17 ms·

Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs

547 points by davidiach 11y ago

entropyneur 11y ago
> With government unable to pay police as much as they need or would like, police are confiscating their revenue directly from the populace. Where does the author think the funding comes from in the normal situation? It's confiscated from the populace just the same. What is this elusive property of the government that makes it not a self-funding gang which is not present in any part of the government (e.g. police in this case) but present in the whole?
- MindTwister 11y ago
  With governments you get to decide the makeup and leader of the gang. Thats... quite a fundamental difference.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Within a specific form of government when it is properly running within a system with minimal corruption, you get to decide the makeup and leader of the government... in theory. In practice, the average person has no say over who is ruling them.
  - entropyneur 11y ago
    The police in this instance is following the law made by leaders you've supposedly decided on.
- Elessar 11y ago
  This 'elusive' property is the idea that taxes are an indirect method of funding the police (as it is re-proportioned via much bureaucracy), while seizures directly fund the policeman's wallet. Obviously the latter is much more dangerous, because there's a self-reinforcing cycle where the police spend their entire time stealing, instead of doing their government-defined jobs. Indirection is important. It allows someone to give you goals that are productive, otherwise you would just steal from your employer instead of working for them (so they would give you money).
  - wanderingstan 11y ago
    Nice explanation. I'd never thought about the important role of indirection in productive employment.
- TY 11y ago
  Distribution of violence makes the differences: taxes are applied to the majority and there's an established and predictable pattern for this way of wealth transfer from the populace to the government, while stop seizures apply to a very small group but in a much more impactful (for that group) way in an unpredictable manner.
- imron 11y ago
  From taxes, which although complex, are still well publicized and listed and it's easy to know how much you need to pay and when. You also (generally) pay these based on your income level. That's completely different from have arbitrary amounts of cash confiscated from you at arbitrary times.
  - ndespres 11y ago
    I think you're responding to an anti-government troll who is being deliberately obtuse about the difference between civil asset forfeiture vs tax collection. Unfortunately statements like theirs muddy the waters between something that most sane people find acceptable (government tax collection) vs something that most sane people find abhorrent once they know about it.
    - purespark2 11y ago
      I think the question is legitimate. Why are sane people okay with having their property rights violated by taxation but not by confiscation?
      - joshuacc 11y ago
        > Why are sane people okay with having their property rights violated by taxation Most people don't regard taxation as a violation of property rights.
      - hyperpape 11y ago
        Knock yourself out: http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/0465051006 http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/... http://www.amazon.com/A-Theory-Justice-John-Rawls/dp/0674000781 http://www.amazon.com/A-Theory-Justice-John-Rawls/dp/0674000... (Seriously, what kind of response are you expecting? There are so many assumptions built in to your question that you're basically asking for a summary of political philosophy).
      - _ak 11y ago
        > Why are sane people okay with having their property rights violated by taxation but not by confiscation? Because these people are not egotistical, anti-social assholes, but contribute their share to society instead.
- purespark2 11y ago
  This is a pretty interesting point that i haven't though much about before. I suppose one problem with confiscation vs. taxation involves incentives. Taxation incentivizes governments to create healthy economies to increase revenue whereas confiscation incentivizes police forces to violate property rights arbitrarily. Another problem at present is there is much less oversight of confiscation than of taxation and maybe confiscation is less predictable than taxation.
  - entropyneur 11y ago
    That's a good point. Taxation is protection racket while stop-and-seize is armed robbery.
- joshfraser 11y ago
  I'm happy I live in a country that has taxes, because I like the improved quality of life that comes from having utilities and public services like streets and water. Civil forfeiture hurts the quality of life for everyone except the cops.
  - Kluny 11y ago
    I believe it hurts quality of life for cops as well, in that it reduces their self-respect.
- jimrandomh 11y ago
  The difference is that the amount of taxes and how they're spent are determined by a legislative process by elected officials.
coreyp_1 11y ago
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. I don't get it, which is why I'm asking here: Why is this "stop-and-seize" not considered unconstitutional? Has it just not been challenged that far yet, or is there a legal rationale that I have not heard yet?
- cauterized 11y ago
  It's usually used against people who don't have the means to mount a legal challenge, in amounts that are too small to be worthwhile for a lawyer to pursue yet that can put the victim in such dire financial straits that they're struggling to stay off the streets let alone hire a lawyer.
- MagicWishMonkey 11y ago
  They get around it by claiming your house or car (or whatever) is guilty of a crime. Unfortunately, inanimate objects can't represent themselves in court.
  - fenomas 11y ago
    AKA Civil Forfeiture. John Oliver did an episode on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks
    - chad_strategic 11y ago
      Shucks you beat me to it. This was about a year go... It's only now that main stream media is picking up on this scam by the police. This type of aggressive policing (excessive jaywalking tickets) was also happening in Ferguson. We know how that turned out...
      - icebraining 11y ago
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
I disagree with the author's attitude towards mercenaries operating in foreign countries. Having read "The Modern Mercenary", by former Blackwater merc, Sean McFate, I am fully convinced that mercenaries have a desirable and necessary place in future conflicts. Take Afghanistan for example. It is a nation at a major geographic crossroads that truly acts as a set of tribes and alliances, not a Westphalian-style state that is Westerners think ought to be the standard. That's why no matter how much "nation building" we do, nothing succeeds. Instead, as McFate argues, we should have mercenaries prevent groups like al Qaeda from using that space to plan attacks on American soil, instead of spending political capital on forever wars. Mercenaries will be seen as a foreign defense mechanism against terrorism, like what we see the TSA doing at home. (Disagree with their tactics all you want, but they have stopped some bombings).
- badsock 11y ago
  Anyone can plan an attack on America in their kitchen. It sounds like you're describing a paramilitary group that can fly anywhere in the world, violate whatever sovereignty they please, bust in through the window, and what, just shoot people that they're pretty sure are up to no good? The principle of sovereignty is more important than placating America's paranoia, regardless of whether people think that a country is too disorganized to deserve the right to not have other countries airdropping their soldiers into it.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Some of the places that host terrorists arent countries, they're messes. They do not have anything close to a Westphalian state, they are a regional coalition of tribes and alliances that call themselves a country for a UN vote and IMF funding. Libya, Iraq, Afganistan, the list goes on. National militaries are there to solve problems, but in the long run, only mercenaries can contain them. It's not just America either. Ethiopia and Kenya would be much better off paying mercenaries that keep somalia's disfunction and terrorism at bay. You can fly in, bomb, invade, whatever, but eventually it becomes a politically unsustainable war. Mercenaries are just an expense, and they know it.
walterbell 11y ago
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/return-of-the-mercenary/388616/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/ret..., "The use of mercenaries in warfare has a very long history—much longer, in fact, than the almost-exclusive deployment of national militaries to wage wars. Before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended Europe's Thirty Years' War and marked the rise of the modern state system, medieval powers from kings to popes routinely hired private fighters to do battle for them. As state governments sought a monopoly on the use of force within their territories in the 17th century, however, they moved to stamp out violence by non-state actors, including mercenaries, driving the industry underground." The Peace of Westphalia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia, "… was a series of peace treaties signed between May and October 1648 … established … a new system of political order in central Europe, later called Westphalian sovereignty, based upon the concept of co-existing sovereign states … General recognition of the exclusive sovereignty of each party over its lands, people, and agents abroad, and responsibility for the warlike acts of any of its citizens or agents. Issuance of unrestricted letters of marque and reprisal to privateers was forbidden."
- clock_tower 11y ago
  I'd add that mercenaries were around, and were a serious problem, from the Late Middle Ages to 1648; some accounts I've read of the Hundred Years' War sound almost exactly like accounts of the Thirty Years' War 300 years later. France, like the Germanies, was reduced to a heap of ruins -- and not just because of the bubonic plague.
maxerickson 11y ago
I'd prefer a seize and destroy policy for contraband over the current system of prosecution. For stuff like heroin or cocaine there doesn't even need to be much of a system for recovery, for prescription pills and the like there probably does, but I think there are some bright lines that can be drawn there. Cash and other legal property should not be seized without a warrant though.
commentzorro 11y ago
This is the Republican Dream. Shifting taxes to states then to localities and finally to each group within the locality. As the nation moves farther and farther to the right expect the to happen in every state and local agency out there.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  In this supposed Dream, who would pay for the missiles and bombs? We've got to destroy developing nations on a regular basis! Republicans actually agree completely with your preference for top-down central control.
- popeshoe 11y ago
  You reminded me of this article: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertaria...
  - commentzorro 11y ago
    This is great. Best line is, "Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®."
- bionsuba 11y ago
  > As the nation moves farther and farther to the right What country do you live in? Surely it can't be the US, who has been enacting very leftist policies for a while now, who has had a leftist president for almost eight years now, whose youth is advocating for a self-identified "democratic socialist" for president, and the country where the most popular republican candidate by far is a centrist RINO.
  - commentzorro 11y ago
    Another Example of ObamaCare Nazis wiping their butts with our Constitution and taking away our guns so they can force us into gay marriages while Jesus weeps.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
asift 11y ago
The author's reference to Morris' high-end/low-end classification of states and absolute preference for centralization seems simplistic and out of touch with economic research on the topic. I think Elinor Ostrom (the only female recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics to date) provides a much more useful framework for evaluating institutional design. In some cases centralization works and in others decentralization is preferable, but a very important component that gets left out of Morris' dichotomy is the role that jurisdictional overlap plays in forcing centralized and decentralized institutions to compete against each other and ultimately provide better outcomes than either could independently.
Dowwie 11y ago
there was a recent discussion about this from Cato: http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/policing-profit-proceeds-apace http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/policing-profit... here's the web site by the people who gave the talk (the paper is downloadable from the right margin) http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/ http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/
YesThatTom2 11y ago
Why is this a bad thing? We don't want to pay ANY taxes, so this way only THE BAD PEOPLE pay to fund the municipalities that do this. ARE YOU A BAD PERSON? OR ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE TAX US TO DEATH PEOPLE? Obviously I'm not serious in what I wrote above. The serious point I want to make is that this is one of the many unintended side-effects of the whole 'lower taxes for the sake of lower taxes' movement. Don't say I didn't warn ya.
- mc32 11y ago
  They should realize this implementation of the law is a moral hazard and it should be avoided.
heapcity 11y ago
I was arrested while hiking and acquitted because I did nothing wrong. But the police never returned my expensive sun glasses or my expensive optical water purifier. "We don't have them."
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Ah, sorry to hear the pigs robbed you. Happens to the best of us. I'll also observe that you probably had to spend cash on a lawyer in order to prove your innocence.
  - heapcity 11y ago
    Making a call from the jailhouse is exorbitantly expensive too.
AC__ 11y ago
Democracy has been bastardized over the past 150+ years to the extent that governments are now effectively nothing more than organized criminal organizations. Police serve as the enforcing arm of these organizations.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Insofar as representative democracy is concerned, it has always fundamentally incurred the inefficiencies caused by the principal-agent problem and diseconomies of scale. This might have been a reasonable trade-off before the advent of modern communication infrastructure, but the model is highly anachronistic by now. The fact that electoral districts operate under a majoritarian basis ensuring party dichotomy per Duverger's law then only makes the case even worse.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  In the US 150+ years ago democracy meant "rule of white men." I'd say it has improved in that regard.
javajosh 11y ago
Actually, the core problem is that when (usually) white, middle-class America sees a police boot on someone's face their instinct is to say, "Well, I guess he deserved it." This is particularly the case for working middle-class mothers. Based on anecdotal conversations, when they see a story about the police shooting an unarmed man in the back, they think, "Well, the guy was probably going to grab someone's little girl and take her hostage." When confronted with stories where the cop was undeniably wrong, they say, "Oh just a bad apple." Another problem is when (usually) black America sees a police boot on someone's face, and notes that statistically it's usually a black face, and their instinct is to say, "Well, I guess it was because he was black." When confronted with stories where the face is white, they say nothing. This breaks my heart. We should never allow a police boot on anyone's face for any reason. The police are public servants, our servants, there to keep the peace, and stop violence from happening. They are not the punishers - that is the role of the court. They are not above the law - they need to hold themselves to a higher standard of conduct. The police should be the best of us, but instead we get low-to-average intelligence physically large men who can keep themselves clean and fit, fill out basic paperwork, and who can follow orders. Emboldened by the attitudes of white, middle-class women that "cracking heads" is a sign of order, also a sign of machismo, and absent any authority to stop it, it continues, and it gets worse. Now, cops go out on a disturbance call, escalate it to violence, and then they 'hurt the bad guys' - cracks some heads, throw 'em in jail. The cop moves on, but 'the bad guys' keep getting hurt, in local lock up, by a justice system that will never hear their case, and then for years by a privatized penal system that takes every economic and social advantage of the prisoner that it legally can. What we have now is a police force whose individual instinct and unmet need for "respect" (actually, dominance) drives their decisions. No-one can stop them. The police have each other's backs. The judiciary has the backs of the police. And the voters are split between two very different, very wrong reactions to the problem - which takes back seat to things like "the economy" and "abortion" in every election. Right now, the best we can do is tell the stories of the people who've been harmed by the police. We need to focus on white, middle-class people, to address both mistaken instincts. We need to fund independent police-malpractice commissions with real teeth, to investigate allegations of wrong-doing. More than anything, we need to reform the way police work is done, making it illegal, for example, for a uniformed cop to coerce a suspect, to lie about the law, or to escalate a situation. We need a "broken windows" policy applied to the police where even small breaches of policy - words of disrespect, for example - trigger a reprimand. We need to ask ourselves why cops swarm on every encounter with a citizen, why they have their hand on their gun when they walk up to your car, why they beat people up so much and get away with it.
DickingAround 11y ago
We cannot expect the world to become more sane. We must ourselves engineer our way out of it. We will engineer our way out of surveillance with encryption. We will engineer our way our of highway seizure with bitcoin (or a similar tech). If does seem bad now, but we will solve it and we will solve it without needing to convince others it's broken.
- MCRed 11y ago
  We may or may not solve it with engineering, but one thing I've become increasingly certain of is we won't solve it by convincing others it's broken. For decades Freedom of Speech was sacrosanct, and now we have a whole generation that rejects it out of hand and feels they have the right to control others speech, even trivially "offensive" speech. Bitcoin and other engineering efforts, however, have great potential.
alistproducer2 11y ago
It's interesting that "conservatives" and "freedom loving people" become pretty OK with tyrannical practices as long as they are practiced on some undesirable group. "Don't tread on me" becomes "Don't tread on me, tread on the brown people instead."
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Some do. I don't.
alistproducer2 11y ago
Serious question. We're all problem solvers here. There has got to be a better way to get our elected leaders to pay more immediate attention to blatantly immoral and unconstitutional stuff like this. As developers and engineers we should come up with a technology to force issue on things like this. I'm pretty tired of reading a story like this and feeling helpless to change it,
- woah 11y ago
  Get out there and join political organizations. Another website just isn't going to change things.
  - alistproducer2 11y ago
    I don't know twitter is "just a website" and it's helped change lots of things all over the world, so......
    - Retra 11y ago
      Twitter's influence in politics is not really the result of the programmers' efforts. It's the result of the politically active people using it. The Twitter platform is at best necessary but not sufficient for its effects. But lots of things are in the same boat. All basic utilities are required for twitter to work, but you wouldn't credit food, waste, and electric companies for such things. And at worst, Twitter isn't even necessary.
  - alistproducer2 11y ago
    @Retra A tool is always only as good as the person using it. The point is webstites and IT can make a difference.
  - wickedlogic 11y ago
    http://watchdog.org/226188/civil-asset-forfeiture-new-hampshire/ http://watchdog.org/226188/civil-asset-forfeiture-new-hampsh... https://freestateproject.org/ https://freestateproject.org/
Fezzik 11y ago
Ugh, so much misinformation. Having lurked here for a while HN seems to think civil forfeiture is the boogie man. To clarify a few things, at least on the county level: 1) There are always drugs when property is seized this way. I review every single civil forfeiture in a rather large county, and the affidavits officers submit read something like: "I stopped Bob after an informant purchased a large amount of heroin from Bob, Bob had syringes, heroin, weed, a scale for weighing drugs etc... on his person, and a rolled up wade of bills". The money is then seized as proceeds of prohibited conduct. 2) IT IS NOT DIFFICULT TO CONTEST A CIVIL FORFEITURE. The defendant is given a single piece of paper, that is insanely easy to understand, and simply has to sign the paper saying the forfeited property is not proceeds of a crime. They then have to appear in court, before a judge, and demonstrate this fact. The bar is not high, but I have never once seen this happen. 3) The money does not all go directly to the seizing agency. Much of it goes towards drugs programs, oversight for civil forfeitures, and other programs. See, for example: http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/131A.360 http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/131A.360 Perhaps at the federal level things work very differently and the process is abused, but every time I see these articles it really feels like an anomaly of a story is used to paint an entire program as being demonic, with little to no data to back up the conclusion. edited for clarity, the statutory language is "prohibited conduct" not "criminal activity"
- chewbacha 11y ago
  The oversight of civil forfeiture is financed by civil forfeiture? Is that true? Sounds like a serious conflict of interest.
  - Fezzik 11y ago
    Not entirely. I would have to search hard to find the exact information, but it is primarily funded by the general fund. This is all at the state/county level though; I have no familiarity with federal civil forfeiture.
- splat 11y ago
  With regards to point 2, at the federal level things do seem to work very differently. Here is a flowchart outlining the steps you would have to take to reclaim your assets from federal forfeiture: https://reason.com/assets/mc/2015_06/forfeitchart.jpg https://reason.com/assets/mc/2015_06/forfeitchart.jpg Regarding point 3, part of the problem, too, is that the federal government engages in sharing programs with local agencies. So if most of the money from a local-level forfeiture does not go back to the agency, the agency has a strong incentive to bring the feds into it because then they will keep a considerably larger fraction of the proceeds.
eshem 11y ago
More in-depth investigation by the Washington Post from 2014: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/st...
clumsysmurf 11y ago
"If you believe -- as many economists do -- that the rule of law is a key determinant of a nation’s prosperity, then you should be worried about this. Stop-and-seize should be stopped." A good book that talks about this is "The Locus Effect" http://www.amazon.com/Locust-Effect-Poverty-Requires-Violence/dp/0190229268 http://www.amazon.com/Locust-Effect-Poverty-Requires-Violenc...
kbenson 11y ago
It seems pretty clear to me the problem here is misaligned incentives. If the police weren't allowed to keep seized money, and where it did end up was disconnected enough, there would be little reason to confiscate property without due cause. Where we could redirect the money that it didn't cause problems is an interesting question, and I'm not sure I know of an answer that doesn't create other considerable problems.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  Why redirect it at all? It's evidence. Put it in a bag, and store it. Nobody gets to spend it until a case is closed.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I obviously mean after it's no longer in dispute, you can't purposefully destroy/lose evidence. After any case is closed, the property should either be returned, or dispensed with in a way that doesn't incentivize wrongful collection of property in the first place.
erjjones 11y ago
Its a booming business for the states and law enforcement. The stats don't lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Payouts_to_states_in_USA_by_Federal_Govt_under_Equitable_Sharing_Program.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
downandout 11y ago
Perfect example of this [1]: A poker player carrying a large amount of cash is pulled over. The cops not only seize his $167,000 poker bankroll, but his vehicle, laptop, and cell phone. They then tell him that he is "free to go" and leave him by the side of the road in the middle of the desert with $192 in cash and no cell phone. [1] http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/19177-hawaii-man-fights-asset-forfeiture-case-similar-to-the-poker-players-in-iowa http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/19177-hawaii-man-fights...
golemotron 11y ago
The real solution to this is not to reform civil forfeiture law but to pass legislation that makes sure that seized property is held in escrow and destroyed if a court decides that it does not revert to the owner. If police/municipalities can't profit from forfeiture and have to pay real costs for exercising it, it will disappear.
Your_Creator 11y ago
John Oliver explains it pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks
spacemanmatt 11y ago
Scenario: You're on the jury of a person accused of killing an undercover policeman who tried to deprive them of their suitcase full of cash. We can't know if the cash was illegally obtained, as they are not on trial nor will the government charge them for any crimes that would connect the cash to a crime. They're only saying the undercover policeman was attempting to make a civil forfeiture. We can't know whether the undercover identified himself to the defendant, because he's dead. There's no evidence that the defendant should have been able to know the deceased was an officer. How are you inclined to find for the accused?

547 points by davidiach 11y ago

> With government unable to pay police as much as they need or would like, police are confiscating their revenue directly from the populace. Where does the author think the funding comes from in the normal situation? It's confiscated from the populace just the same. What is this elusive property of the government that makes it not a self-funding gang which is not present in any part of the government (e.g. police in this case) but present in the whole?

MindTwister 11y ago
With governments you get to decide the makeup and leader of the gang. Thats... quite a fundamental difference.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Within a specific form of government when it is properly running within a system with minimal corruption, you get to decide the makeup and leader of the government... in theory. In practice, the average person has no say over who is ruling them.
- entropyneur 11y ago
  The police in this instance is following the law made by leaders you've supposedly decided on.
Elessar 11y ago
This 'elusive' property is the idea that taxes are an indirect method of funding the police (as it is re-proportioned via much bureaucracy), while seizures directly fund the policeman's wallet. Obviously the latter is much more dangerous, because there's a self-reinforcing cycle where the police spend their entire time stealing, instead of doing their government-defined jobs. Indirection is important. It allows someone to give you goals that are productive, otherwise you would just steal from your employer instead of working for them (so they would give you money).
- wanderingstan 11y ago
  Nice explanation. I'd never thought about the important role of indirection in productive employment.
TY 11y ago
Distribution of violence makes the differences: taxes are applied to the majority and there's an established and predictable pattern for this way of wealth transfer from the populace to the government, while stop seizures apply to a very small group but in a much more impactful (for that group) way in an unpredictable manner.
imron 11y ago
From taxes, which although complex, are still well publicized and listed and it's easy to know how much you need to pay and when. You also (generally) pay these based on your income level. That's completely different from have arbitrary amounts of cash confiscated from you at arbitrary times.
- ndespres 11y ago
  I think you're responding to an anti-government troll who is being deliberately obtuse about the difference between civil asset forfeiture vs tax collection. Unfortunately statements like theirs muddy the waters between something that most sane people find acceptable (government tax collection) vs something that most sane people find abhorrent once they know about it.
  - purespark2 11y ago
    I think the question is legitimate. Why are sane people okay with having their property rights violated by taxation but not by confiscation?
    - joshuacc 11y ago
      > Why are sane people okay with having their property rights violated by taxation Most people don't regard taxation as a violation of property rights.
    - hyperpape 11y ago
      Knock yourself out: http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/0465051006 http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/... http://www.amazon.com/A-Theory-Justice-John-Rawls/dp/0674000781 http://www.amazon.com/A-Theory-Justice-John-Rawls/dp/0674000... (Seriously, what kind of response are you expecting? There are so many assumptions built in to your question that you're basically asking for a summary of political philosophy).
    - _ak 11y ago
      > Why are sane people okay with having their property rights violated by taxation but not by confiscation? Because these people are not egotistical, anti-social assholes, but contribute their share to society instead.
purespark2 11y ago
This is a pretty interesting point that i haven't though much about before. I suppose one problem with confiscation vs. taxation involves incentives. Taxation incentivizes governments to create healthy economies to increase revenue whereas confiscation incentivizes police forces to violate property rights arbitrarily. Another problem at present is there is much less oversight of confiscation than of taxation and maybe confiscation is less predictable than taxation.
- entropyneur 11y ago
  That's a good point. Taxation is protection racket while stop-and-seize is armed robbery.
joshfraser 11y ago
I'm happy I live in a country that has taxes, because I like the improved quality of life that comes from having utilities and public services like streets and water. Civil forfeiture hurts the quality of life for everyone except the cops.
- Kluny 11y ago
  I believe it hurts quality of life for cops as well, in that it reduces their self-respect.
jimrandomh 11y ago
The difference is that the amount of taxes and how they're spent are determined by a legislative process by elected officials.

coreyp_1 11y ago

Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. I don't get it, which is why I'm asking here: Why is this "stop-and-seize" not considered unconstitutional? Has it just not been challenged that far yet, or is there a legal rationale that I have not heard yet?

cauterized 11y ago
It's usually used against people who don't have the means to mount a legal challenge, in amounts that are too small to be worthwhile for a lawyer to pursue yet that can put the victim in such dire financial straits that they're struggling to stay off the streets let alone hire a lawyer.
MagicWishMonkey 11y ago
They get around it by claiming your house or car (or whatever) is guilty of a crime. Unfortunately, inanimate objects can't represent themselves in court.
- fenomas 11y ago
  AKA Civil Forfeiture. John Oliver did an episode on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks
  - chad_strategic 11y ago
    Shucks you beat me to it. This was about a year go... It's only now that main stream media is picking up on this scam by the police. This type of aggressive policing (excessive jaywalking tickets) was also happening in Ferguson. We know how that turned out...
    - icebraining 11y ago

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

I disagree with the author's attitude towards mercenaries operating in foreign countries. Having read "The Modern Mercenary", by former Blackwater merc, Sean McFate, I am fully convinced that mercenaries have a desirable and necessary place in future conflicts. Take Afghanistan for example. It is a nation at a major geographic crossroads that truly acts as a set of tribes and alliances, not a Westphalian-style state that is Westerners think ought to be the standard. That's why no matter how much "nation building" we do, nothing succeeds. Instead, as McFate argues, we should have mercenaries prevent groups like al Qaeda from using that space to plan attacks on American soil, instead of spending political capital on forever wars. Mercenaries will be seen as a foreign defense mechanism against terrorism, like what we see the TSA doing at home. (Disagree with their tactics all you want, but they have stopped some bombings).

badsock 11y ago
Anyone can plan an attack on America in their kitchen. It sounds like you're describing a paramilitary group that can fly anywhere in the world, violate whatever sovereignty they please, bust in through the window, and what, just shoot people that they're pretty sure are up to no good? The principle of sovereignty is more important than placating America's paranoia, regardless of whether people think that a country is too disorganized to deserve the right to not have other countries airdropping their soldiers into it.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Some of the places that host terrorists arent countries, they're messes. They do not have anything close to a Westphalian state, they are a regional coalition of tribes and alliances that call themselves a country for a UN vote and IMF funding. Libya, Iraq, Afganistan, the list goes on. National militaries are there to solve problems, but in the long run, only mercenaries can contain them. It's not just America either. Ethiopia and Kenya would be much better off paying mercenaries that keep somalia's disfunction and terrorism at bay. You can fly in, bomb, invade, whatever, but eventually it becomes a politically unsustainable war. Mercenaries are just an expense, and they know it.

walterbell 11y ago

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/return-of-the-mercenary/388616/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/ret..., "The use of mercenaries in warfare has a very long history—much longer, in fact, than the almost-exclusive deployment of national militaries to wage wars. Before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended Europe's Thirty Years' War and marked the rise of the modern state system, medieval powers from kings to popes routinely hired private fighters to do battle for them. As state governments sought a monopoly on the use of force within their territories in the 17th century, however, they moved to stamp out violence by non-state actors, including mercenaries, driving the industry underground." The Peace of Westphalia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia, "… was a series of peace treaties signed between May and October 1648 … established … a new system of political order in central Europe, later called Westphalian sovereignty, based upon the concept of co-existing sovereign states … General recognition of the exclusive sovereignty of each party over its lands, people, and agents abroad, and responsibility for the warlike acts of any of its citizens or agents. Issuance of unrestricted letters of marque and reprisal to privateers was forbidden."

clock_tower 11y ago
I'd add that mercenaries were around, and were a serious problem, from the Late Middle Ages to 1648; some accounts I've read of the Hundred Years' War sound almost exactly like accounts of the Thirty Years' War 300 years later. France, like the Germanies, was reduced to a heap of ruins -- and not just because of the bubonic plague.

maxerickson 11y ago

I'd prefer a seize and destroy policy for contraband over the current system of prosecution. For stuff like heroin or cocaine there doesn't even need to be much of a system for recovery, for prescription pills and the like there probably does, but I think there are some bright lines that can be drawn there. Cash and other legal property should not be seized without a warrant though.

commentzorro 11y ago

This is the Republican Dream. Shifting taxes to states then to localities and finally to each group within the locality. As the nation moves farther and farther to the right expect the to happen in every state and local agency out there.

jessaustin 11y ago
In this supposed Dream, who would pay for the missiles and bombs? We've got to destroy developing nations on a regular basis! Republicans actually agree completely with your preference for top-down central control.
popeshoe 11y ago
You reminded me of this article: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertaria...
- commentzorro 11y ago
  This is great. Best line is, "Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®."
bionsuba 11y ago
> As the nation moves farther and farther to the right What country do you live in? Surely it can't be the US, who has been enacting very leftist policies for a while now, who has had a leftist president for almost eight years now, whose youth is advocating for a self-identified "democratic socialist" for president, and the country where the most popular republican candidate by far is a centrist RINO.
- commentzorro 11y ago
  Another Example of ObamaCare Nazis wiping their butts with our Constitution and taking away our guns so they can force us into gay marriages while Jesus weeps.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

asift 11y ago

The author's reference to Morris' high-end/low-end classification of states and absolute preference for centralization seems simplistic and out of touch with economic research on the topic. I think Elinor Ostrom (the only female recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics to date) provides a much more useful framework for evaluating institutional design. In some cases centralization works and in others decentralization is preferable, but a very important component that gets left out of Morris' dichotomy is the role that jurisdictional overlap plays in forcing centralized and decentralized institutions to compete against each other and ultimately provide better outcomes than either could independently.

Dowwie 11y ago

there was a recent discussion about this from Cato: http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/policing-profit-proceeds-apace http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/policing-profit... here's the web site by the people who gave the talk (the paper is downloadable from the right margin) http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/ http://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit/

YesThatTom2 11y ago

Why is this a bad thing? We don't want to pay ANY taxes, so this way only THE BAD PEOPLE pay to fund the municipalities that do this. ARE YOU A BAD PERSON? OR ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE TAX US TO DEATH PEOPLE? Obviously I'm not serious in what I wrote above. The serious point I want to make is that this is one of the many unintended side-effects of the whole 'lower taxes for the sake of lower taxes' movement. Don't say I didn't warn ya.

mc32 11y ago
They should realize this implementation of the law is a moral hazard and it should be avoided.

heapcity 11y ago

I was arrested while hiking and acquitted because I did nothing wrong. But the police never returned my expensive sun glasses or my expensive optical water purifier. "We don't have them."

cryoshon 11y ago
Ah, sorry to hear the pigs robbed you. Happens to the best of us. I'll also observe that you probably had to spend cash on a lawyer in order to prove your innocence.
- heapcity 11y ago
  Making a call from the jailhouse is exorbitantly expensive too.

AC__ 11y ago

Democracy has been bastardized over the past 150+ years to the extent that governments are now effectively nothing more than organized criminal organizations. Police serve as the enforcing arm of these organizations.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Insofar as representative democracy is concerned, it has always fundamentally incurred the inefficiencies caused by the principal-agent problem and diseconomies of scale. This might have been a reasonable trade-off before the advent of modern communication infrastructure, but the model is highly anachronistic by now. The fact that electoral districts operate under a majoritarian basis ensuring party dichotomy per Duverger's law then only makes the case even worse.
Kristine1975 11y ago
In the US 150+ years ago democracy meant "rule of white men." I'd say it has improved in that regard.

javajosh 11y ago

Actually, the core problem is that when (usually) white, middle-class America sees a police boot on someone's face their instinct is to say, "Well, I guess he deserved it." This is particularly the case for working middle-class mothers. Based on anecdotal conversations, when they see a story about the police shooting an unarmed man in the back, they think, "Well, the guy was probably going to grab someone's little girl and take her hostage." When confronted with stories where the cop was undeniably wrong, they say, "Oh just a bad apple." Another problem is when (usually) black America sees a police boot on someone's face, and notes that statistically it's usually a black face, and their instinct is to say, "Well, I guess it was because he was black." When confronted with stories where the face is white, they say nothing. This breaks my heart. We should never allow a police boot on anyone's face for any reason. The police are public servants, our servants, there to keep the peace, and stop violence from happening. They are not the punishers - that is the role of the court. They are not above the law - they need to hold themselves to a higher standard of conduct. The police should be the best of us, but instead we get low-to-average intelligence physically large men who can keep themselves clean and fit, fill out basic paperwork, and who can follow orders. Emboldened by the attitudes of white, middle-class women that "cracking heads" is a sign of order, also a sign of machismo, and absent any authority to stop it, it continues, and it gets worse. Now, cops go out on a disturbance call, escalate it to violence, and then they 'hurt the bad guys' - cracks some heads, throw 'em in jail. The cop moves on, but 'the bad guys' keep getting hurt, in local lock up, by a justice system that will never hear their case, and then for years by a privatized penal system that takes every economic and social advantage of the prisoner that it legally can. What we have now is a police force whose individual instinct and unmet need for "respect" (actually, dominance) drives their decisions. No-one can stop them. The police have each other's backs. The judiciary has the backs of the police. And the voters are split between two very different, very wrong reactions to the problem - which takes back seat to things like "the economy" and "abortion" in every election. Right now, the best we can do is tell the stories of the people who've been harmed by the police. We need to focus on white, middle-class people, to address both mistaken instincts. We need to fund independent police-malpractice commissions with real teeth, to investigate allegations of wrong-doing. More than anything, we need to reform the way police work is done, making it illegal, for example, for a uniformed cop to coerce a suspect, to lie about the law, or to escalate a situation. We need a "broken windows" policy applied to the police where even small breaches of policy - words of disrespect, for example - trigger a reprimand. We need to ask ourselves why cops swarm on every encounter with a citizen, why they have their hand on their gun when they walk up to your car, why they beat people up so much and get away with it.

DickingAround 11y ago

We cannot expect the world to become more sane. We must ourselves engineer our way out of it. We will engineer our way out of surveillance with encryption. We will engineer our way our of highway seizure with bitcoin (or a similar tech). If does seem bad now, but we will solve it and we will solve it without needing to convince others it's broken.

MCRed 11y ago
We may or may not solve it with engineering, but one thing I've become increasingly certain of is we won't solve it by convincing others it's broken. For decades Freedom of Speech was sacrosanct, and now we have a whole generation that rejects it out of hand and feels they have the right to control others speech, even trivially "offensive" speech. Bitcoin and other engineering efforts, however, have great potential.

alistproducer2 11y ago

It's interesting that "conservatives" and "freedom loving people" become pretty OK with tyrannical practices as long as they are practiced on some undesirable group. "Don't tread on me" becomes "Don't tread on me, tread on the brown people instead."

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Some do. I don't.

alistproducer2 11y ago

Serious question. We're all problem solvers here. There has got to be a better way to get our elected leaders to pay more immediate attention to blatantly immoral and unconstitutional stuff like this. As developers and engineers we should come up with a technology to force issue on things like this. I'm pretty tired of reading a story like this and feeling helpless to change it,

woah 11y ago
Get out there and join political organizations. Another website just isn't going to change things.
- alistproducer2 11y ago
  I don't know twitter is "just a website" and it's helped change lots of things all over the world, so......
  - Retra 11y ago
    Twitter's influence in politics is not really the result of the programmers' efforts. It's the result of the politically active people using it. The Twitter platform is at best necessary but not sufficient for its effects. But lots of things are in the same boat. All basic utilities are required for twitter to work, but you wouldn't credit food, waste, and electric companies for such things. And at worst, Twitter isn't even necessary.
- alistproducer2 11y ago
  @Retra A tool is always only as good as the person using it. The point is webstites and IT can make a difference.
- wickedlogic 11y ago
  http://watchdog.org/226188/civil-asset-forfeiture-new-hampshire/ http://watchdog.org/226188/civil-asset-forfeiture-new-hampsh... https://freestateproject.org/ https://freestateproject.org/

Fezzik 11y ago

Ugh, so much misinformation. Having lurked here for a while HN seems to think civil forfeiture is the boogie man. To clarify a few things, at least on the county level: 1) There are always drugs when property is seized this way. I review every single civil forfeiture in a rather large county, and the affidavits officers submit read something like: "I stopped Bob after an informant purchased a large amount of heroin from Bob, Bob had syringes, heroin, weed, a scale for weighing drugs etc... on his person, and a rolled up wade of bills". The money is then seized as proceeds of prohibited conduct. 2) IT IS NOT DIFFICULT TO CONTEST A CIVIL FORFEITURE. The defendant is given a single piece of paper, that is insanely easy to understand, and simply has to sign the paper saying the forfeited property is not proceeds of a crime. They then have to appear in court, before a judge, and demonstrate this fact. The bar is not high, but I have never once seen this happen. 3) The money does not all go directly to the seizing agency. Much of it goes towards drugs programs, oversight for civil forfeitures, and other programs. See, for example: http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/131A.360 http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/131A.360 Perhaps at the federal level things work very differently and the process is abused, but every time I see these articles it really feels like an anomaly of a story is used to paint an entire program as being demonic, with little to no data to back up the conclusion. edited for clarity, the statutory language is "prohibited conduct" not "criminal activity"

chewbacha 11y ago
The oversight of civil forfeiture is financed by civil forfeiture? Is that true? Sounds like a serious conflict of interest.
- Fezzik 11y ago
  Not entirely. I would have to search hard to find the exact information, but it is primarily funded by the general fund. This is all at the state/county level though; I have no familiarity with federal civil forfeiture.
splat 11y ago
With regards to point 2, at the federal level things do seem to work very differently. Here is a flowchart outlining the steps you would have to take to reclaim your assets from federal forfeiture: https://reason.com/assets/mc/2015_06/forfeitchart.jpg https://reason.com/assets/mc/2015_06/forfeitchart.jpg Regarding point 3, part of the problem, too, is that the federal government engages in sharing programs with local agencies. So if most of the money from a local-level forfeiture does not go back to the agency, the agency has a strong incentive to bring the feds into it because then they will keep a considerably larger fraction of the proceeds.

eshem 11y ago

More in-depth investigation by the Washington Post from 2014: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/st...

clumsysmurf 11y ago

"If you believe -- as many economists do -- that the rule of law is a key determinant of a nation’s prosperity, then you should be worried about this. Stop-and-seize should be stopped." A good book that talks about this is "The Locus Effect" http://www.amazon.com/Locust-Effect-Poverty-Requires-Violence/dp/0190229268 http://www.amazon.com/Locust-Effect-Poverty-Requires-Violenc...

kbenson 11y ago

It seems pretty clear to me the problem here is misaligned incentives. If the police weren't allowed to keep seized money, and where it did end up was disconnected enough, there would be little reason to confiscate property without due cause. Where we could redirect the money that it didn't cause problems is an interesting question, and I'm not sure I know of an answer that doesn't create other considerable problems.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
Why redirect it at all? It's evidence. Put it in a bag, and store it. Nobody gets to spend it until a case is closed.
- kbenson 11y ago
  I obviously mean after it's no longer in dispute, you can't purposefully destroy/lose evidence. After any case is closed, the property should either be returned, or dispensed with in a way that doesn't incentivize wrongful collection of property in the first place.

erjjones 11y ago

Its a booming business for the states and law enforcement. The stats don't lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Payouts_to_states_in_USA_by_Federal_Govt_under_Equitable_Sharing_Program.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

downandout 11y ago

Perfect example of this [1]: A poker player carrying a large amount of cash is pulled over. The cops not only seize his $167,000 poker bankroll, but his vehicle, laptop, and cell phone. They then tell him that he is "free to go" and leave him by the side of the road in the middle of the desert with $192 in cash and no cell phone. [1] http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/19177-hawaii-man-fights-asset-forfeiture-case-similar-to-the-poker-players-in-iowa http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/19177-hawaii-man-fights...

golemotron 11y ago

The real solution to this is not to reform civil forfeiture law but to pass legislation that makes sure that seized property is held in escrow and destroyed if a court decides that it does not revert to the owner. If police/municipalities can't profit from forfeiture and have to pay real costs for exercising it, it will disappear.

Your_Creator 11y ago

John Oliver explains it pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks

spacemanmatt 11y ago

Scenario: You're on the jury of a person accused of killing an undercover policeman who tried to deprive them of their suitcase full of cash. We can't know if the cash was illegally obtained, as they are not on trial nor will the government charge them for any crimes that would connect the cash to a crime. They're only saying the undercover policeman was attempting to make a civil forfeiture. We can't know whether the undercover identified himself to the defendant, because he's dead. There's no evidence that the defendant should have been able to know the deceased was an officer. How are you inclined to find for the accused?