>The 2016 law was designed to require a criminal conviction before the state could seize money, according to the bill’s statement of intent.
>But the Legislature left two loopholes. Seizures over $25,000 could circumvent state law entirely by being adopted into federal court.
>And law enforcement could still seize assets under state law if evidence connected the cash to drugs – even if there are no drugs in the car.
Because law enforcement is determined to steal people's money.
What would cause it to stop happening?
State control over the police in the US is imperfect, and, since the US is a fundamentally flawed democracy for deep structural reasons, popular control over the state is even more limited. Thus there are two separate reasons why this wouldn’t be stopped even if most people were against it (which is by no means clear anyway).
I’d like to dream that it would become fairly obvious to the majority that these institutions simply are not under actual popular control, have no true accountability, and are in baldfaced defiance of the country’s founding principles and Constitution. I have yet to hear any convincing argument that this assessment is wrong, so hopefully the number of Americans who agree will someday reach a critical mass.
Because nationally its been upheld as constitutional and would require a constitutional amendment.
This interpretation of the sixth amendment isn't open to other interpretations. Specifically that civil cases are different than criminal cases, so they civilly charge the asset itself and the not the human being. Whoops.
Subsequently, some states started changing their own laws to stop the practice in their state, including the state in this article but it didn't work.
Obviously if they started seizing bank branches under probably cause of criminal activity, it would change overnight, but nobody wants a real challenge so they don't.
the police aren't skipping these procedures
The courts are not in a place to invalidate existing laws, so the legislatures are required to change those laws.
Or a clarifying constitutional amendment is required.
If you can think of a shortcut nobody else thought of then go for it.
It's not that the police are right, it's that if you get harassed by the police or pulled over etc that you clearly did something wrong, and people will contort themselves into a pretzel to make that logic true.
Unions the police want it to stay and they have a very strong Union. It's the other side of well coordinated collection action it can allow a very small minority to hold the rest of the people hostage.
It is slowly being fixed, however.
> The sheriff’s office has specialized in and perfected the practice, known as civil asset forfeiture, despite a 2016 law meant to ban it in Nebraska.
Other laws have either passed, not been passed, or are being written in other states. I’m not going to dig up more citations for a dead thread buried in the HN archives—it is easy enough to find out about these laws being passed. If you can’t find information on Wikipedia, you will have to look elsewhere. I know traditional news sources carry stories about legislation, so I recommend starting there.