FBI says seized fortune was criminals’ loot—owners say: Where’s the proof?

It is a double edged sword because sadly the police view the public as the enemy in alot of cases, and if you know your rights under the law they view you as "aggressive" or "hindering" their job.

Most do not understand that their primary job is to protect those rights the same rights that they hate people knowing and exercising. Instead they are deluded into this belief by elected officials that their legal role is one of overseer, or ruler over the residents or subjects in the jurisdiction...

It is more complex than that. Under CAF the property is on trial and not you. While the state laws vary, around 12 states use what is call Administrative forfeiture. All they have to do is send you a notice claiming they intend to take away your property and you have 20 days to approach the court. 20 days. If you fail to do so, there is nothing you can do and the government keeps the property.

But even if you decide to file the claim, federal and state laws grant the power to government authorities to decide if the case should go to court. Federal law and some state laws give government attorneys the power to decide whether the claim can proceed to court. Most often you wont get your day in court at all.

CBP is the worst of federal agencies. By law when it steals your property, it is required to inform this to DOJ who is then supposed to either return the property or follow judicial forfeiture. In 7 out of 11 cases CBP simply ignores the law. The desperate property owner then have no choice but to negotiate with CBP which than splits the loot and returns only part of it to the owner.

> From 2005 to 2010, government seizures of assets from both criminals as well as innocent citizens went from $1.25 billion to $2.50 billion

I think your math is wrong because you are dividing 5 years worth of money with 2010's number of cases. But that is not very relevant. Bernie Madoff's few billion dollars were also under CAF so they would skew the mean. Also I would suggest look at state data. Institute of Justice has much detailed numbers. Florida's average CAF value is $4.5k and every other state is below $2k where as median cost to litigate is around $3000K.

> The median currency forfeiture is small, averaging just $1,276 across 21 states with available data. In some states, the median forfeiture is only a few hundred dollars. These low values suggest forfeiture often is not targeting kingpins or major financial fraudsters. [1] > In the four states that track this information, people seek return of their property in 22% of cases or fewer. [1]

> The low median value of most forfeitures is in line with media reports about forfeiture activity. For example, from 2012 to 2017, Cook County, Illinois, law enforcement conducted over 23,000 seizures totaling $150 million. The median value of these seizures was just $1,049, and approximately three-quarters of the seizures were of cash (most of the rest were vehicles). Many of these seizures, including most cash seizures of less than $100, were clustered in the poorest parts of Chicago. [2]

These trends of median value of CAF hold pretty much for every state but you can look at the IJ report yourself.

But any rate the original point stands, cops steal more than burglars.

[1] - https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/pfp3content/exec... [2] - https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/policing-for-pro...

Either way. https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/pfp3content/forf...

In that case, it would also be illegal.

> As far as number 5, you can't assume that's illegal either. I have a family member [whose] ex wife continues to commit identity theft and cause headaches for him 5 years after the divorce is over.

Okay? So he keeps his money in cash in a safe deposit box? Doubt.

Sure, sleeping on a mattress made of $100 bills might raise suspicion.. but that's still not a crime. If the government suspect you haven't paid your taxes, the burden is still on them to prove you didn't pay your taxes. If they have any evidence to bring this to a court, it would need to pass the threshold of actually being evidence of absent tax payments, it is not enough to say "They are sleeping on a bed of benjamins, your honor."

I'm well aware this is ignoring how hilariously broken actual legal proceedings are, of course, thus scenarios like the one that started this thread.

A EU wide rule may follow, but maybe a bit higher.

edit: I believe this was the incident: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-dhs-over-unlaw...

edit 2: It was $4700. Wouldn't raise eyebrows in a bank withdrawal. Not what I had in mind when I said "massive".

[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4876107/user-clip-joe-biden-w...

Let's take a different case: Duterte in the Phillippines. "We know who's a drug dealer, so the police can just kill them. Yeah, maybe a few innocent people will get killed, but hey, small price to pay."

Is that too extreme? What if the police just rounded up people they thought were drug dealers and jailed them, putting the burden of proving their innocence on them?

"Innocent until proven guilty" - that's the policy that you cannot violate.

People think they have rights, until the system decides you're an outsider and tramples all over you to the applause of the society (the in group).

They could have sued directly in civil court without waiting for the criminal cases to play out. If the Feds have enough evidence to justify foregoing, you know, actual trials and immediately redistribute the assets to the victims then any court cases should be trivial formalities and quickly resolved. On the other hand, if it actually does take years to determine guilt then maybe the Feds shouldn't be so quick to apply the sentence before the trial.

So, say you have $10 million after laundering it through a business, and that's used to invest in housing, and that doubles, and later the government identifies all of that original $10 million as illicit because they've identified your laundering method. They are going to attempt to take everything gained, the whole $20 million, under the theory that it was all proceeds of your illicit behavior.

The problem is, what if you already had $1 million dollars free and clear from a settlement or something, and you used that as well, so $11 million was invested and $22 million resulted? Is the government going to take $20 million and leave you $2 million? Doubtful. Should they? That's an interesting question, and depending on how people view the laws involved, 4th amendment rights, and the purpose of the seizing of money, they might come down on different sides of that question.

They were basically offering money laundering as a service as recently as ten years ago. And given how long those court arguments likely take that's recent enough.

https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...

Theirs is the money the government takes. Taxpayers (as such) are fellow victims. Voters may have supported the government's actions or opposed them—would you punish the opposition, who are on the victim's side, merely for not having sufficient numbers to prevent it?

The government claims to act on behalf of taxpayers / voters / citizens, but (once elected, if applicable) they make their own decisions about the form of that action; there is no agent/principal relationship here where the principals (citizens) would have specific knowledge of and control over the actions of their agent (the government). If people in the government choose to do something bad then those specific people need to compensate the victims; the fact that they claim, unilaterally, to be acting for someone else does not in any way deflect their personal liability for the consequences of their own choices.

Those who are most directly responsibly for the illegitimate seizures should bear the majority of the cost. That would be the individual officers who carried out the seizure, their superiors at the police department and in the state and federal government, and any judges who sign off on warrants which are later ruled invalid.

The way we treat people with a mug shot is horrendous. But mug shots per se serve a vital purpose: they are a public record of persons the state is holding. That makes “disappearing” them later on harder.

[1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/penitentiary

In other words, it's significantly higher than the numbers the FBI claims.

Thomas Watson Sr. still managed to found IBM after being sentenced to a year in jail for anti-trust violations as an NCR salesperson. Chesa Boudin got elected as San Francisco DA even though his parents were sentenced to prison for the felony murders of two police officers. Hell, he's a good example of someone who takes the side of criminals accused of petty theft or small-scale drug crimes.

I think there's some small subset of Americans who are Law & Order at all costs, but most people tend to have their own moral judgments about which are just and unjust laws, and they don't judge people harshly (or at all) for being accused of breaking unjust laws. Most people wouldn't take the side of a murderer or child predator. But a drug user or illegal immigrant? Lots of people take their side, even if they aren't one themselves.

You can probably draw a very clear line between 'perception of fairness in the criminal justice system's and 'likelyhood to commit crime'.

I'll take what you might think of as a third track.

It's not so much that it's biased, but that it's arbitrary. Especially at the Federal level, the disparity in sentencing is remarkable..and it isn't just the difference in lawyer quality depending on wealth.

Investigators also once said "After Floyd got out of his car, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later."

I don't always trust what investigators say, especially ones from a department that once jailed Floyd for 15 days for "failure to identify to a police officer" (???), and later murdered him.

Edit: Apologies, it was actually a different department that murdered him.

OK, and? That quote is from Wikipedia and I'm sure that you read on and saw the next few sentences documenting that he served 5 years in prison for that crime, and then worked with rehab mentoring organizations and was never again charged with a violent crime or property crime. He was briefly arrested in 2019 for possession of opiates due to his personal drug addiction.

I think more armed robbers should be in jail to protect innocent victims

But he went to prison, for 5 years. Armed robbery is bad for sure, but how long do you want to keep people in prison? Nobody was shot or otherwise injured. After he was released, there were no similar offenses. Why would you still want to treat him like a violent criminal 13 years later?

Someone who is known to have committed a crime in the past, is what 'criminal' should mean. However the word has decayed to implicitly meaning 'career criminal', which might also be an apt label. Contrast to the phrase 'reformed criminal'.

The problem of __dismissive labels__ rather than specific labels being bad, hadn't been conveyed to me previously and this helps me see the rhetoric about avoiding other dismissive terms such as 'homeless' in a clearer light. Even the new PC terms often only get used in the same way; which does not solve the problem, nor communicate why the change in phrasing was necessary.

As a practical matter, I'd say it's more along the lines of just how do you control a crazy acting person without hurting them. A certain number of them are going to die, there's no way around it. Most people would probably agree that a lot of traffic stops and arrests are for chickenshit offenses. Add to that the fact that police are wired a little like German Shepherds. You run, they chase.

I disagree. There is indeed a web of laws and subsidies that makes black people to chose a career of crime.

It starts with public schooling system. Black ghettos have some of the countries worst schools. These schools fail all the black kids in their early formative years. This blame is not on racist white conservatives but teachers union funded political left.

Not only black kids fail to get a good education, their overall lack of abilities are glorified by political left in the name of multiculturism. Failure to speak good english, dress well, do basic math, reading and writing etc. is something portrayed as uniquely black things that somehow we should celebrate. A black kid who does well academically is called a coconut. The kid who is out of school can not find a job or unpaid work because of minimum wage laws enacted by political left.

If you are white kid and 17 years old it is much easier to find a job. You have a social connections, other white people trust you and other small business owners are mostly white. If you are black kid of a single mom living in a ghetto getting that first job is incredibly hard. How do you survive then ?

Your bad second hand car gets tickets which you can't pay. You get arrested for not paying them. Out of desperation you learn to peddle drugs and go to jail a few times. You record means you can never get even the lowest of low jobs at Costco or Walmart. The only choice you have now is to continue working in the underground economy which has worst of ethics and higher probability of getting jailed.

Warren Buffet use to say that the modern cash register made an entire generation of Americans more honest. He had a point. Larger dishonesty starts with smaller thefts. But reverse is also true, if you are never exposed to honest work, it is hard for you to stay out of jail in this country.

I do feel crime among black people is a systemic issue and not an issue of genetics and both political left and right are responsible for pushing them into this sad state.

PS: My arguments are mostly based on Thomas Sowell's work around race. He has put in lot of efforts to show that while culture matters, the culture itself is not determined by genetics. Culture evolves based on incentives.

See the cycle?

---

And then there's the argument for why gangs exist in the first place, or other small, localized militias providing protection and a place of belonging.

"Just don't commit crimes, 4head" misses... a lot.

Like how you put it, it's that the scope of forfeitures is bigger than stolen goods. The comparison is only useful to help give a size of the problem. The critique is in 2 parts: 1, at least a significant portion of civil forfeitures are illegitimate, if not most of them and 2 this isn't a small problem but instead on the same order as stolen property.

Civil forfeiture doesn't require the government to convict anyone, or even arrest them, for that matter. The vast majority of the money that comes from this process comes from people we're supposed to assume innocent, since they haven't been proven guilty. Due to that, we have to assume that all of the money that comes from this process without convictions is stolen from innocent people.

If the government wants to seize the assets of people it convicts, that's one thing, but taking money from people and making them pay to prove it wasn't related to crime is absolutely theft.

I mean, there's clearly a need for something akin to "civil forfeiture" -- what if Bob steals your car and sells it to Alice? The cops have to literally take it back; that's civil forfeiture, as Alice might not be criminally liable, but the car was still stolen and belongs to you.

Law enforcement, of course, might abuse it (as it often abuses just about every other power it gets). So there's need for oversight, but civil forfeiture is very obviously needed for remedying some harms.

This isn’t THAT new - very real government documents that leaked decades ago on COINTELPRO and MKULTRA should hopefully disabuse anyone of the notion that the gov’t doesn’t do pretty abusive things at times to it’s own people. Pushing back, downsizing gov’t so they do have the budget for large scale shenanigans are important.

Unfortunately not the direction it has been moving for some time however, or is likely to go anytime soon.

Harder to say if I was still me with my current skills and wealth and it was a forced relocating to Kenya or the USA, but I strongly suspect I’d still choose the states. Not certain, but strongly suspect.

Don't worry I will probably never vote in your country's election.

If you've missed the voter suppression thus far, you and I both know that you won't listen to any evidence or argument otherwise.

There are many more ideologies than capitalist and communist. The world is not black and white.

There are valid historical reasons for it, but it's a bit anti-democratic just the same. The rules which give more representation per capita to residents of less populated states were implemented to appease those states' governments and encourage them to join the union. However, it detracts somewhat from the ideal of "one person, one vote" when a voter in Wyoming (with three electors for 532k residents[1]) has the same influence as four voters in Texas (34 electors for 24.3M residents[1]).

On the other hand, the real issue has less do with how the President is elected and more to do with the excessive influence the President exercises over the government as a whole—particularly the Legislative and Judicial branches—and the ever-more-intrusive power and influence of the federal government in general.

> > Democracy, as a tool, has been made blunt by capitalist and military interests.

> Yes because it's made great by communists????

Special interests turning the power of government to their own ends is a problem whether those interests are communist, capitalist, or socialist in nature, or something else altogether. The law should be just and not merely a tool for those who own capital to oppress the rest of society—and of course the same goes for those who would seize others' capital for their own use, whether noble or mundane.

Unfortunately, the interests of capitalists (i.e., owners of capital) are not always aligned with capitalism—which requires upholding everyone's natural rights, whether they own capital or not—and often would be better described as plutocratic and authoritarian (rule by those with the most money). One may oppose "capitalist interests" while upholding the principles of capitalism; there is no conflict.

[1] https://www.fairvote.org/population_vs_electoral_votes

I just don't see how it's possible without a complete top to bottom replacement of a majority of our government.