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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> Various chain emails over the past seven years have warned readers about the possibility of Homeland Security seizing items like gold, silver and guns from their safe deposit boxes at the bank. This isn’t possible without first obtaining a search warrant, since those boxes are private property. And banking officials told us random seizures just aren’t happening. We rate this statement Pants on Fire.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/jul/26/chain-emai...

Perhaps it's still just a conspiracy theory with respect to the DHS rather than the FBI. It doesn't seem to be out of line with civil asset forfeiture policy, other than it being from safe deposit boxes rather than vehicles or luggage.

> Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year (2015)

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

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I'm not sure how chain-email debunking DHS seizures pertains to this specific case in the OP where hundreds of safety deposit boxes we seized by the FBI and there is an ongoing case over it. Fact checking blogs are notorious for selecting multiple variations of a rumor and "fact-checking" the low hanging fruit, then treating all other variants as satisfactorily debunked.

>"What the government has done here is completely backward," writes Frommer. "The government cannot search every apartment in a building because the landlord is involved in a crime. After all, when somebody rents an apartment, that apartment is theirs."

I disagree. Let's say you "rented" a room at a crackhouse. The house later gets seized and your stack of cash is seized. Is it reasonable to show up to the police station and say "yeah that's my cash, no it wasn't involved in anything illegal, can I have it back?"

> Let's say you "rented" a room at a crackhouse. The house later gets seized and your stack of cash is seized. Is it reasonable to show up to the police station and say "yeah that's my cash, no it wasn't involved in anything illegal, can I have it back?"

Yes. Why wouldn't it be reasonable?

can you declare it's source? otherwise it'll be quite silly to try reclaim it

Why wouldn’t the onus be on the police to prove you obtained it illegally?

So they should be considered guilty until proven innocent? By this logic, the FBI should be allowed to seize a bank and every bank account holder would need to prove where each penny came from.

I think you read the other comment backwards?

That's basically how civil asset seizure works in practice. Technically they charge the asset and not the person, because they know the person has rights and could defend themselves. Somehow they got the courts to agree to allowing the asset to be the subject without extending any of the rights (like to representation) being extended to it.

that was not the premise hat's being discussed! it was about a room being rented in a crack house. good luck getting your money if you don't have that source of revenue declared somewhere.

Why would it matter that you are renting a room in a crack house? Do you have fewer rights if other people are committing crime in your vicinity?

yes, or do you think a poor person who has no choice other than to rent in such a location has the same rights as others in modern America?

The question is whether that is reasonable.

It's not reasonable because the government and society have created an environment and system that has no incentive or obligation to return the property. Unless you are a part of the system (LEO, lawyer, judge, etc) your words are worthless. You are essentially a second class citizen.

Edit: clarifying since I'm being downvoted... it should be reasonable but the way our system is currently "working" makes it unreasonable because the system will just ignore you. Hell, if you annoy them, they might find a reason to harass you more.

Yes, we are in agreement.

There is a line. A rented whole apartment is private. Same goes for safety deposit boxes.

So if escrobar separated his coke warehouse into separate units they can't all be seized?

You can see an example of a search warrant in the link below. It specifically outlines the properties to be searched. If someone had multiple warehouses in question, I assume they would have to be individually listed.

https://www.justice.gov/archive/amerithrax/docs/08-431-m-01....

Saying that the line can sometimes be hard to define doesn't mean there isn't a clear line in the vast majority of cases.

https://www.logicalfallacies.org/continuum-fallacy.html

> escrobar

This is an excellent typo. It’s like Pablo got into banking.

There are likely RICO type laws that could be applied which would allow seizing everything in a warehouse no matter who is "renting" the individual units.

Would you say the same thing about someone who rented a house in a meth town?

The difference is that the business itself (ie. the provider of the boxes) is alleged to be criminal.

I'd kinda argue this article is a refutation of the fact check. If a rumor went around that the CIA is putting hidden cameras in random people's bedrooms, and it turned out that the NSA was putting hidden cameras in imprecisely-selected people's bedrooms, no way is that "pants on fire".

And banking officials told us random seizures just aren’t happening.

Regardless if it happens or not, that is the single stupidest statement for anyone to show as proof. Of course the bank is going to say their service is secure and nothing bad ever happens. That is basically Apple's response to "touch disease" back in the day. If you are going to call yourself a fact checking site, you need to do some actual fact checking.

United States of America vs. Safety Deposit Box #R2C20, honorable Judge Civil F. Guaranteed presiding.

Nit: it's "Safe Deposit Box"

It can be either. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/safe-deposit%20bo...

Why is civil forfeiture such a conspiracy bugaboo in the first place?

It's not hard to imagine why people who are trying to instill distrust in the government would harp on an unpopular and frequently unjust program.

It wouldn't surprise me if the other way around happens too. Quite a lot of people started off trusting their government by default; that's what public schools mostly teach after all. But when people witness these injustices again and again year after year, is it any wonder that some people will decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

It happened to me (an illegal search that violated my 4th amendment rights). I have family who are cops and I believe be genuinely great people. However if only 5% of cops are dirty that's still a lot of people who can shoot you in the face and most likely get away with it.

Similar scenario for me. I told one friend who is a trooper about it, and they said this other guy sounds like a bad cop. I literally found blatant mistakes and misconduct with everyone we dealt with as part of the system (police, magistrates, judges, DA's office, clerks, etc).

In the 1700s a group of people got really upset that another group of people kept taking their things without asking - they had a motto 'no taxation without representation.'

That group then founded a culture around this odd distrust of monarchs, that in later generations became a distrust of governments in all forms - even going as far as to conjure fantastical secret societies like the 'illuminati' that maintain a strong thumb on the scales of justice.

It's just a part of the psyche that built the U.S.A. - it's a feature, not a bug

For accuracy, please note that those people were more upset that the king exempted a company he had a stake in from that taxation (East India Tea Company), mostly in order to make up for some disaterous business dealings that threatened to los him and his friends a lot of money.

Much of the rhetoric was dressed up as against taxes, but really all of the actual action was against unfairness in government (especially the lack of taxes). A worthy goal, and a decent reason to revolt. But I wish current politics would occasionally get the facts right.

The popular, incorrect, narrative taught in schools also conveniently avoids introducing the concept of corruption via preferential treatment. I doubt there was a concerted effort in regards to that, but as a child I remember internalizing a concept of “we should resist external government force”, instead of the more apropos, “we have a duty to protest government corruption.”

I'm not so sure that 'corect' lesson is lost in schools, it sounds more like “we should resist external government force” is just a short cut of 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.'

Because it's corrupt and police departments use it as a funding mechanism (without having to prove guilt). It costs more money to get your cash/assets back than the cash/assets are actually worth in most cases.

In other words, if you have $500 in cash, the police can say, "I suspect that is being used in a drug deal," with no actual evidence, and they take your $500. It will cost you around $2500 in attorney fees to try to get it back. The federal government also gets a cut. In 2010, this accounted for about 2.5 billion dollars in revenue, no trial required.

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

"Civil forfeiture in the United States, also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture,[1] is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing."

I'm surprised you haven't heard about this. It's been going on for decades.

I believe there needs to be reform of civil forfeiture as much as the next guy, but I find it funny that 2010 is always the year used when a specific annual amount is cited. That year includes the forfeiture of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme money which alone makes up some 20%-30% of that annual number. Also there aren't going to be a lot of people defending Madoff's right to the money that was taken through civil forfeiture. It is therefore a little misleading to use that specific year to instill fear about the practice without acknowledging that it is somewhat an outlier and that maybe there are valid uses for the practice.

>...but I find it funny that 2010 is always the year used when a specific annual amount is cited. That year includes the forfeiture of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme money which alone makes up some 20%-30% of that annual number.

No, civil asset forfeiture is an ongoing problem and 2010 is not some unusual outlier.

As the original article states:

>...Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary.

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

Looking more broadly:

>...Since 2000, states and the federal government have forfeited at least $68.8 billion—that we know of. Not all states provided full data, so this figure drastically undercounts property taken from people through forfeiture.

https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...

I didn't say it wasn't a problem, but 2010 is always chosen specifically because of Madoff. Madoff also shows why that burglary comparison is meaningless. There is a long tail to civil forfeitures. You can have forfeitures measured in 9 figures and Madoff's is not the only example of this. There are almost never any burglaries of that value. Also burglaries are basically never justified, but sometimes civil forfeitures are justified. Therefore the total money taken is a worthless metric to compare between burglaries and civil forfeitures.

And to reiterate, I agree with you that there needs to be changes to civil forfeiture. I just think we should be honest about the numbers and reasoning we use in that debate.

>...I didn't say it wasn't a problem, but 2010 is always chosen specifically because of Madoff. Madoff also shows why that burglary comparison is meaningless.

The article addresses this issue:

>..."In a given year, one or two high-dollar cases may produce unusually large amounts of money — with a portion going back to victims — thereby telling a noisy story of year-to-year activity levels," the Institute for Justice explains. 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.

>For that reason, the net assets of the funds are usually seen as a more stable indicator — those numbers show how much money is left over in the funds each year after the federal government takes care of various obligations, like payments to victims. Since this number can reflect monies taken over multiple calendar years, it's less comparable to the annual burglary statistics. Still, even this more stable indicator hit $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice — higher again than the burglary losses that year.

>...Also burglaries are basically never justified, but sometimes civil forfeitures are justified.

Criminal forfeitures are done after someone has been convicted and are justified. Civil forfeitures on the other hand are done before anyone has been convicted and the victim doesn't get free legal representation and is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Police agencies have to be funded, but it shouldn't be done by stealing from the public.

That $4.5 number is completely worthless as a comparison to burglaries. It is just the number in the fund at the end of the year. You are basically trying to assume a person's income based off the money in their checking account. It is nonsensical.

I have said elsewhere in this thread that the burden of proof shouldn't be on the owner to prove innocence, but I'm not sure simply changing that turns it into criminal forfeiture. My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime. Meanwhile civil forfeiture can happen when the crime is committed by someone else (technically the item being forfeited).

Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly. Other people benefited from Madoff's crimes without being aware that crimes were being committed. I think it is acceptable for that third party profit to be forfeited despite the owners not committing a crime.

>...That $4.5 number is completely worthless as a comparison to burglaries.

It gives a sense of the scale of the abuse. A number of states refused to give out the data, so it is a low estimate.

>...My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime.

Yes, and that is justifiable. Abuses like confiscating a person's money because they went on a domestic airline flight with a large amount of cash are not justifiable.

>...Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly.

It is a mistake to just focus on a large forfeiture as that is rare:

>...Data from 21 states show half of all currency forfeitures are worth less than $1,300, hardly the stuff of vast criminal enterprises and far less than it would cost to hire an attorney to fight back.

https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...

Would it count as forfeiture for the state, or should it rather be used for restitution to the victims?

That is a false choice. It is both.[1]

>Carl J. Shapiro and various related people and entities have agreed to forfeit $625 million to the United States, all of which will be made available to the victims of the fraudulent investment advisory business which was owned and operated by Bernard L. Madoff

[1] - https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/201...

So let's say the number is 50% lower. That makes it okay? Or 90% lower. Just to be nice.

Bernie Madoff turned himself in and was convicted. Sounds like they could have seized the money some other way.

I said I wanted civil forfeiture reform. However being morally right doesn't justify fudging the numbers. If the number is 50% or 90% lower and that weakens our point, so be it.

If you look at the wikipedia article you'll notice a graph about the equitable sharing agreement. This is an agreement that the federal government has with state and local police where anything seized is shared with the federal government. Madoff's seizer wouldn't be included in that number I wouldn't think, but if it was, 2010 was only slightly higher than 2007, 2008 and 2009.

So the 2010 thing is just a coincidence and either isn't included in the equitable sharing agreement, or if it is, it shows the Madoff seizure is just a drop in the bucket. Either way, it's pretty bad.

The easy fix for civil forfeiture is assign the burden of proof to the state, not the citizen. Some states have done this very thing.

> I believe there needs to be reform of civil forfeiture as much as the next guy

If by "reform" you mean "complete elimination", then I agree.

Civil forfeiture is such a clear and obvious violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. How it lasted more than even a few DAYS before being struck down by even the lowest level courts is beyond me.

Civil forfeiture has its origins in customs law where a ship transporting contraband would be seized along with its contents. This was because in the 1600's to 1800's it wasn't feasible to track down and punish the owners of the goods/ship in a foreign country assuming you could even figure that out.

Of course the practice got expanded to contexts and situations that have nothing to do with smuggling because government will use any excuse to expand its powers.

My first change would be to shift the burden of proof. Right now civil forfeiture includes a presumption of guilt. Switch that to a presumption of innocence and many of these problems would go away. That presumption of guilt is somewhat central to the civil forfeiture process, so whether this a a "reform" or "complete elimination" is a semantic debate. There are certainly some instances in which the forfeiture is just. The previous mentioned Madoff case is one example.

They take your property, then force you to sue to get it back. Meanwhile, you go out of business or go broke.

https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/seize-first-questi...

Please read the article you linked. "forfeiture" has surpassed burglary; and most of that is criminal forfeiture, after a conviction, returning stolen property or paying a fine. The biggest single chunk is what Bernie Madoff stole.

Here's the conclusion of the article after reviewing those details, including Madoff:

"Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. "

The implication that the author wants to make is that the cops are worse than the criminals, and that's the conclusion most people will make on first reading of it. However, after further inspection that's totally acceptable, because cops mostly (?) go after bad people, whereas criminals mostly go after innocent people. It's like saying "police are responsible for more kidnappings (aka. arrests) than criminals". Technically true, but misleading.

Where do you get the idea that criminals target innocent people? The few statistics I have seen indicate criminals tend to target other criminals because they are less likely to go to the police if a crime is committed against them.

source?

Not really, they just want you to realize what a scam it is and that cops/feds are stealing from people for no reason other than personal and departmental gains to flex their power. It's rather common in certain states. Along with basically illegal search by K9 cops on false triggers of vehicles. This happened to me in Texas. I refused them searching my car (had a brake light out), the cop got in a huff, said I had to wait until they brought a k9 out (thought he "smelled marijuana"). Full disclosure, I've never smoked pot or done any narcotic of any kind but I did have a pot brownie in college once. They search my car, the dog "triggered on something" and found absolutely zero as I knew they would (although I was a bit afraid it would be dirty cops who'd drop a dime bag somewhere). It was a complete waste of time and I'm pretty sure the cop set it all up because he was bored and I didn't submit to a voluntary search. This turned me a pretty big supporter of the cops into someone who realize they really need to be reigned in from their current fascist/military mentality.

ikr! I wasn’t born here and when I tell my friends US police forces are better equipped than my home country’s military they just give me a stare as if it’s normal and blame it on the 2nd amendment that most cops have to carry body armor and deadly force weapons. Sounds so backwards to me, something I’d expect in Somalia and not Redmond, Washington.

I don't see the problem being with them having those tools. I see the problem being how the system doesnt provide correct/adequate training and turns a blind eye when those tools are misused. There needs to be accountability.

I quite strongly believe in the saying "When all one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

I definitely see this in Tech, so it likely happens in policing as well - where they're given ever so forceful tools, they'll find reasons to justify that cost.

They aren't only given "hammers". They have an array of tools at their disposal. There are some cops who don't have the training or the capacity (standards are pretty low) to effectively use the correct tool, like that cop that thought she was using a taser. But countless others are able to correctly choose and use the right tool for the job.

At first I think, "this approach is playing roulette with a revolver," but on second thought if the cop was dirty they'd "find" something regardless of path. If you have the time the civic exercise of constitutional prerogatives is undoubtably as worthwhile and interesting as jury duty or voting.

The below linked incident exposed a broad conspiracy to arrest and jail people with a primary purpose of padding overtime timesheets. The city and former chief continue the coverup to this day.

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

> said I had to wait until they brought a k9 out (thought he "smelled marijuana")

You know what really blows my mind? Is that in some states, possession of merely a dimebag of weed can get you a prison sentence and that "smelling marijuana" is used as a justification for bringing out the drug dog.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, I literally have an ad for a weed shop on the back of my grocery store receipt. Proof: https://imgur.com/gallery/b1sicuL

To say "the police go after criminals" is overly simplistic. They go after those who they are allowed to and that group of people changes from administration to administration making the police a political hammer and we are all the nails.

Here is just 1 exmample https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...

Further when the police target you there is zero recourse you can take to resolve the harassment, when your neighbor does it there are many avenues. I would 100% rather be beat by my neighbor than my police.

> However, after further inspection that's totally acceptable, because cops mostly (?) go after bad people,

So let's sum it up. You agree that the cops can seize property without any evidence and require the original owner to get a lawyer prove they are innocent before they get their property back.

You believe the idea of "guilty until proven innocent" is unimportant, because the police are mostly going after bad people.

And it doesn't bother you that the police departments actually get to keep the stuff their seize. You don't see any possible conflict of interest when the police departments can just seize property and keep it and never present any proof at all unless the person they confiscated it from spends a lot of money on legal assistance, and often not even then.

To me this reads like some dysfunctional dystopia, but then I find strongly authoritarian societies frightening.

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