Comment by clavalle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clavalle | Hacker News Reader

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Good.

I really don't understand how this practice persisted for so long next when we have the right to due process.

For people who think it only happened to drug dealers who were difficult to prosecute; it happened to my elderly parents.

My grandfather died suddenly in Georgia and we were the closest family at the time. My parents packed up their car in a hurry and started from Texas down I-10. In Mississippi they ran into a drunk driving checkpoint. They, being elderly conservative Republican business owners driving a luxury sedan that never conceived that the police would not be on their side, consented to a search of their car. The police found an antique revolver (my dad is an avid collector) locked in its case in the trunk. That plus the $800 he had in his wallet as travel money was enough to get them thrown in jail for the weekend and their property seized as suspected drug dealers.

$8000 in local lawyer fees later they got their car back but the antique gun had 'gone missing' along with the cash. Their lawyer said they were lucky to get the car back.

I'm curious- did it change your parents' views about DUI inspection stops? If they found them innocuous (or at least constitutional) before the incident, do they still feel the same way?

I am pretty sure my dad didn't like them to begin with but the question at the time was 'do I give the cops a hard time and spend even more time out here or let them take a look and get on my way'.

Drunk driving is a serious problem, no doubt about it, but stopping everyone on an interstate to talk with them is insane overreach.

I am surprised no one's figured out the problem of analyzing traffic camera data to flag people who are driving erratically so enforcement can be both more comprehensive and targeted. I'd be wary of that solution, too, but it is far better than stopping everyone.

>but stopping everyone on an interstate to talk with them is insane overreach.

Especially when they aren't really looking for drunks, but people like your father to victimize as police fundraiser.

Anything that monetizes police action will lead to massive abuse. It blows my mind people won't accept that. The cops and the unions aren't stupid. They want that money for salary, pensions, and toys. The politicians want that funding without having to raise taxes.

So now the electorate is literally being bullied and mugged by the police. I'm really starting to like the lame-duck version of Obama. His recent moves are very much needed: encouraging municipal fiber, workers leave rights, sanctioning Russia, immigration amnesty, etc.

Unfortunately as executive orders, rather than laws, they can easily be undone by the next executive.

I think it's overly diplomatic to call this action a police fundraiser. These were highwaymen. Note they aren't doing this to their locals, they know better and that's why they're on the interstate, they're doing it on behalf of the locals. The rot is with the town itself.

Last time I went through a DUI checkpoint, they wrote more than 100 tickets for lack of proof of insurance—the most frequent citation from that event. DUI arrests? 2.

Either the insane overreach isn't effective, or DUI is a miraculously solved problem here.

Of course, it might've hurt that this was at a sane hour on an unremarkable Wednesday night.

Clearly this particular instance wasn't about catching drunk drivers or apprehending drug dealers. This is blatant arrogant thievery, while also accusing both transient travelers and their local constituents of being morons for falling for this veneer of an excuse: oh it's for drunks N drugs, OK! At the very least the police could have restricted this to race and class as subterfuge, but no this was absolutely brazen: give us your fucking money grandpa! That's what really happened.

I will bet they had a lot more resources for doing searches than they did sobriety checks for those who refused the search. The search would therefore seem fast, while you probably had an insane line waiting for a sobriety test. This is a town with significant corruption and nepotism problems, and is operating like a cartel itself.

> I really don't understand how this practice persisted for so long next when we have the right to due process.

Can someone clarify for me- I read the article, and it SEEMS to be saying "the feds will no longer be participating in this process, which will of course still be carried out by state and city police". It's more about where seized money gets allocated, than about limiting the actual seizures.

Is that right?

Under federal rules, the departments got to keep the forfeitures. IE: the cop who pulled you over could literally pocket the cash. 0 oversight.

Under State rules, in almost all states, the money goes into the general fund. And there is due process to actually seize the asset. We're essentially removing the incentive from the police officers to pull people over. It does them no good to take your stuff if it just goes into one big pot that they'll never see again.

The Missouri Sate constitution requires that any proceeds from seizures go to an education fund. In Missouri, not a penny should go to the local cops. Unfortunately, local cops would frequently violate the state's constitution by turning over the seizures to the feds, who would then keep a percent and give the rest back to the local cops. Of course, the local cops should have turned it over to education, as that is clearly what the state constitution requires, but they would routinely violate the constitution and keep the proceeds for themselves.

Ah yes, Missouri. The state where, as a teenager, a highway patrolman bragged to me that he pulled a guy over and arrested him because "he was Mexican and looked at me wrong." Oh, and that guy was on the school board. And he was a church youth pastor, telling this story to the youth group.

If true, then I know of at least one local police force in Missouri that's in egregious violation of this. Can you drop a link to the relevant state code?

Well, parent said "Constitution", so the link would have to be this: http://www.sos.mo.gov/pubs/missouri_constitution.pdf

That said, I'm not finding it with a little searching and skimming. I do see gaming revenues restricted to education...

This policy adjustment is in regard to a federal program that shared the seized proceeds with the state and local police that made the seizures using federal laws.

That is, the laws that were 'suspected' broken were federal laws, and properly the seized goods belonged to the feds. The feds then shared a large portion of that back to the state and local cops. They will no longer do so.

This removes a great deal of the incentive for locals to use federal laws for seizures.

Many states require seizures go into the state general fund, so there's no incentive there for cops to overstep, at least not financial incentives.

So in theory this should result in a pretty big reduction in unwarranted seizures.

Or seizures just not worth the effort.

It's actually more significant than that.

At some point in the past 10 or 15 years, Minnesota (I think) passed a law barring police in that state from doing so.

The police didn't stop... they just filed it under the federal civil forfeiture program, took their 80% cut and it continued.

So stopping the federal program will let states fix this, when until now it was futile to try.

This was the easiest way for most of the proceeds to get laundered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H sent back to the police who made the seizure. Many states have clauses where any seizures go to the General Fund, not the Police budget.

This is the biggest problem - police officers have a huge incentive to seize money when most of it goes directly to their department, and often times there is there is little to no oversight on how this money is spent: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-police-bought-with...

"One audit examined about $3.4 million in Equitable Sharing funds that the Oklahoma Highway Patrol spent from July 2009 to June 2012.

The audit found $1.9 million in unallowable and unsupported expenditures relating to salaries, overtime pay, construction, fees paid to contractors and the use of two Ford F-150 pickup trucks by non-law enforcement personnel."

There are both state and federal laws for the practice. So this will slightly decrease the situations in which the state/local police can do this. Likely to be compensated for by new state laws. And of course this doesn't stop the Federal law enforcement from doing this. Civil forfiture needs to be abolished period. It boggles my mind, as a layman, that this is considered to satisfy the requirement of "due process" and is therefore constitutional. Sure, there's a process, but it's not the due process.

> Likely to be compensated for by new state laws.

Police departments may lobby for "agency keeps the proceeds" state laws, but because states usually are constitutionally required to balance their budgets, they are reluctant to move general fund things out to dedicated funds, and if the feds are moving in part due to public outcry over the practice, the same pressure out to be able to be brought on states if they start to consider mirroring the discontinued federal practice.

Money only has rights when it is being given anonymously to PACs.

Huh. Hopefully they are now elderly libertarians? Have their political views changed since that experience?

Not really. To be libertarian you have to be pretty idealistic. They don't qualify. Now they are just Republicans that don't trust the police.

Well, that's some progress anyway.

All it will take to fix our police problem is sufficient public will. There isn't any other barrier.

There are people with the will, attempting to fix it in NH:

"Reform Asset Forfeiture!" - http://schedule.nhlibertyforum.com/event/de3f714a09d0089b2fc...

https://freestateproject.org

That assumes an ethical standard, and that the public isn't completely ignorant or malevolent like the one used in top comment example.

It might be true that a large number of self-proclaimed libertarians are idealistic, but it's certainly not true that idealism is necessary for libertarian views.

Libertarians need someone to enforce property rights. Police/Private security firms have always been the strong-arm of the ruling class, nothing about the ideology contradicts that. As that strong-arm, they will be granted special privileges and authority that they will abuse.

There are more libertarian-proposed solutions to such problems than there are libertarians. Most of these slot neatly into the category of things that could work in theory, but have never been attempted.

Once you go beyond the political mainstream, alignment between individuals drops drastically. If you can't get anything you want by compromise, you don't have to compromise on anything.

You may be surprised by the number of varying and mutually incompatible ideas that different libertarians will have regarding any particular issue, each one insisting that their idea would totally work, if only conditions X, Y, and Z could be met.

Some libertarians advocate self-service (or privately contracted) enforcement with public adjudication.

Someone whose life is affected by having a car and a few grand taken from them v. Xe Domestic Security, Ltd

Prosecution: Xe stole my car and rent money and now I have no way to earn enough credits to buy my insulin and keep my apartment.

Defense: The offender was found travelling in an erratic and suspicious manner. As per the agreement made by travelling on Private Road Supranational's private road, the traveler is subject to searches of their person and vehicle if suspected of engaging in certain dangerous activities outlined in Section VI of the contract. In addition, any property suspected of use in a criminal or dangerous activity will automatically have its ownership transferred to Private Road Supranational, as detailed in Section V. Furthermore, we have no record of ever confiscating any of the offender's property.

Judge, brought to you by Lockheed Martin: This seems to be a pretty open and shut case.

I'm not a self-identified libertarian, and I never said it was necessarily a good idea, just that public (or publicly contracted) enforcement entity with special priveleges isn't an essential feature of a libertarian system; some suggest that citizens should contract with their own enforcers, and that enforcers should have no special privileges beyond those of all citizens.

Why do I get the creeping suspicion that this is modeled on an actual in rem civil forfeiture case, where only the names have changed?

And some advocate privately contracted adjudication as well.

sounds like 199x in Russia :) Does shooting in public qualifies as public adjudication?

By "public adjudication" I meant that government courts -- or at least a government function of licensing and assigning adjudicators -- would continue to exist to adjudicate disputes, even though enforcement would be private.

(Many libertarians also see the government courts as last-gasp fallbacks and prefer private adjudication, but most that I've seen discuss the issue recognize the possibility of impasse in getting parties to agree on a private adjudicator, and see that some government involvement here may be essential.)

Yes some libertarians go to the extreme of anarcho-capitalist where everything is settled by insurance companies, including murder. If you, or one of your thugs kills someone, then your insurance company pays the surviving family's insurance company to compensate the family and your insurance rates go up. You don't actually go to jail, you're punished monetarily.

If you're really wealthy you have such good insurance that they negotiate sufficiently low compensation that you can in effect have anybody killed. And it's called feudalism. Or in early U.S. times, this was the American frontier, a.k.a. the wild west, and hired guns.

Libertarians think they have some new bright idea that's never been tried before to counter the fact we're ignorant violent primates. We want something enough, get pissed off enough, we become irrational. Having the irrational hire enforcers is old hat. And it leads to things like the gangs of New York, butchery in the streets, the warlords of Somalia.

These same libertarians are the first to propose both open and conceal carry (of guns) which are the #1 enemy of free speech and civil discourse. It says, "if you argue better than I do, I might just have to let my gun do the talking, so keep your mouth shut smarty pants." So I think libertarians are idiots and not to be trusted, especially if they're armed.

These same libertarians are the first to propose both open and conceal carry (of guns) which are the #1 enemy of free speech and civil discourse.

Because clearly the same cops you've been roundly criticizing as "highwaymen" elsewhere in the thread should have a monopoly on the possession of firearms.

I've got a better idea: you guys move to Somalia. I'm fine where I'm at.

>I've got a better idea: you guys move to Somalia. I'm fine where I'm at.

it is great to send people to Somalia while sitting in US. Doing so in Somalia would have quite different result through "private enforcement" :)

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