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Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
- ccvannorman 11y agoOut of curiosity I looked up murder stats as well. Roughly 1000 were killed by police in 2014 nationwide, whereas nationwide civilian murder toll reached about 10,000. So at least police aren't killing more people than regular people?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> So at least police aren't killing more people than regular people? They're killing more people than terrorists though: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/08/youre-nine-times-likely-killed-police-officer-terrorist.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/08/youre-nine-times-like... http://www.globalresearch.ca/increasing-police-brutality-americans-killed-by-cops-now-outnumber-americans-killed-in-iraq-war/5361554 http://www.globalresearch.ca/increasing-police-brutality-ame... http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-killed-police-officer-terrorist http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-ki... http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/youre-55-times-likely-killed-police-officer-terrorist.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/youre-55-times-likely... Yay?
- Fezzik 11y agoThat is primarily true because we are a heavily/overly militarized and protected country. If it were easier to frequently fly planes in to large buildings I think we can all agree religious extremists would be killing a significantly larger number of people in the US. It is *lack of opportunity that prevents this, not a passivity that is greater than that of police officers.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoHow many people are waiting in a TSA checkpoint at busy times, unprotected? And yet, we haven't seen those groups of people massacred.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> How many people are waiting in a TSA checkpoint at busy times, unprotected? None; even outside the "secured" areas, airports are one of the most heavily patrolled places open to the public. Obviously, that doesn't make attacks impossible, but characterizing that locale as "unprotected" is unreasonable.
- delecti 11y agoThe security line is almost by definition pre-security, and often includes dozens or hundreds of people.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> The security line is almost by definition pre-security The security screening line is (just) outside of a particular layer of security; the area of the airport outside that layer, including the line, is still one of the most heavily patrolled areas open to the public in the US, it is not "unprotected".
- delecti 11y agoMaybe you couldn't get to the screening line with a rifle strapped to your back, but you almost certainly could with a bomb strapped to your chest under your jacket.
- mikeash 11y agoYou could bring one hell of a big suitcase bomb. Weight limits would not apply, and size limits only vaguely. Lug in one of those really big roller suitcases filled with high explosives and nails, roll it right into the security line, and... I'm on a list now.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIf you want to be really douchy about such an attack, use liquid explosives in 1L soda bottles. Say that you forgot about the regulations and dutifully throw them together into the bin... (I'm probably on the list already anyway.)
- jellicle 11y agoI thought the problem was there is no tally of people killed by police. There's no central registry, no requirement to report. The only stats collected on this are people collecting news clippings, but of course many things don't make the newspapers. Probably the police kill fewer people than non-police killers, but we don't really know. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-year-after-ferguson-why-nobody-knows-how-many-people-n405376 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-year-after-ferguson-...
- DrScump 11y agoI wish the body of the article separated stats for civil forfeiture vs. criminal forfeiture.
- maxerickson 11y agoThe source number isn't even clearly based on seizures in 2014. At least it's linked: http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/crime-and-justice-news/2015-11-civil-asset-forfeiture-report http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/crime-and-justice-news/20... That says that federal account balances from seizures totaled $4.5 billion in 2014. It also says that Madoff and Toyota each contributed more than $1 billion to those accounts. edit to add: It seems likely that the seizure is only related to the Madoff case, not that it came from Madoff directly, in another comment I linked a BBC article saying the forfeiture came from JP Morgan.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoToyota? That's a seizure? In what sense? Are fines considered the same as seizures?
- maxerickson 11y agoApparently for the purposes of this article. I got that far and decided I wasn't going to spend any more time looking into the claims as presented in the link and flagged it.
- sambe 11y agoBit off-topic but https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html say flagging is for off-topic and spam, not low quality (they also explicitly request not commenting to say you flagged something).
- ars 11y ago> they also explicitly request not commenting to say you flagged something They just if you comment nothing else, it's OK to mention it as an aside to a more useful comment.
- Shivetya 11y agofrom Cato, http://www.policemisconduct.net/explainers/civil-asset-forfeiture/ http://www.policemisconduct.net/explainers/civil-asset-forfe... and if you time, a detailed report which is 186 pages of PDF http://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/policing-for-profit-2nd-edition.pdf http://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/policing-for-profit...
- yourepowerless 11y agoHow much more evidence do people need before we all readily conceed that America is a police state? Before you can change reality you must first understand the reality that exists. Police steal and murder without consequence. They are a gang of murderous thugs protected by a corrupt court and legislative body.
- Fezzik 11y agoI am not sure this article leads to that conclusion. Most of this money comes from drug busts. You can argue about whether or not heavily addicting drugs like cocaine should be legal, but that $12 billion was not seized from John and Jane Doe for no reason. Is the rule misused? It sure seems like it is, occasionally. Should we as a nation abolish it? Maybe. but most of the funds are confiscated from drug dealers who would use the money... to sell more drugs. And to buy tigers and mansions, of course, but also to distribute drugs. Also, drug cartels have a penchant to murder a ton of people. Sometimes 20,000+ a year. Leaving the money with them seems like a poor choice. Money seized in drug busts: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91490480 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9149048... Drug cartels and homicide: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/drug-lord/the-staggering-death-toll-of-mexicos-drug-war/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defe...
- yourepowerless 11y agoYour equivocation of clearly immoral behavior is suggestive. Is stealing wrong? Yes, yes it is. How many more decades of a failed war on drugs policy do you need before you accept and argue for a change of course? When bad laws create the incentive which results in 10,000s of murders it is imperative to change those incentives, even the Mexican government is now clamoring for change, but the war on drugs is too convenient for the status quo and justifies all sorts of government empowerment. But in the face of a murderous institution I'm happy we have some fellow Willing to equivocate and defend senseless murder, torture, and theft, good job dude.
- Fezzik 11y ago
- Animats 11y agoHome burglary is almost dead. What's to steal? Any TV you can carry is almost worthless. There's no market in used desktop computers, or used furniture. Nobody has cameras any more. Few people keep much cash around. Phones are probably in the owner's pocket, not left in their house. And because the economy is down at the low end, pawn shops and flea markets are choked with stuff they can't sell. There have been single white collar crimes that exceed the value of all US burglaries. Madoff alone stole more than five years of burglaries. The FBI has their priorities wrong. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports tally a burglary when it is reported, but a while collar crime only when an arrest is made. This creates the illusion that white collar crime is much smaller than it is.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- caf 11y agoWe were burgled last week, and they stole thousands of dollars worth of jewellery, a laptop and two ipads... ...and the spare key for my car, which they used to steal the car.
- danso 11y agoSorry for your loss, but thanks for the reminder that I shouldn't be keeping my spare key in a visible place when I leave home.
- caf 11y agoI'm thinking that a small safe is probably the best bet, which can also be used to store documents like passports.
- jschwartzi 11y agoMake sure it's bolted down too. As a rule, expect it to be about as difficult to remove as it was to install.
- 11y ago
- steffan 11y agoI think you mean other burglaries.
- a3n 11y agoAsset forfeiture is armed robbery, not burglary. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the police do that too.
- tomohawk 11y agoAny assets seized by police should be counted as revenue, and should go to the general fund to be allocated by the legislature. Separation of powers.
- bo1024 11y agoAny assets seized by police should be burned in a bonfire.* Anything else causes poorly-aligned incentives. *OK, maybe I would agree with donated to certain causes, if chosen carefully.
- tomohawk 11y agoI'd actually go further. The 5th Amendment to the US Constitution would appear to ban this activity. "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Rand Paul has introduced legislation to restore the protection the amendment should provide: https://reason.com/blog/2015/01/27/rand-paul-reintroduces-bill-aimed-at-cur https://reason.com/blog/2015/01/27/rand-paul-reintroduces-bi... President Obama appointed Loretta Lynch as AG, who has a proven track record of using civil asset forfeiture to advance her career. http://www.cato.org/blog/loretta-lynchs-worrisome-answer-civil-asset-forfeiture http://www.cato.org/blog/loretta-lynchs-worrisome-answer-civ...
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoIt is very sad, but our Bill of Rights is getting eroded by horrible legislation. Our founding fathers predicted this bad government behavior by giving us the B.o.R. Now, we are just standing here watching it be slowly taken from us. Edit for clarity.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoKeep this in mind when police or politicians push any legislation to give them more power over you, do more surveillance, or have less accountability. Especially as they push it over the "threat" of ISIS. Remember that they do more financial damage and kill more people than any terrorist outfit outside one-hit-wonders like 9/11. We need to fight civil forfeiture and all legislation like it.
- privacy101 11y agoEven if you added deaths by police and deaths by terrorists together, it would probably still not be in the top 50 leading causes of death (I'm still trying to find data with all causes of deaths in the US).
- ncallaway 11y agoThe CDC has a relatively comprehensive data set here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm It's definitely not everything, but I don't know of a better data source...
- kristopolous 11y agodeath by police is tracked here (1051): http://killedbypolice.net/ http://killedbypolice.net/ ... cancer kills about 580,000 and automobiles get about 32,500 for comparison.
- joering2 11y agoWow, wonder what cops think about this page and if ever tried to shut it down. Someone is doing extensive work organizing all this on a daily basis. Too bad we don't know how many were bad guys and how many innocent, but that would be hard to followup and monitor.
- kristopolous 11y agoIt's a spectrum. Some, like this 6 year old (http://theadvocate.com/news/13907799-176/few-details-emerging-in-officer-involved http://theadvocate.com/news/13907799-176/few-details-emergin...) leave the officer in greater culpability than this active shootout with police (http://www.pe.com/articles/riverside-784400-officers-stop.html http://www.pe.com/articles/riverside-784400-officers-stop.ht...) where the driver sped away and died in a car crash against a barrier. If you scroll through and read the stories, most of them seem to be either terrible car crashes or violent criminals. Presuming that officers work 2080 hours a year and there are 765,000 with arresting power, you are 1755 times more likely to interface with a not-a-cop than a cop on the job. Therefore, you are 160 times more likely to be killed X minutes with a police officer than X minutes with some stranger. 15 seconds with 1 cop is as dangerous as 15 seconds with 160 random people. My friends in south LA from different backgrounds have a mantra to never call the cops under any condition. The idea is that however bad a situation can get, introduction of the police will incontrovertibly make it a de facto worse situation. Whether true or not, this seems to be a gut intuition to many (search google for "never call the police" to see people express this view). The crux of the question is two-fold: 1. Does bringing police into any situation generally lead to worse consequences than avoiding them? 2. If we believe that violence is always an inferior solution that lacks efficacy, then why should we invite state-sanctioned violence into our lives voluntarily? Stated another way, why is the government provided service to someone with psychological distress two people with firearms locking them in a cage? Shouldn't we provide a more appropriate government service for this?
- rayiner 11y agoAll burglaries are wrongful, but only some unspecified fraction of civil asset forfeitures are wrongful. You need to multiply the first number by that percentage before comparing the two numbers. The comparison in the article is thus nonsense.
- nraynaud 11y agonope, because they could have been forfeited by a court anyways.
- rayiner 11y agoCivil forfeiture requires a showing in front of a court.
- fineman 11y agoNot actually. It merely requires a cop. And the state has been known to kidnap your children if you try to dispute the issue.
- fineman 11y agoThe issue though is that your money, car, etc, is gone instantly and you're on the side of the road hitch-hiking home. No hearing, no evidence even. The fact that a hearing is part of the process is largely irrelevant because other parts of the system to conspire to keep victims from reaching the hearing or getting justice.
- nraynaud 11y agoYes, I used the wrong concept. My point is that a fair trial against a defendant would also forfeit the ill acquired assets.
- samstave 11y agoI would like to see these numbers by each and every precinct or branch. There was a post some time back about some new building and equipment a Florida PD built with their stolen money.
- dredmorbius 11y agoWashington Post's Wonkblog has more on this with a graph of CA seizuires from 2001-2014. It's staggering (I looked it up doubting the Armstrong blog, ended up verifying it): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/10/report-in-lean-times-police-start-taking-a-lot-more-stuff-from-people/?hpid=hp_rhp-more-top-stories_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/10/repor...
- pns 11y agoLiving as an American in Kenya give me a lot of perspective to what the logical endpoint is if certain government practices get put on steroids, such as this. While in the United States it sounds alarmist to think of this all as a system of organized, police-mandated shakedowns, that's very common here. In 4 out of 5 times I hear folks get pulled over by cops, the driver had to pay a bribe. Police regularly go to businesses demanding regular payments else they shut down the companies. I wouldn't have give this a second thought before, but after living here, I see what its like living under degraded institutions.
- SixSigma 11y agoIn India it is similar. Also they (Indians) say "if you see a dead body don't call the police, you will end up in prison for murder"
- JulianMorrison 11y agoPolice civil asset forfeitures are burglaries.