Police Seized Innocent Peoples Property, Kept It for Years. What Will SCOTUS Do?
reason.com
reason.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
This is also only based on federal police statistics, because we don't have data available on state and local police forces who all participate in this looting.
Previous discussion, which mods removed from the frontpage once it was at the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36975143
Robbery on the other hand is by definition a violent crime, the threat of violence is what distinguishes it from other forms of theft or larceny.
This is exactly it for me.
When I first read that the TSA would report you to the DEA for carrying large sums of cash into an airport, and the DEA would intercept you and seize it, I’ve been referring to it as armed robbery.
When the DEA asks you to hand over the $10k in your backpack, they’re doing it under threat of violence. It’s armed robbery, they just haven’t “drawn their gun yet.”
Try sticking to “I’m sorry sir, you can not have my money” and you’ll quickly see what the full weight of the U.S. Government looks like when escalated against you.
From the time they decided they wanted your money, it was theirs.
If you look at victim data it's roughly it's 3 million burglaries per year, about 1/3 of which are home invasions. And about 1/4 of those (so 1/12 of total) are also violent crimes where the resident is injured.
But then when it comes time to report crime stats some stuff gets partitioned off into other buckets (I guess to avoid double counting? Idk). So e.g. some sources will take those 250k assaults-during-burglary and not count them as burglaries.
It gets really confusing really fast.
Also, I’d add that robbery can be done by trick instead of threat of violence. E.g., a robber tricks victim into handing over their wallet or purse, then distracts them while they remove valuables. The victim may not even know they’ve been robbed until later. If the victim, later noticing she has been robbed, then has a heart attack and dies, however, then the robber could potentially be charged with felony murder.
The entire right side seems to be trying to redefine what "Burglary" means in everyday English. It means people stealing things, without the victims finding out right away, and without intimidating or threatening anyone.
The definition is completely overbroad, and seems like it's done with some agenda. Someone "entering with intent to commit a crime" is not always burglary, for example someone intending to defecate in a hallway or spray graffiti in the bathroom is not a burglar.
Its chart shows that burglary led from 2016-2018, but asset forfeiture was ahead again in 2023.
I'm constantly hearing horror stories like the ones in this article and I've never heard any reasonable defense of our current system. In fact, I've never even heard an unreasonable defense.
Incidentally, I'm not sure he's familiar with the second half of the idiom ("spoils the whole bunch").
2016 essay by the president of the Fraternal Order of Police arguing against civil forfeiture reform.
> The FOP does not disagree that there is a need for civil asset forfeiture reform. In fact, we worked very closely with Senator Jeff Sessions on this issue going back to the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA) of 2000.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sessions-signals-more-police-pr...
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of civil forfeiture's biggest fans, reinstates aggressive federal policies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-madoff-and-the-case-for-...
2017 essay by then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein praising civil forfeiture and arguing reform is not necessary.
> Some critics claim that civil asset forfeiture fails to protect property rights or provide due process. The truth is that there are multiple levels of judicial protection, as well as administrative safeguards.
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/forfeiture-is-rea...
So, no.
I posted that link in response to an inquiry for a single source in support of civil forfeiture. While I happen to agree with the general thrust of your complaint, it is a non sequitur. The Supreme Court is the ultimate authority, provided a Congress unwilling to hold them accountable (which it currently is).
My question of 'credibility' is not "do you like the Federalist Society" but "do you think they're in political alignment with the Thin Blue Liners and are they writing policy."
And then you have the license plates and stickers and whatnot.
Voting gets us nowhere with limiting state power. Like falling for a good cop bad cop routine. It provides consent for both sides of the aisle abuse like this.
edit: I don't know fee.org. Here's a more neutral reference to widely-known facts: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/bidens-crime-preven... It's easily researchable.
Or becoming a lawyer and filing suit against police departments and other government agencies? Or financially supporting those lawyers?
Expecting people who point out a problem to also fix that problem in a single social media comment is a little unrealistic, I think, and generally not something people ask in good faith.
kinda like asking a black man what he thinks should be done about jim crow, if he's so smart. the tactic really does go way back
like yea oppressive power structures systematically foreclose, neuter, and dismantle any means that might be used to counteract or escape their effects, that's why they're oppressive power structures.
it’s galaxy-brain stuff to be asking the people inside to just wave a wand and dismantle it all, like I guess you think they could have just done it all along and simply chose not to? and “self-oppression” is of course a very real narrative that is pushed in these situation, it’s really your fault you can’t escape!
again, commoners of any form (let alone one single commoner working alone) are not going to be able to just do one simple trick and upend an oppressive power structure, it's a better place than being in the fuckbarrel but the point is oppressive power structures don't leave anyone a recourse, if your title doesn't begin with "senator" it doesn't really matter what you think or do.
there is of course one option, the last of the boxes. but if you aren't willing to fight for what you believe in then, yeah, you're effectively consenting to the society you are offered by political elites. consent can still be withdrawn, but in an oppressive power structure that's usually going to be a violent process.
like I am just telling you outright: soapbox, ballot box, and jury box are all effectively powerless to overturn the problems in american society, by design (that's why it's oppressive). and you can either live with that, and the society thus pressed upon you warts and all, or not. some random march for george floyd or voting blue every election is not going to fix america. keyboard warriorism (including this comment) certainly is not going to do it either.
nobody actually walks away from omelas - and omelas news network thinks you're crazy for even suggesting there could be anything better. We all - you and me and every other law-abiding, taxpaying citizen - accept this society knowing that it exists on the back of the largest slave/gulag population on the planet, and an arbitrary and capricious (and usually politicized) "justice" system that could randomly condemn any of us to that slavery and a permanent mark of underclass. We all accept the idea that our attempts at reforms will not do more than trivial and meaningless amounts of good through our lifetimes. And yet we stay and participate.
https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
You're not helping. Why is that, Leon? Why do you consent?
(I consent to omelas too, I just want you to consciously make your own decision in full knowledge of the consequences and responsibility of your actions. Every day you wake up and go about your life, you do it on the backs of the police state and the carceral state/gulag archipelago it has imposed upon us, and even rattling the bars of your cage a bit by voting or activism will not change this.)
Well, this is a situation where most people cannot really "just leave". And in fact the US expends considerable resources to make life difficult for those who attempt it.
This will not change unless until and until elites' own interests align in reforming it. And elites are pretty good at making it illegal to make their lives uncomfortable or apply pressure on them in meaningful ways.
It is possible for societies to become so stratified that this change is not possible without violence. Classically, dictatorships, but I don't think that is the only way to get there.
America is in that place, because our society is so geographically isolated and so resource-blessed that a traditional collapse is not possible. There is no neighboring country that is going to topple us if we allow our system to become stagnant and calcified. Any realistic attack would have to cross an ocean or a rainforest/jungle to do it.
So we will continue bumbling along, boiling the frog and allowing our society to become worse and worse, because the US cannot collapse and cannot reform. And there really is nothing that you, as a single voter, could possibly do about it.
Even a million man march cannot do anything about it - easier to just assassinate the commoner's leader and move on with some token reforms to shut people up. The system doesn't mind using (extralegal!) violence on you, that stigma is for commoners not elites.
Would they say the same if the only two options were Saddam and Maddas?
If the nation's leaders are being elected by a 10-20% voter turnout, it'll be very obvious what's going on. That is the thing that they don't want to happen.
Keep voting harder! That'll solve everything!
You have to make a habit of finding out who the incumbent is and not voting for them. Do this every election and it will get better after a decade or so. You have to scramble the shady alliances by inserting new people every election. It's better than what we've been doing.
How do I know this will work? Incumbent politicians were starkly against simply marking who the incumbent was on ballots a decade or two ago the last time it came up.
The opponent here isn't other citizens, it's the police and their organizations (police benevolent associations, police unions, etc.) which wield considerable political power, and to an extent also legal power (since they collectively have nearly full discretion over what laws are enforced and by what means, to the extent they can cooperate amongst themselves).
Could a sufficiently wealthy mayor (like Bloomberg) push through privatisation and deunionisation, while using their personal funds to pay for private security for the whole city in case there is a strike? The department's annual budget seems to be around 5 billion USD.
It's called the national guard.
And, they're really badly equipped to do everything NYPD does.
As best I can tell, that is not true.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association, a police union, posted to Twitter a screenshot of Chiara de Blasio’s arrest report, which is a public record. The arrest report report contained her address… which was Gracie Mansion. In other words, not remotely a secret. The tweet did not threaten her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrolmen%27s_Benevolent_Assoc...
Once voters know the pattern, they're hep to it.
So what's with the NYPD ? No voter control ? Should NYers start proposing referendums ? Are referendums even possible ?
The solution to this is either:
- setup a second security force to gradually replace them
or
- subdivide the coverage map into different districts, suss out the districts with poor performing management, then merge the territories of bad areas under the management of good areas
or
- subdivide responsibilities between violent crime, petty crime, and mundane enforcement like traffic, with separate departments for each, and tackle cleaning them up separately.
Really the notion of taking the same "trained" cop for all the roles in an urban area is pretty stupid. Specialized enforcement roles are likely a better solution.
Shadow defunding, without calling it defunding, is also another weapon, but of course Minneapolis blew that by outright calling it defunding.
But really the drug war is what fuels corruption and excessive power. Remove the drug war, and it would kneecap massive amounts of abuse.
And, of course, they are all part of the same union.
By subdividing into distinct departments, it is the basic divide and conquer. And you can replace departments more readily: keep the traffic and crime investigation units, but replace the patrol cops that are refusing to do their jobs.
Seems like the root problem is that we grant the state a monopoly on physical violence because the alternative (no group having a monopoly on physical violence, and hence all of them battling it out) is worse. But then like the holders of any monopoly, they abuse it. This is why we can't have nice things.
A suggestion I've thought of before and have seen in the wold increasingly is pay cops a stipend to pay for their own insurance. If they can't get insurance they get fired automatically.
Which gives the ridiculous (to us) dozens of police cars flocking around a single criminal.
I'm from one of the more stable countries in Europe. While there is corruption and abuse in the police, the average officer has greater loyalty to the system than to their superiors. Which means that if someone refuses to do their job, you can fire them and possibly charge them with crimes, and you will eventually find a replacement willing to do the job.
The only way I can see something like this happening is if the average police officer does not believe in the legitimacy of the political and legal system.
I suspect like many things, there was some logic to the introduction. But it's just gotten to really batshit levels that there is probably nothing to do but stop the practice.
As I understand it, some of the origins were that for debts owed to the government, with the person not present in the country, it was much more practical to target assets that may exist within the country than try and get the individual.
Even in the introduction in the criminal context, I sort of understand the logic. In criminal organizations, there are likely people profiting a lot, that have engineered enough doubt that proving their connection to the beyond a reasonable standard is so difficult. But meeting a preponderance of the evidence standard in the civil context to reclaim those assets I can understand the argument.
So I think there are some bad and weak arguments, but they certainly don't outweigh what's happening now.
I think one of the worst argument I heard for not returning the money, was the police department wasn't able to follow the judges order, because they deposited the money into a bank account and transferred to another agency. And they'll never be able to find the exact same bills again that they gave to the bank, so are unable to follow the court order to return the money they took to the rightful owner.
It’s the same basic rationale that all freedoms are ultimately curtailed with - all those rules are inconvenient, let’s by pass them a little bit. Then the reason for the rules start to become readily apparent again. Then the rationale takes on the old “can’t make an omelet” refrain, as if the world revolves around punishing criminals and everyone need to accept the collateral damage.
Personally I’m of the old “rather let a thousand guilty go free than punish a single innocent,” but I also don’t set policy.
Account for the seized assets.
Interledger Protocol works with any type of (digital) asset ledger; W3C ILP.
The FTC CAT Consolidated Audit Trail system does not uniquely identify individual bills / [ledger] dollars, either FWIU. But are photons uniquely identifiable either
Due process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process :
> Due process developed from clause 39 of Magna Carta in England. Reference to due process first appeared in a statutory rendition of clause 39 in 1354 thus: "No man of what state or condition he be, shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law." [3] When English and American law gradually diverged, due process was not upheld in England but became incorporated in the US Constitution.
Whether it's possible to disarm and incapacitate without larceny.
Criminal Justice Reform > Arguments on criminal justice reform > Support for reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_reform_in_the...
Save the children.
School-to-prison pipeline > Alternative approaches, Mental Health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
There are 549 translations of the UDHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/search?f%5B0%5D=event_type_taxonomy...
> Article 11: Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
> No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
> Article 17: Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
> No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
> Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
But I’m not against civil forfeiture if practiced better with better safe guards.
Every year the government takes 30%+ of the money I make via taxation. Unelected administrative functionaries lay down laws that can massively change the value of your property.
I’m not going to cry if the government keeps money whose origin you can’t explain. By law, I have to file tax returns that explains my income. There isn’t a huge difference. These kind of seizures makes organized crime much easier to fight.
But again, a lot of these examples look more like straight theft.
Also, law enforcement shouldn’t get to keep the money it seizes. It’s a perverse incentive. Should just go into the general treasury.
But yes we must explain everything to the Government. Rights aren't inherent, but are granted to us by the government if we can explain good enough why we need them. Cops should pull me over and ask how I financed my car and if I don't have a good enough answer/documentation on me they should get to take it /s
In theory it already is a constitutional right to Levy a civil trial against the police for forfeiture. And any civil trial with dollar value more than 20 is entitled to a jury.
How it's used and abused in practice in both systems is the important part. I'm not sure either system necessarily has a great track record in that respect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJd4Q4u5cqU
Reminder: this is yet another piece of evidence that The War on Drugs™ does not serve us well in any way, shape, or form.
Yes, that is exactly what I said. I'm not sure how to read it otherwise. If you're going to assess how it works under communism by looking at why the government allows and and what their goal is, it only makes sense to assess other systems the same way, which is why I said "the reasons the law allows..."
Means of production is not the same as the shoes on your feet. It's just unfortunately confusing terminology that leads to twisted argumentation.
Btw, the alternative to capitalist liberal states is not exclusively authoritarian marxist-leninist communism. Not all anti-capitalists are pining for another different boot to lick.
Even today factories aren’t the means of production, they don’t make houses that’s mostly people with hand tools. Nor do they make food or mine resources etc.
Marx was not the origin of Communism or the phrasing around means of production. The context for his writing wasn’t simply factory conditions being so bad he created an original ideology from whole cloth. Which is why he was credited with the Marxism not Communism.
- police writ large
- police monopolies
- any given police policy and its interaction with capital
Anyways, if police are supposed "to defend capital", then a policy of stealing capital from private individuals is exactly not capitalistic.
And people's personal property is not normally capital in the sense of capitalism, it not generally being the means of production or of reproducing capital itself. This is a really basic point which has me thinking we disagree on the fundamental terminology. Capitalism isn't a synonym for commerce, assets are not necessarily capital.
In both cases here, the true underlying motivation of the parties involved is to take other people's stuff for themselves, but their apologists, communists and drug warriors alike, both rationalize real harm done to real people by pretending their actions are in pursuit of some utopian end state (which in both cases is an unattainable fantasy).
Capitalism has no defense mechanisms against unwarranted seizure of property. Private ownership is a precursor to capitalism, not a byproduct of it. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways by which capitalist entities can gain government-like powers, if not totally supplant the government[0]. Concentration of wealth is a problem whether or not the person who owns the wealth claims to own it for themselves or in the name of the working class.
The way that you prevent the government[1] from stealing your stuff is to make it inconvenient for them to do so. In the US, we have presumption of innocence, right to due process, and so on. These are constitutional rights that the government broadly respects. If they regularly didn't, you'd see brain drain as people and businesses with the means to do so would escape the country. Those without such means would begin economically sabotaging the country. However, these are blunt instruments whose use entails personal cost, so people don't use them right away. The US can therefore get away with ignoring its own constitutional obligations some of the time, and in this case, that's how they get away with civil forfeiture.
Think of it like this: when Apple or Google start screwing over developers, or Reddit or Twitter start screwing over users, we don't all immediately jump ship, but some do. If they continue doing this, and they exceed a particular threshold of bullshit, they continue losing people faster than they gain. This creates a feedback loop of stupider and stupider tactics pissing off more and more people until the platform collapses.
Countries work in similar ways.
[0] The basic idea of Rothbardian ancap economics is that we should deliberately encourage this. The idea is that this would supposedly lead to competition for governance. Except this wouldn't actually happen because competition is a byproduct of capitalism, not an essential property of it.
[1] or government-like entities
If people start organizing and forming mass strikes and unrest, all those things would, and already have, happened.
As for the rest of your comment, I have no clue what it has to do with what I posted. My point was that when talking about a system and its negative outcomes, it is pointless and often disingenuous to immediately mention another system. It blurs the topic and takes away from real analysis and critique.
Let’s talk about how this system developed in the US on its own merits, and when that is well understood, maybe then compare it to other systems.
Joe Biden was also a huge fan of civil forfeiture in the 80s and 90s: https://fee.org/articles/how-a-young-joe-biden-became-the-ar...
They arrest your money. You are not accused of a crime, your money is. Your money is not a person, and thus has no constitutional rights. Your money is not innocent until proven, that's a silly system reserved for persons - instead, your money must prove its innocence. And thus you get cases with absurd titles such as "United States v. $84,740.00 U.S. Currency" ( https://casetext.com/case/us-v-8474000-us-currency )
I'd love to say you can't make this up, but they did.
A federal suit under which the government unsuccessfully attempted to force the Coca-Cola Company to remove caffeine from its product.
United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Solid_G...
At that point the defense would be Qualified Immunity.
People have started to try to apply Eminent Domain to the Qualified Immunity defense [1]. They're not disputing that you are a LEO acting in official government capacity but Eminent Domain requires that you compensate a private party for use of their stuff.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/investigates/police-...
Note: IANAL, I'm a complete layperson.
From what I could understand it sounds like 4 other district courts have ruled (around 31:30) on similar issues by siding that Eminent Domain does not apply on police actions while 4th has apparently ruled differently (I do not know which case they are referring to) & there were some arguments that earlier John Corp case from 5th Circuit (I believe https://casetext.com/case/john-corp-v-city-of-houston) already split the district courts.
To me it did sound like judges were taking the city side more though they did also ask for what kind of test should be implemented if they did rule in favor of Bakers.
Hopefully they do end up affirming the lower court decision but let's see.
https://better-cities.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/BCP-ref...
Police are local militias with a near-military supply of weapons, technology, and surveillance.
Cities often seek judgement or ways to control law enforcement but police unions and silent strikes render their attempts futile.
If your city had George Floyd protests, you're likely aware of these silent strikes. The police simply stop doing their job and allow crime and lawlessness.
Without the threat of a national military coming down on them, local LE behaves like a mafia.
That's why, even at the local level, forfeiture reform usually needs to be bundled with other, more broadly popular policing reforms. There isn't a critical mass of people lit up over asset forfeiture in most communities. Other attack vectors include:
* Qualified immunity reform packaged as a way to more easily get rid of bad cops.
* Collective bargaining transparency so the public (and even the city council) can see what tactics the union is using in contract negotiations.
Finally, require all the, ahem, proceeds of this theft to be set aside for paying the above.
That removes the profit motive and adds substantial downside to bogus theft.
Obviously making police overtime and bonus pools be the source of funds for lawsuit payouts might improve things - the unwillingness of police to actually report illegal behaviour by their coworkers might be reduced when that behaviour lowers their income.
Limit the ability to charge unincorporated property. The government can charge persons: natural and artificial. But random property? no.
Expand constitutional protections to property based on being owned by a natural or artificial person.
Expand the 5th amendment right to just compensation, making the government pay for property is seizes and not considering civil asset forfeiture to fit the due process exemption.
And this is all for the consideration that random municipalities will try to find a way around any outright ban on civil asset forfeiture
I think the lack of seizures from financial institutions merely suspected of a crime is a damning enough indictment of the practice
Surprisingly, part of the the right wing of the Supreme Court is skeptical of CAF: "Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch criticized asset forfeiture as an “extravagant punishment” in a 2018 decision. Justice Clarence Thomas said outright in a 2017 case that modern civil forfeiture schemes are likely unconstitutional."
From: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/south-carolina-supr...
The weaseling is always "but it's _civil_, not _criminal_.". Except, the premise is that a crime has been committed. But, people are being deprived of their property without due process. That private property is being taken for public use without _any_, let alone _just_, compensation.
It should be a 9-0 ruling striking it down, but we'll see...
[0] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transc...
I call this mentality "no stop snek from stepping on other snek". It is not an ideology, but the consequence of right-wing outrage perverting that ideology. Right-libertarians do write long rants about police brutality, civil asset forfeiture, and so on; but right-wingers more broadly care solely for identity politics that benefit them. Think about how Louis Rossmann, who is very vaguely right-wing and very libertarian, got shat on by the right-wing half of his audience[2] for interviewing Sam Seder about right-to-repair.
What SCOTUS decides will likely be informed by the calculus of who exactly is petitioning them and what benefits the people who put them there. They aren't yet willing to completely shit on the concept of stare decisis[1], but we have to at least present a case to right-wingers that not only civil asset forfeiture is bad and unconstitutional, but that it's bad and unconstitutional in ways that hurt the kinds of people they are sympathetic to.
[0] Case in point: the relative lack of outrage in right-wing circles whenever black people get their guns confiscated or are summarily executed for having them
[1] The overturn of Roe v. Wade is concerning me, though
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DR1AIsyzZ0&lc=UgxdShhyG9NmA...
Unless they want live "easy" life (as someone famous said):
Do not own anything, so you will have no problems.
The first story sounds more innocent but how do both of these apply to the volume of other cases? The article makes it sound like all of them would be similarly innocent.
A hypothetical situation that could somewhat justify the police taking someone's car would be if the car was known to be stolen, but presumably she wouldn't be able to apply to get it back in that case, so that doesn't seem to be the case.