(Sadly in reality even when innocent, it's hard to get the assets back without a legal battle.)
EDIT: typos.
The law enforcement understands this and uses it to profit from this public support.
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.
Where would you prefer they be posted? Would you be prohibited from photographing them?
The core problem is how we treat people accused--not even convicted--of crimes. Socially. But also legally. That's a better place to address the issue than trying to gerrymander the Eighth Amendment.
Any sane government would find a way to both protect the identity of the accused while also ensuring the the appropriate family members can get access to this information if necessary.
While we're at it, the way normal people get arrested is fucking horrible too. It's not like in the movies where they lightly cuff your hands together. The police have specifically designed their handcuff procedures to be as painful as possible and to make it look like you're resisting, when in fact, you're just responding to pain and trying to maintain balance.
If I were an oppressive state, I'd make sure to publish mugshots of most people, to create a "public trail" of "we don't disappear people" but only actually disappear those few that I really wanted to disappear.
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fiRDJLjL94
2 - https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/14/texas-prison-air-con...
For example I am pretty sure if you create a bill that says prison inmates are required to give a fellatio to other inmates it will not muster a single vote in Congress. Yet, it is reality of prisons. Now, is penitentiary supposed to punish people like this ? No. Do most Americans find pleasure in the fact that inmates in prison are treated like this ? I think Yes.
The point is once you are in prison for whatever reason, your life is essentially done even if the punishment was for few years. You wont get a job, no one will rent a place to you, you wont get a loan and so on. Unless you have a pretty big community safety net you wont survive.
Jails any ways are not supposed to punish people.
In other words, it's significantly higher than the numbers the FBI claims.
I think that the time period where this is true is the post-WW2 prosperity. There was a large premium on order and social stability here, along with creating institutions that kept (white, suburban, middle-class, male) Americans safe and gave them a stable upwards trajectory. Much of the support for law & order comes out of the demographic that grew up in this time period, with subsequent generations being much more skeptical of law enforcement and sympathetic to criminals. You don't see 20-somethings flying thin-blue-line flags, but you do see them calling to defund the police.
I think your real life examples are great, though!
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.
Having lived in many countries and born in India, I have actually come to respect these outlaws. Now, that does not mean you gotta love all criminals but without the healthy disrespect for authorities and skepticism of government agencies no society can actually improve. Nearly all women's rights and civil rights movements had government agencies as their greatest opponents.
I think the government has learned the lesson post MLK, Rosa Parks incident. The cost of pull of a Rosa Parks like stunt is very very high today. Not only you go to jail pretty quickly in a violent manner, your mugshots appears everywhere on internet, you might lose your job, rental property and low credit score. more importantly your neighbor and friends will hate you for being a criminal without even bothering what crime you did.
A classic case is of people who left water for illegal border crossers. It was illegal and yet a great gesture, the right thing to do. But if you have felony against your name, you life is permanently ruined. As a job interviewer you might actually hold such action in high regard but the resume is not going to reach your desk.
So when you hear people say "well, Floyd committed a crime previously," it's the long shadow of the past of (1) criminalizing them and then (2) dehumanizing them, in order to treat them as low value chattel - justifying killings or other mistreatment.
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.
That said I think it disgusting to pretend that George Floyd was subject to a "web of laws designed to incarcerate black people", unless that web of laws targeting only black people includes prosecuting things like armed robbery. If his priors had only included things like jaywalking or drug possession I might agree with you.
"In 2007, Floyd faced charges for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon; according to investigators, he had entered an apartment by impersonating a water department worker and barging in with five other men, then held a pistol to a woman's stomach."
If anyone wants to talk about disproportionate prosecution thats fine. I think more armed robbers should be in jail to protect innocent victims, and if that means catching more white or asian ones I'm all for it.
Sentencing disparities are disgraceful but I thought I remember reading that they largely disappeared if you adjusted for prior convictions and mitigating circumstances(armed robbery with an straw purchased gun vs. a bat for example). Also I think somewhat related were economic reasons(affording a better lawyer), and honestly though tackling poverty is probably a better way to prevent future criminals, we still need to do something about today's criminals and protect future victims.
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.
Maybe the 7 year old who identified him was coerced by detectives. Anything is possible. That doesn't mean we discount all evidence presented with the thought terminating cliche "ACAB".
I'm very comfortable saying that even in an ideal future where racial harmony has been achieved and police misconduct is a distant memory, if placed on a jury I still would never convict someone on the sole evidence of a 7-year-old's photo array testimony 3 months after the crime occurred.
In absense of other evidence, I'll presume innocence, and that the officer is lying. That's what the thought terminated ACAB means there, a presumption of innocence.
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?
I was responding to the disingenuous claims in the original post.
>Nobody was shot or otherwise injured
Being held at gunpoint might not cause physical injuries but its dismissive to pretend it causes no injuries.
>After he was released, there were no similar offenses. Why would you still want to treat him like a violent criminal 13 years later?
I wouldn't, don't attribute the strawman in your head to me.
More relevant to the original post I responded to I also wouldn't pretend he was only subject to a "web of laws designed to incarcerate black people" after getting punished for committing a violent crime.
Then you say you were responding to disingenuity? Sorry, no sale.
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.
That’s… quite a summary of a cop putting his knee on someone’s neck while people all around screamed at him that the man was suffering, and staying in that position until the man died. Floyd was already on the ground and had four armed policemen surrounding him - how was he a threat, or someone who couldn’t just be hauled up and cuffed / placed in a police car? Compare it for example to the almost-courteous way Dylan Roof - who committed a crime far worse than anything Floyd ever did - was treated by the police when they finally caught up to him.
I’m sorry but you sound like a right wing TV host doing their best to paper over the truth / make it about anything else but the inherent racism of American policing. Perhaps if Floyd was an aberration your point might hold - but this is clearly a pattern, as we’ve seen over and over. The only way to solve the problem is by understanding its roots, not blasé statements reducing it to statistics and a “crazy acting man” who couldn’t be subdued without hurting him.
Usually they don't die. Designing a protocol is not such an easy thing.
Talk to someone who has worked in a cell-extraction team, it's a pretty outrageous scene.
'inherent racism'? Sounds like someone who has a purely internet knowledge of policing. The world's a complicated place. Save your outrage to bore your friends.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...
I didn’t bring it up before because it wasn’t germane to my point, but I’m an African man (from West Africa, where the effects of chattel slavery are still being felt every day) who has lived in the US for a decade. So yes, as a person who has experienced both the racism displayed to us people living in the so-called “third world”, as well as racism in the US, I think I am entitled to my outrage. Perhaps working in a cell-extraction team as you said is making you take this personally. But this isn’t about you, it’s about a system set up after slavery to keep black people in their place. It doesn’t mean every policeman / woman is racist, just as I wouldn’t say “all white people are racist” just because they continue to benefit from a system that was setup to heavily favor them. So please don’t dismiss my viewpoint as mere outrage informed by the Internet. Of course the world is a complicated place - even back home not all our problems can be blamed on slavery and colonialism (we have had terrible leaders, our government is rife with corruption etc). That doesn’t mean racism’s effects don’t play a huge part in our current state, or continue to lead to young black men especially having their lives treated as more expendable than their white counterparts.
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.
*I do think there's plenty of racism, institutional and otherwise, embedded in the "justice" system itself. Sentencing disparities are a travesty. But it's more complex than you implied.
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.
Some places actually create budgets, based on forfeiture. There's a town in Texas, that basically set themselves up as "highwaymen"[1] (Would have been ironic, if the town was named "Turpin").
Gives a whole new meaning to "Quota Night."
I remember reading about a person around these parts, that was unable to get their property back, after they were cleared, because the police department had already sold it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenaha,_Texas#Asset_forfeiture...
I understand why it was implemented, but it has been abused so widely and for so long that it must stop. It has stopped being a tool for law enforcement to being a tool to coerce defendants and the innocent alike.
The counter-argument is that if that money was used to generate more funds legally, is that other money not tainted?
Say you make $10 million selling drugs, and use that to invest in housing in an area, and the money doubled over a few years. If you sell all those houses and now have $20 million in the bank, how much of that is funds available because of illicit behavior? $0, $10 million, or $20 million?
I agree the current system is stupid, and often abusive, but I don't think it's necessarily a simple problem.
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...
They would also work to prosecute less people every year, no more than needed.
The best part is no part.
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.
I noted a clear distinction for the case you listed. A traditional joint civil suit against Madoff would have done the exact same thing with a similar amount of process. It's true that access to our legal system is way too expensive in general, but creating a backdoor for the government and hoping they will use it to help private citizens is not the way to fix that.
Not "this looked fishy and is probably illegal so let's seize this person's assets".
No: that deprives the person of their property, and their right to due process. (Not to mention the violations of the 4th covered in the article.) One should not need to prove one's own innocence to get their own stuff back.
I'll allow, under probable cause or a warrant, temporary seizures, but even that must have due process. The seizures in the article did not generally have either.
(I do sort of agree that, in the case the seizure was of an innocent person's belongings, that it be returned with interest. But that does not forgive/condone the human rights violations in TFA.)
What?? In an ideal world a proof should be produced before anything is seized!
Here’s what they said:
> In an ideal world a proof should be produced before anything is seized!
In cases of drivers with cash, this problem is solved by the police arresting the individual and holding the cash.
Indeed, from the article it sounds like they seized what they found then tried to justify it a posteriori and for this guy it seems that was only "god sniffed narcotics on bills".
To me this really reads as: "You have a safe deposit box, and we found cash in it, so you're a criminal and we have seized that cash.". That's ridiculous.
"The right of the people to be secure in their ... effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause ... [and] particularly describing the ... things to be seized."
Let's not create more cases where little guys get bullied around by the legal system because they can't afford to defend themselves. It's already the case that they can (and do) coerce people into pleading guilty for a BS indictment because they can't afford lawyers.
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).
LEO use this as a tactic to deprive defendant's ability to fund their own defense.
And punitive damages, maybe then they'll have at least couple of brain cells dedicated to checking if they actually have any case against someone's money.
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.
I see this cop-baiting practice getting criminalized long before civil forfeiture.