experiencing low quality discussions. So, you could have originally replied with something along the lines of, "to be fair, many people have only just learned of systemic racism, and as a result, casual discussions on the topic are often low quality and just muddy any debate."

But why focus on these low quality discussions in the first place? Don't they exist for nearly any topic? Are they really the highest priority when trying to have a constructive discussion?

This was the main point of my comment, to point out that your reply focused on the existence of low quality discussions, and in turn does more to perpetuate the idea that "systemic racism" is not well defined nor well founded in general, than it does to contribute to better understanding. Rapind's reply also points this out, that very low quality arguments are similar to strawman arguments, and even if it wasn't your intention, solely focusing on them can actually hinder the discussion.

If you acknowledge that better definitions of "systemic racism" exist, but you omit them and focus on poor definitions instead, you are contributing to the low quality of the debate yourself.

In regards to being honest with oneself, I mean being aware of your own understanding and it's limitations. How would you describe the depth of your understanding on this topic? Do you have resources you can share with others so they can better understand what you mean when you discuss systemic racism? Perhaps you can recommend a favorite book or specific author that you think covers the topic comprehensively and in good faith? Do you feel like you know what an expert means when they're using the term, as well as the common misconceptions faced by non-experts? Are you asking yourself these questions before you ask them of others?

Sorry, I think I made things less clear by accidentally typing "former" instead of "latter". Anyway, my specific claim is that "systemic" is overloaded and abstract and there are bad faith actors exacerbating the problem, and it is driving a lot of confusion and low quality discourse. It's important to address because having a productive, honest, accountable public debate is paramount to democracy, social progress, and the welfare of over 300 million Americans and those who are affected by America. Anyway, this conversation is already sufficiently off-topic; hopefully it's clear enough where I stand even if you don't agree. In whatever case, it's time I duck out.

>My claim was the former.

I think you meant 'the latter'. Former is the first, latter is the last.

Oof, yeah. I’ve done that twice this afternoon.

There are those who understand the nuance in discussions like these that use meaningful and succinct terms like systematic to represent a known thing. Once a term is in the mainstream though, others will adopt a term without really understanding or often having any desire to understand what they're saying.

It's like a strawman that's been brought to life for opposition to a belief it had previously been used in. The term may then lose meaning once everyone on twitter starts debating it under it's new flawed definition. Basically a way to dismiss something uncomfortable by subverting it's meaning. A good example would be "Social Just Warrior" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior.

What GP is doing is feeding the strawman (I doubt intentionally) which may have the effect of reducing real evidence and support into subjective nonsense in the mainstream context. The worst part is that it sort of feeds itself. GP might very well be correct in that the term is being misused blatantly in some contexts.

4d chess.

Thank you for this comment, and for describing this dynamic so clearly.

As you said, I doubt it was intentional, but GP's comment stuck out to me because it was in response to a rather innocuous statement of disbelief. I would liken it to witnessing the following exchange:

> A newly released climate change report from ExxonMobil has sparked controversy ...

>> It boggles my mind that there’s any debate about whether there's climate change when we literally have studies from fossil fuel companies detailing the evidence and predicting its future impact.

>>> In fairness, "change" is not well defined, and is routinely misused. For example, if we're talking about the recent storms in the midwest, and I invoke "climate change" to imply that these storms were directly linked to rising global temperatures and will lead to the collapse of the North American food supply, you could point out that the storms are still consistent with local weather phenomena observed in the area's recent history, at which point I would retreat to ...

>>> In my experience, people who are willing to be honest, precise, and consistent in their terminology tend to have more reasonable and productive debates about weather events. They can often agree on many things with the people who are supposed to be their enemies and the disagreements are more understandable. Notably, most Americans probably agree that these storms were damaging to farmers in the midwest.

>>> EDIT: People are fixating on the example and assuming that the reported rate of destruction to the corn crop in Iowa underrepresents the rates in neighboring areas, and ... , but when taking into account reduced demand from China and ... , there's clearly no threat of a food supply collapse. So while it's fair to argue that agricultural scientists are failing to account for something, we're not talking about ignorant people making stupid extrapolations. If we're going to go off-topic, then let's at least make it a productive, enlightening digression.

How do you point this out effectively, so that people can realize that they're fixated on arguing against a strawman of their own creation, and so they don't just double down?

It isn't just the police. The government at all levels has laws which allow it to seize property from Americans and in most cases without recourse. Welcome to big government, where government officials and politicians do not have to answer for the laws and regulations they put forth. It is the regulatory state that is even more daunting as unelected officials can set rules and fines that are never voted on

A recent famous case was seizing and selling a persons house over an eight dollar tax payment.[0]

Through forfeiture and excessive fines government routines takes millions, tens of millions per year, from Americans each year. From losing your property over tax issues, forfeiture from police stops, excessive fines for property violations[1], to just simply losing money for trying to fly with it [2]

Why doesn't this get more attention here? Simple, this site seems to have a poisonous view of Libertarian issues and links to sites which cover these transgressions daily but are on Libertarian sites get flagged or down voted into oblivion.

[0]https://reason.com/2020/07/24/county-wants-answers-from-trea...

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2019/07/19/f...

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-dea-s...

IMHO, the problem is that americans have gotten used to taking things too literally and being overly nitpicky, rather than look at a big picture. The right to bear arms, for example, was originally put there with the intent to allow the people to violently defend against an oppressive regime, if they felt that was what was needed to defend their rights and freedoms. It's since been reduced to nits on the interpretation of "the people" as individuals vs their state, and nowadays, it's been further reduced to nits on rifle sizes, open carry virtue signaling, whatever.

This whole thing fits the Benjamin Franklin quote to a tee: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".

  1) Rent a car from Hertz
  2) Drink drive
  3) Car gets forfeited

  1) Rent a hotel room from IHG
  2) Drug deal in room
  3) Room gets forfeited

  1) Hire an EC2 instance from AWS
  2) Use it to try to hack NASA
  3) AWS datacentre is forfeited

Do I have that right? Or are there different rules for large organisations?

There have always been different rules for large corporations (and the rich) because they have money to challenge the state in court.

White collar crime isn't prosecuted as much because the laws were written with 'intent' clauses that make it easier to avoid convictions and difficult to prove so cases are more expensive and complicated. Most suits against corporations take years and millions of dollars to resolve.

Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft, the only reasonable justification for it is for unclaimed property, the second someone is found to be the owner you're seizing their property which there are (theoretically) [0] constitutional protections against.

[0] I say theoretically because legal protections only 'really' exist when they're enforced against the government.

That would violate rule number one of being a bully, never pick on someone who can fight back.

You have to look for that struggling single mother, she doesn't have the time, energy, or resources to protest if you steal from her.

If you read the fine print of your rental agreement, you will find that if for any reason the car becomes unrentable while you are in possession of it, you are responsible for the rental fee until the car is good to go.

The cops would not be interested in the other scenarios though. They can only make money from the confiscated items if they can sell/auction them. I guarantee AMZN has more lawyers than any 3 letter agency, and will not get close to the front door. The hotel room concept is just too far even in a hyperbolic sense. Change it to rent an AirBnB that is a single family domicile, and you have a better leg to stand on

> Do I have that right? Or are there different rules for large organisations?

There are always different rules for those who can afford top lawyers.

Yes. This hotel got confiscated on that basis. Welcome to America!

https://www.wbur.org/news/2012/11/14/tewksbury-motel-owner-f...

Amazing, although I suspect it wouldn't happen to a corporation -- the constitution specifically gives incorporated entities far more rights than actual people.

AWS has lawyers that we can only dream about. but Ex1 and 2 happen all the time.

> generating nearly $10 million for those departments

Any forfeiture law should state proceeds would go to a third party. Having the same party (police) that implements the law benefiting from it is just plain wrong.

Forfeiture laws like that should not exist if you want to have separation of powers.

It's a form of punishment and thus should only be a power wielded by the judicative, for reasons neatly demonstrated by Minnesota police.

Did you get to the part where the agency is seizing some vehicles and then has to pay to store them? Someone should do a little more digging into that... wouldn't doubt it if the owners of some of those storage facilities have connections with some of the people seizing the vehicles..

Yes, and the towing companies as well. I'm sure they are very much in favor of these laws.

> How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country?

Articles like this do genuinely fill me with patriotic anger.

Still, my limited knowledge of American history is that it's filled with reprehensible (as well as noble) conduct. So I don't wonder "what happened" to this country because AFAIK it's always been flawed.

I'm not even American, not even living in the US, not even considering the idea of living in the US, and I'm angry at this. It's not patriotic anger - it's humanitarian anger.

Here's the issue that lots of people fail to understand. Once it's figured out, a lot of fixes can happen.

The "Police" are departments of city/state politicians. "Sheriff" is an elected offices for a county.

The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ".

Within a county, the sheriff has the highest law enforcement jurisdiction below the US Marshal cowboying in and taking away their badges. They can even arrest FBI, ATF and ignore Fed requests in general (limitations to this, especially due to paperwork, but the legal right is there). This is why you get plenty of Sheriffs saying, "I and my deputies will not enforce XYZ law".

Why?

Because the Sheriff reports directly to "the people" of the county. He/she is an elected official. Sometimes, they're not even prior law enforcement. But they have a direct dialogue with their voter base (most of the time) because they have a rather direct cause/effect of their time in "office". Also why it's called a Sheriff's Office instead of department (when people know what they're doing... some states are weird/dumb).

The "police" report to the politicians of their jurisdiction.

When certain mayors say, "The police are doing naughty things"... dude... they're on the mayor's orders. The chief can be instantly booted out by the mayor. "It's a travesty that police are overly patrolling certain sectors". YOU APPROVE THE SECTORS AND MADE THE LAWS FOR THEM TO DO SO! "The cops shouldn't be funded through forfeiture/tickets/etc." The politicians are the ones who put that system in place! Police don't make laws, they enforce them according to their hiring governing body... their city/town.

Please, people of the USA, for the love of all things good, learn about your local politicians and vote. Quit this crap of these mayors acting surprised and shifting the blame to the police. The politicians are the ones telling them what to do. Stop being surprised and ignorant.

In the end, the public is to blame for, "Politicians have our best interests at heart if we don't pay attention to what they're doing." I don't care what party you belong to, it's your responsibility to keep a politician in check, no matter their party as well.

> The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ".

If you actually follow local politics, you'll often find that, if the police are even following directions are all, that behind those directions, the most powerful interest group promoting those local policies and able to defeat politicians that displease them is...the police.

Only because people consistently vote with the police. So if we the voters stopped voting for whoever the police tell us to, things would get better.

I think there's a union component to this as well. A lot of people vote along with unions, especially public unions. This is an interesting case where the people most upset with the police are also the ones who tend to like unions (and where unions have political/voter influence), creating a bit of tension. I think this results in focusing on the police themselves, rather than the upstream causes that you're identifying.

Anyway, in case it wasn't clear - I'm totally agreeing with you :-)

> The chief can be instantly booted out by the mayor.

Many cities have trie this, and the police circle up behind their union rep and keep doing what hey were doing before.

In many cities the mayor cannot fire the police chief. In my city in Texas, the city council can only fire the city attorney and the city manager. Of course, the mayor and council can apply pressure to the city manager, but it's not as easy as "booted out by the mayor".

And in a lot of situations, the police chief can't even (permanently) get rid of bad cops, even if they want to. The fired officers sue with the backing of the union, and are often rehired.

There was an NYT article a while ago—I'll see if I can find it—featuring a number of chiefs who described how they'd fired cops guilty of everything from small-time incompetence to horrific abuses of power. They were forced to rehire these idiots after lawsuits.

> "The police are doing naughty things"... dude... they're on the mayor's orders. The chief can be instantly booted out by the mayor.

It's not quite that straight forward. The police have powerful buttons to push to influence the mayor through as well; strikes, blue flu, media, etc. On top of that the mayor is constrained by the union contracts as to what they can demand the police do.

Isn't that like saying "the President really has no ability to stop the military from invading a country, sure, he's the Commander In Chief, but they have powerful buttons to push ..."?

The difference is that the military has a long history and culture of respecting the rules and not being outright defiant of civilian control whether or not they agree with them.

The military doesn’t have a powerful union that protects bad members. In fact, when Trump pardoned someone who was convicted by a military tribunal, the military brass was livid.

When that happens, it's a military coup. Some people argue that the extent to which police can intimidate local government has almost reached the same level; there are all sorts of recent examples. e.g. Doxing a councilwoman after which her neighbour was raped in her home as a possible mistaken identity attack: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8498489/Oklahoma-ci...

Well, no, a military coup would be if the military invaded their own country. Invading a different country is something else.

It's still the military ignoring, which in effect deposes. the legal civilian government. It could be nonviolent but that'd require the whole military (and in the US probably the National Guard of each state) to go along with it. A coup is just "a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government." invading another country without orders from the President definitely satisfies 2 of those conditions regardless of how smoothly it goes inside the country.

> A coup is just "a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government." invading another country without orders from the President definitely satisfies 2 of those conditions regardless of how smoothly it goes inside the country.

It may be violent and illegal, but it fails the key criterion of being a seizure of power from the government. The government remains in power.

Only partially, one of the principal powers of the government is making war. That power is seized in this scenario.

Nonsense. By your definitions, anyone committing any crime has accomplished a coup. A coup is deposing the government and installing yourself in its place. That's what "seizing power" means here.

I'm willing to say there's a distinction in kind between a person committing a crime and the entire military going on an adventure without authorization.

No not really because the president has direct legal authority over the military. Mayors do not directly control police, they're bound very tightly by strong police union contracts for starters as to what they have to do to even fire an officer.

Also if the military did decide to just go around ignore the President there's not much he could actually do, it happens often enough in other countries we have a name for it... a military coup.

There's a difference in firing an officer and setting policy though. It's quite normal in most countries that you can't randomly fire employees ("at-will employment" is very rare, globally), but that doesn't mean the employees are free to do whatever they please. And when they break rules, they can very much be fired.

Mayors can set policy, but it's easier to have the police to their bidding while simultaneously say how terrible it is what the police are doing. Can't blame them, it's politics, but you don't need to fall for it and assume that police unions run the country with politicians as their puppets.

> And when they break rules, they can very much be fired.

Not if you're a cop.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...

> A San Antonio police officer caught on a dash cam challenging a handcuffed man to fight him for the chance to be released was reinstated in February. In the District, an officer convicted of sexually abusing a young woman in his patrol car was ordered returned to the force in 2015. And in Boston, an officer was returned to work in 2012 despite being accused of lying, drunkenness and driving a suspected gunman from the scene of a nightclub killing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-pol...

> "In Philadelphia, an inquiry was recently completed on 26 cases where police officers were fired from charges ranging from domestic violence, to retail theft, to excessive force, to on duty intoxication," Adam Ozimek writes in a Forbes article on reforms to policing. "Shockingly, the Police Advisory Committee undertaking the investigation found that so far 19 of these fired officers have been reinstated. Why does this occur? The committee blamed the arbitration process."

This guy got reinstated:

> In June 2008, after downing six drinks as part of his wife's birthday celebration on the South Side, Paul Abel was accused of accidentally shooting a 20-year-old man he was trying to pistol-whip.

How do you know so much about the organizational structure? I would like to learn more, everything from the secretary on up to the potus.

This is all nice in theory. But if you are a minority and repeatedly mistreated by the police, the majority either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

It’s not that police abuse and lying just started happening the last few years, it is just now getting recorded and streamed.

I'm sure most have heard the lecture about how essential participation in democratic institutions is.

Another option is to just opt-out and move elsewhere. Find ways of living where these things don't impact you.

> The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ".

Frequently, no.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/nypd-union-war-de-bl...

> When Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted his outrage at the violence — claiming the shootings were an attack not only on police but “on ALL New Yorkers and everything we believe in” — the official Twitter account for the Sergeants Benevolent Association replied in characteristic fashion: “Mayor DeBlasio, the members of the NYPD are declaring war on you! We do not respect you, DO NOT visit us in hospitals. You sold the NYPD to the vile creatures, the 1% who hate cops but vote for you. NYPD cops have been assassinated because of you. This isn’t over, Game on!”

https://gizmodo.com/nypd-union-doxes-mayors-daughter-on-twit...

> A New York City Police Department union known for its controversial attacks against Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted out the personally identifying information of his daughter on Sunday night, including a residential address and her New York State ID number.

Or this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-coronavirus-face-masks-sh...

> A growing number of sheriffs in Texas say they are refusing to follow a recent executive order requiring masks in public. Governor Greg Abbott's mandate aims to slow the spread of coronavirus, as cases in the state soared past 200,000 on Tuesday.

Ohio: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ohio-face-...

Wisconsin: https://www.tmj4.com/news/coronavirus/these-wisconsin-sherif...

Indiana: https://www.newsweek.com/indiana-sheriffs-refuse-enforce-sta...

Michigan: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/07/12/w...

The police themselves are really driving civil asset forfeiture. It's a huge revenue stream for police departments. And if your state allows civil asset forfeiture, the worst offenders may be the state police, which is a much more distant entity to hold accountable than your local sheriff.

>How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country?

Because, especially among those who self-identify as "patriotic American[s]", the discussion always goes something like this:

if you're dealing with the police in any way then you must have done something wrong and are therefore a criminal >>> criminals are bad people who deserved to be punished >>> who cares what happens to them, we shouldn't coddle criminals

Any suggestion that any part of this is wrong is met with accusations of being soft on crime or the like, which is generally a political death sentence in the US.

The rest of the article gives some context:

>She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul.

>When the driver, Syrgeo Perez, 30, refused a breathalyzer, he was arrested on suspicion of DWI and troopers seized Dietrich's car using Minnesota's forfeiture law.

Do you really think that seizure was completely and totally unwarranted given the circumstances? If I were her, I would make him pay whatever it took to get my car back.

I don't think blanket penalties should apply to some situation as described by one party.

Eg, if the man's family member was in hospital and he was under a great deal of stress, he could have been speeding to the hospital, refused a traffic stop and so on. But this is a circumstance for the judge to decide on a case basis.

See death penalty for murder, not everyone convicted of murder is guilty and some have been executed by the state. I personally don't think it's worth the risk of executing an innocent person just to satisfy some vengeance or whatever justification we put on it.

Absolutely unwarranted. The law has no right to do this. Sure they can take it and charge a fine. Keeping a vehicle for this? No, this basically means there is no limit to how they can punish you, they can just take any property you or someone else has (where the crime was committed) with the current precedents. That's what fines are for. Sometimes cars are kept for collateral for that, but these civil asset forfeitures are on top of crimes AND you don't even have to get convicted. They drop all charges and sue the car for going fast and then keep it. Yes it is that stupid and their reasoning has Siberian Sink Hole size holes in it.

There is a large segment of the American public who are absolutely fine with horrific punishments because they believe that they are safe from law enforcement because they "do everything right," and so if you don't "do everything right," you deserve to be harshly punished to get you back in line.

"How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country?"

Because patriotism in America originates from fear, not from love for the country.

Much like in China where people dare not say anything critical of the government to their peers because they worry that their peers will see them as traitors and they'll be shun from society; when everybody thinks like that then nobody dares to speak their mind and talk about issues honestly.

So in America the patriotism and "love" for the country is expressed through various mantras such as "thank you for your service", saluting passing fighter jets, hanging American flags on every occasion and the unconditional support for suspicious budgets and laws of all sorts and war orgies orchestrated by the corporate government; many people I would argue don't actually support any of that but if they were to speak up, they would be seen as un-American which is the worst crime you can possibly commit living in America.

It’s definitely overreach. I believe these will be changed over time. Laws change slowly, but on balance it’s a good thing. It’s more predictable and the landscape doesn’t change from admin to admin.

Please call it unConstitutional, because that is precisely what it is. Also the reasoning behind it is only supported by precedent, and has nothing to do with logic, fairness, or you constitutional rights.

Libertarian party has spoken about this for decades and people automatically ignore them and here we are. Sheriffs are using it as an assumed revenue source. GF caught smoking in your car? Take it, let her off with a warning, and sell it and keep the $20k . They actually sue the car. The sheer stupidity of that if overwhelmingly apparent and yet they do it and get away with it. This isn't in podunk towns, this is all over the USA and only a few states have any laws limiting it.

Police used to be very popular/trustworthy (in the public imagination) until recently.

> Police used to be very popular/trustworthy (in the public imagination) until recently.

The people who are most consistently and vividly at the receiving end of the untrustworthiness of police (whether racial minorities or otherwise) tend to be politically and socially marginalized, as historically has been support for their interests. For the less marginalized, if they were in the receiving end of police injustice, it was usually at least masked in a more convincing veil of plausible deniability.

But those people who get the worst of it haven't seen police as trustworthy for, well, as long as there have been police. For the simple reason that police have never been, even in a simulated way, trustworthy for them.

That public perception has a lot to do with Dick Wolf creating the Law & Order television series. Historically, cops have not been loved by their communities (one of the reasons the supreme court saw fit to introduce the absurd doctrine of "qualified immunity" was because cops had it hard enough without also being legally on the hook for every action they take). The L.A. times had a very interesting piece on the topic of cops in the media:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-...

Police are very loved by groups of people who are not targeted unfairly.

Have you not seen the whole “Back the Blue” and “Blue Lives Matter”?

I think that the popularisation of hero cops in media leads directly into these movements.

I believe people would be more willing to examine the actions of police critically if they weren't being sold as "the good guys" for several hours of primetime television a week.

Why would the people who are treated fairly and protected by police care if the police are treating “them” unfairly?

The same people who didn’t trust the police “until recently” never trusted the police. It was not until police misconduct started being filmed that people learned the truth - and many still don’t care and make excuses for police misconduct as long as it isn’t happening to someone that looks like them.

If you review the history of police in America, this is definitely incorrect.

Police evolved out of night watches, slave patrols, and a variety of other loose organizations meant to guard capital.

In the mid 1800s, the first patrolling police departments were formed in the northeast, and the practice spread across the country. The police very much operated like a gang through to the early 20th century. There are many, many documented instances of police attacking, eg, the Irish in Boston. They often made allies with organized crime, and corruption was commonplace.

Later, the police were literally fighting unions. Again, there are many instances of police disrupting union events with violence including open gunfire on union members.

The Jim Crow era certainly had police doing innumerable, terrible things.

Through the later parts of the 20th century the police were arresting, beating, and extorting people for being gay. The modern Pride parades trace their origins to a riot against police violence.

Over the decades that followed, police got more and more military equipment, no knock raids became more common, and police became considerably more militarised.

Fast forward to today, where police are regularly killing unarmed, fleeing, or otherwise unthreatening black men and women.

There's no era in American history where the police were the good guys. Maybe to the straight white land owning folk, but police boots have always been on the neck of someone in this country.

>Later, the police were literally fighting unions. Again, there are many instances of police disrupting union events with violence including open gunfire on union members.

This reminds me of the luddites. Everyone thinks Luddites are an example old fashioned people trying to hold back progress when it was more like what happens when you have a large unemployed group of people protesting on the streets. Some of them started a riot against factories but not because they hated technology, they hated the business owners. The way the government decided to deal with the Luddites is by suppressing them through police and military violence.

The moral of the story isn't "get with the times", it's that business interests take priority over human lives.

It's not so much that the "checks and balances" have failed, but that some places are so partisan that they would literally rather support the people who are telling you the police can take your stuff without trial than consider voting for a different politican than they're used to.

The checks and balances work when there are people actually on the other side of the scale.

That’s a failure of checks and balances. If the same people are in charge of all sides it’s really just a one party system.

The US constitution was not designed for political parties. If it it was you might see things mostly the same except the house was elected based on national vote for proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation Which would result in more fluid party representation.

Originally introduced : https://www.congress.gov/bill/98th-congress/senate-bill/948 Sponsor: Sen. Biden, Joseph R., Jr. [D-DE] (Introduced 03/24/1983)

A quick check with Congress shows various bills introduced to address excesses :

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr5212 Tim Walberg Sponsor. Representative for Michigan's 7th congressional district. Republican.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1219... Sponsor: Rep. Collins, Doug [R-GA-9] (Introduced 02/14/2019)

The two party system doesn't help either. The political spectrum encompasses enough nuance that a winner-take-all duopoly on candidate selection and orchestration is severely crippling the quality and variety of political inputs to the System.

To be honest, I'd almost prefer a neutral organization specialized in facilitating any political campaign to the System of Political parties we have now. If I have to hear "You have to vote Republican or Democrat or it's a wasted vote," again from people cavetching about the state of the political climate and situation in the U.S., and I may not continue to be so adept at not lashing back with a sharp-tongued response.

Until the Establishment on both major political parties come to terms with the fact that both of them can lose there will be no fundamental change in direction of politics.

I don't even count the pathetic excuse for statesmanship we're currently experiencing, because those are mainly differences in amplitude of already established patterns and tendencies rather than an appreciable shift in Qualitative policymaking.

That doesn’t explain civil asset forfeiture in states with a supermajority of one party or another.

The supermajority is the core of the problem.

Hardly, you also don’t see states doing much better on this issue when the legislature is heavily contested.

I'm generally against property being taken in association with crimes. Particularly by police without supporting paperwork and oversight. But in this case:

"She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul. When the driver ... refused a breathalyzer, he was arrested on suspicion of DWI..."

She was able to buy the car back. Drunk drivers cause many injuries and deaths. What happened to this country is that we decided that thousands of drunks on the road was not acceptable. MADD was founded in 1980 to get that fixed. Whatever it takes.

“She was able to buy the car back.”

Think about that for a minute.

A state sanctioned gang decided her car, that she owned, was no longer her property. Then they were graceful enough to allow her to buy back her stolen property. It’s absolutely disgusting and unacceptable in modern society.

People like you who rationalize this behavior make me sick.

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