Surely, if the records are themselves stolen, the original owners would be entitled to have them back.
If they weren't stolen, does the thief forfeit ownership of them through the mere act of putting them in a car they stole?
But the police have demonstrated on many many many occasions that they generally cannot be bothered to return stolen items to their owners or even, given the location of a stolen item to reclaim it from the thief.
A friend of mine is a realtor. He once was selling a house that was empty. A random package showed up at the address (correct on the package). He asked the owners if it was theirs they said no so he threw it in the back of the trunk and forgot about it for months.
Randomly while grabbing something in his trunk, he found it and was like “I should try and mail this back to the sender.” It didn’t have any return info on it so he opened it to see if there was any info inside. There was another box inside full of loose coffee beans and inside that was a metal tin. Now curious he opened the tin and found it packed full of little vials with powder in them.
He called the non-emergency police line in a bit of a panic thinking he should report what he found but they blew him off saying he should file a police report online. Not wanting to be in possession of drugs he drove it to a police station where the cop at the front desk was SO confused about what was going on and basically told him to get lost.
Finally he just decided to call it a day and threw it away in a dumpster.
There is no case to avoid drug law reform, disagree on the nature of what is required but /something/ needs doing. This bullshit where there is nothing like the rule of law and equality before it has to go. It's a cancer that eats away at society and however bad you think it is, it's actually a lot worse.
Not saying you’re wrong, Im just surprised to hear this and am curious about the extent
"only crime", a minor one at that, and three serious crimes don't match up, and is possession of recreational amounts a serious crime in any jurisdiction?
As someone who has a record over an ounce, lol.
Cops LOVE weed being illegal. Claiming to smell weed provides an easy path to justifying a search that vanishes when it becomes legal.
There are also a lot of states that have a laughably low threshold for personal use and anything above that is is legally considered to imply intent to distribute. This then opens the door for all kinds of seizures of vehicles, computer equipment, and most importantly cash in a backwards "guilty until proven innocent" scenario where the person doesn't even need to be charged with a crime to lose their property.
If they acknowledge the issue and take the stuff, there’s now a record that Mr. Sharkweek’s realtor friend surrendered a bag of heroin or whatever.
That can jam you up in a few ways. A decade later you apply for a federal job, you’ll be explaining this story to a suspicious investigator. Some jackass prosecutor or person up the chain may decide it is a big deal after all, etc. Or… they pretend not to understand you and you (and the problem) go away
That's just not true
Only if they choose to make a report saying so. However, it's easier just to shrug instead of doing any paperwork or taking on any responsibility whatsoever, so that's the action they choose.
Before reading this, I think curiosity would have gotten the better of me were I in the same situation. But the story is a good life lesson: when you come in possession of a package with no return address, there’s probably a good reason why the sender didn’t want anyone to know who sent it.
I've picked up crates of much better condition records as trash before, with many great records that could have been sold for OK prices, if the person throwing them away knew where to sell them and wanted to bother with it. But a lot of people/places just don't want to even both with it. Best prices come from selling them one by one on a site like like discogs, but that takes a lot of time and effort. If you bring them into a record store that buys used records, they'll either take a few they think they can sell (paying you a fraction of what they intend to sell it for) and tell you to keep all the rest, or they'll take the whole thing (again paying just a fraction for the few they want) and treat the others as bargain/dollar bin stuff or just throw them away.
(Some of my favorite things I've found in crates of thrown-away records: some Sergio Mendes records (some were bland, but some were awesome), various new wave 80s records by people I'd never heard of but were fun to listen to, LOTS of good classical recordings.)
Alas deceased (which was a bit of a shock when it happened).
Jeck's thing was a sort of live analogue sampling.
If it had been me then I would have said "great, now I have to go and get legal advice". I would have refused them.
But at the same time what am I supposed to do? Unload them in the impound lot and drive away? That'd piss off the cops, who could possibly fine me for flytipping.
It's a shitty position for the cops to put you in.
Unless you like bad advice from someone whose interests are at best orthogonal and typically actually against your own.
Sure, they might objectively be junk, but they also might be somebody's junk, and returning it to them may make them very happy.
Well, they could, but I don't think his lawyer would advise him to answer that question.
But otherwise it just looks like they don't even want to try. In a normal small community police or you would try to find out who it belongs to, not just give up. :)
LA is one of these places.
If you place them in custody, you might as well provide them with some basic housing that costs less than jail. They have literally nothing to lose from fines, court dates, tickets, probation. They don't have a toilet, what else are you going to take away from them.
The police are correctly judging that the need to defecate is not a criminal problem.
Find a public toilet or use a restaurant/shopping mall toilet.
By definition, if there is a public toilet accessible to you, or you are welcome in a restaurant toilet without paying, you have somewhere to go to the toilet.
So what are they to do? Put a huge stack of records in the evidence locker with no crime actually attached to them (just vicinity to another crime)? Could suck if somehow someone else could identify them and want them that was also a victim of theft, but it really would just be stashing them and hoping by rare chance someone stumbles into the lost and found.
Personally I'd rather the stack of stuff sitting in the guarded, expensive to maintain evidence locker is stuff actually tagged to a crime and relevant to solving it
but then i re-read the article and see "and then they grab a few of the thief’s personal items from the car as evidence.". so it's not like the cops were following some policy that all the stuff in the car should be returned to the car's owner. just the stuff they don't want to deal with