Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year (2015)

Ending Civil Asset Forfeiture is an absolute mess for legislators because while it makes sense to end it based on past abuses, the reality is that it is a political grenade. Want to end CAF? Why are you soft on crime? Why are you supporting criminal activity? Why do you want law abiding citizens to pay higher taxes to offset the revenue lost from CAF?

It really does seem to be a thing that is best handled by a ballot measure or referendum.

I don't know if there is a "they" there... many systems are autopoietic and don't need an organized "they" to reify themselves.

In my view, the world makes a lot more sense when I look at what systems do instead of the intent of the system's builders.

This view makes conversations difficult, because when we point out that, for instance, the US has a larger prison population than any place, ever, or that the US has the largest and most complex modes of killing masses of people, it can feel very much like we are in wingnut territory.

This is doubly complex because often I find myself talking to people who aren't merely comfortable working from the premise that the putative intentions of systems are the only legitimate way of discussing these systems; some folks identities are so entwined with those systems that any questioning of them becomes an attack on the legitimacy of their identity.

The US police system can be a draconian monstrosity and, at the same time, it doesn't need to be a "they" organizing it. It's sufficient that we identify strongly enough with that authority such that we can't look at horrible things without questioning our own view of the world.

In other words, yeah, I agree- these systems sucks, everyone knows they sucks, and I too feel like a nut when I question them.

The world has gotten better for me as I've been able to progressively give up the idea that I'm the one misunderstanding what is happening, and that there are some clear injustices endemic to these systems.

The vast majority doesn't donate the sums of money to politicians that the entrenched beneficiaries of the policies in question donate. The vast majority gets taxed so the government can pay the beneficiaries, and those beneficiaries, in turn, use that money to lobby to keep the laws off of which they profit.