53 ms·

Law allows police to seize and sell cars of non-lawbreakers, keeping proceeds

312 points by clouddrover 6y ago

RandoHolmes 6y ago
I often compare law enforcement to the Matrix. The government is the machines, and the citizens are the humans whose energy is being siphoned off, only in this case it's money, not energy. It's unethical and unconscionable, and yet they still do it.
- naringas 6y ago
  money is (in an indicrect and rough sense) a form of energy energy is all about the capacity to do work. how do you make humans do work? you give them money so money is all about the capacity to make humans do work.
  - bredren 6y ago
    Joules only do useful work when they are directed by humans. Money is the most quantifiable form of energy we have today.
  - EarthIsHome 6y ago
    > how do you make humans do work? you give them money I don't know if I buy this argument. Think pre-Columbus Native Americans in North America. Members of tribes still did work without money. What about people with the most money? Do they do the most work? We need to define what "most work" or "capacity" for work is. Money is a tool/technology that acts as a bridge between two quantities/qualities. More simple, money is a common means of exchange. Money is only an incentive to work for poor people because they will die without it. But this has to do with the capitalist system we live in, and it is not inherent to money itself.
    - duutfhhh 6y ago
      Money is when I conspire with a few thugs to block access to the only source of water in town and demand special tokens for access and when people ask where they can get those tokens, I tell that they can earn some by doing some work, like building a house for me or cooking some food.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  The original premise was that the machines used the computational power of the human brains rather than using the humans to generate electricity. Seems a lot more plausible to me, though not as apt in your analogy. </tangent>
  - noneeeed 6y ago
    This has always bothered me about the Matrix. The idea that the Matrix was made up of the human's brains made so much more sense than using them to generate heat. I always just watch it with this version in my mind and ignore the energy nonsense.
    - bena 6y ago
      You don't even have to change any of the movie. Morpheus can believe in the battery thing. He can tell everyone this because it's what he's been told, because it's what the person before told, etc. But I don't think it's been confirmed or denied in any of the material from the franchise. It's just been assumed. Morpheus could just be wrong.
      - iso1210 6y ago
        https://i.imgflip.com/4dkxhj.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/4dkxhj.jpg
      - foxdev 6y ago
        I always thought of him as an unreliable narrator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
        MayeulC 6y ago
        https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/main/unreliablenarrator https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/main/unreliablenarrat... also, I guess?
      - salawat 6y ago
twic 6y ago
This particular case is not nearly as bad as it sounds. Someone used a car to commit a crime, so the state seized the car. The car was owned by another person, who had lent it to the person who committed the crime. This sounds like a powerful deterrent to allowing your car to be used to commit crimes. > "You're asking one drunk person to determine whether another person is fit to drive. That's absurd," said attorney Chuck Ramsay. No, it's not. Just assume they aren't. What's the alternative? Merrily lend your car to someone who might be drunk, and not bear any consequences?
- vidanay 6y ago
  “It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.” - John Adams
  - darksaints 6y ago
    A wonderful quote. I can't help but see the similarity between this quote and the words of a 90 year old BLM protester that I met in Seattle recently: "No, I don't really care about the looters. Let them take what they want. Because it doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. Because guilty or innocent, if they're black, they're gonna end up in prison at some point before they die. Just like I did. For 24 years."
    - rimliu 6y ago
      So he was innocent and spent 24 years in prison? Or was he just trying to downplay his own responsibility?
      - darksaints 6y ago
        He claimed he was innocent, and I think I believe him. My therapist does some work in the state prison system, and he told me once that most prisoners go through the full 5 stages of grief usually within a couple of months. And by the end of those stages of grief, it is no longer painful for them to accept and openly admit that they committed a crime. He can only recall two long term prisoners that he worked with that refused to admit guilt after a year in prison...one of them has already been fully exonerated (not commuted, but actually cleared of all guilt), and the other was recently granted a retrial. Anecdotal, sure, but I find it believable.
dougmwne 6y ago
I think I'm more bothered by the misaligned incentives in this situation. Since the police department gets to keep the proceeds of the asset forfeitures, they will take as many cars as they can. Maybe a good fix would be to have proceeds go to education or social welfare. And the arresting officer shouldn't make the decision because it might lead to an abuse of power. An uninvolved third party should decide if they take the person's stuff. I'm not personally in favor of asset forfeiture but I do understand that enough people probably are that the law isn't likely to get repealed.
- endymi0n 6y ago
  This. If you allow capitalism to absorb the government itself, what you get is for-profit persecution. If crime generates income, be it through asset forfeiture, private prisons or a law system where you can win by just making the case big enough the other side can't pay defending the case, you align the incentives towards finding crime where there is none. It's no surprise the US has the highest prison population per capita in all the developed world and nobody trusts cops. The US is an interesting experiment in what you get if you try to run a government on market forces, but I prefer to live in a country where police don't have to earn their own income, but are civil servants, tenured for life. That may lead to inefficiencies, fine, but at least the incentives are aligned towards helping out and preventing crime instead of generating more of it. I haven't had a single instance I can remember where I was ever scared by police.
  - jliptzin 6y ago
    What country are you in?
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      According to a recent post, they are in Germany.
  - dougmwne 6y ago
    I have a number of European friends and they can't even wrap their heads around the USA's policing and crime issues. It's literally a foreign concept to them. Their attitude seems to be, "You're so rich. How could you get this so wrong?" I'd say you get it better than most, just add a big scoop of institutional racism and you're there. In the spirit of HN, I'm not trying to push a political opinion, but just to explain that to the BLM protesters, this is their reality.
pjc50 6y ago
And people wonder why there are massive anti-police protests all across the US.
aazaa 6y ago
> A controversial law that allows police in Minnesota to take and sell someone's personal property is coming under more scrutiny after the state patrol seized a woman's car during a drunk driving stop late last year, even though she was not driving or charged with a crime. > ... > Troopers seized Dietrich's car under Minnesota's forfeiture law that has allowed police agencies across the state to take close to 14,000 vehicles, generating nearly $10 million for those departments in just three years, according to a review of statewide data by 5 INVESTIGATES. How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country? The system of "checks and balances" that we're taught (maybe not anymore) has clearly failed here and in hundreds if not thousands of other cases, ranging from ravenous petty theft of private property owned by people charged with no crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... to secret courts and clear violations of the constitution: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790281142/scathing-report-puts-secret-fisa-court-into-the-spotlight-will-congress-act https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790281142/scathing-report-put... This is not what freedom looks like. It resembles another system, though. One that gets trotted out pretty regularly to smear political candidates and organization that try to effect change.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  It's not so much that the "checks and balances" have failed, but that some places are so partisan that they would literally rather support the people who are telling you the police can take your stuff without trial than consider voting for a different politican than they're used to. The checks and balances work when there are people actually on the other side of the scale.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 6y ago
    That’s a failure of checks and balances. If the same people are in charge of all sides it’s really just a one party system. The US constitution was not designed for political parties. If it it was you might see things mostly the same except the house was elected based on national vote for proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation Which would result in more fluid party representation.
csilverman 6y ago
My undertanding of asset forfeiture was that its original intent was to target criminal enterprises. If you bust a drug cartel, their (often significant) assets might as well go towards the common good. And somehow, that turned into a system where cops can stop you and take your property according to mere presumption of guilt, as in this stupefying example from a few years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/30/drug-cops-took-a-college-kids-life-savings-and-now-13-police-departments-want-a-cut/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/30/drug-... Any system with such a glaring conflict of interests and profound lack of accountability is going to be abused to the hilt, as this is. I don't have a problem with confiscating cars from habitual drunk drivers, but there has absolutely got to be more justification for it than this—to say nothing of due process—and it should go without saying that the confiscating agency should not directly benefit from these actions.
- csharptwdec19 6y ago
  The other part of it was to be able to 'chip away' at criminal enterprises. Especially in the past (i.e. before the age of digital surveillance, cheap/easy video, etc.) it was much more difficult to get enough evidence to catch some of the more-organized criminals. Remember, for a criminal act you are supposed to be considered guilty 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. That's a huge part of why asset forfeiture is civil and based on 'presumption of guilt'. Remember, the only thing they every got a solid conviction on for Al Capone was Tax Evasion. Unfortunately it is a system that provides perverse incentives for law enforcement that have been abused more and more over time.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > That's a huge part of why asset forfeiture is civil and based on 'presumption of guilt'. Remember, the only thing they every got a solid conviction on for Al Capone was Tax Evasion. Now of course, the big part of why Capone could not be caught otherwise was corruption - cops and officials paid by Capone or trading favors. Making asset forfeiture available with little oversight gives it to hands of the same people eager to cooperate with Capone. Had all cops and prosecutors and judges and jail workers bean ethical, we would not need oversight and simultaneously Capone would be caught sooner.
eric_b 6y ago
> She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul. So she lets someone else drive her car at felony reckless driving speeds while she sits in the passenger seat? I mean... this law sounds like it has some problems but I'm not sure this is the case that proves it. Surely she bears some responsibility here? Additionally, the car was used in a crime. Should you get your gun back if you loan it out and it's used to shoot somebody?
- bena 6y ago
  It does prove it. Here's what the police could have done instead. Arrest the driver for "felony reckless driving". Have the car impounded for the night. Drive the passenger to her place. Give her written instructions on how to reclaim her vehicle the next day. There. You've made the roads safer. You've made the people safer. And you haven't stolen someone's property. And you know what, yes, you should get eventually your gun back if it's loaned out and used to shoot someone (provided you didn't loan it out for the purpose of shooting someone). The law doesn't have "some problems". It is a problem.
- iso1210 6y ago
  If she wasn't in the car? What if the car was a rental? Is there a law against being a passenger? If so what level of proof is there?
- watwut 6y ago
  Yeah, it absolutely does prove it. The driver is responsible for driving the car, not other person sitting next to driver. Also, you can not loan your gun to random people, you can borrow your car to whoever you want to. In the situation when someone else can legally borrow your gun and uses it for crime, the item should be returned to you at the same exact moment when other evidence is returned after trial. Keeping gun as evidence is necessary for trial, keeping car as evidence is not necessary here. Aaaaand keeping evidence and seizing item for profit are also massively different actions.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > Surely she bears some responsibility here? If you're sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving an insane speed, what do you do? Hit the e-break? You're almost certainly going to die. Call thew police? The person is driving that crazy and you're in a locked room. You do the math. There is absolutely nothing a passenger can do.
TheButlerian 6y ago
The US pigs are in a league of their own.
arnonejoe 6y ago
What if the car is a lease?
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Guarantee there's probably some obscure clause in lease agreements that allow the dealership to sue you (or allow them to seize collateral from you) if you can't produce the car at the end.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    You don't need an obscure clause for that. Leases have a term.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Confiscation\Destruction of items used in crimes irrespective of ownership is pretty standard, even a little old fashioned. Owner\Lender beware is the principle here. Sometimes laws even specifically ban the loaning of items (say guns) to give added culpability. The point being, that you're at least somewhat responsible for the things people do with what you lend them...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  So, I shouldn't loan things I value to people who may fall under police scrutiny?
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Yeah, pretty much. Certainly for anything valuable or dangerous or potentially criminal. I won't comment on whether this is fair or effective or necessary or whatever. But it is quite standard in the USA and elsewhere. Partly its a way to make people enforce laws themselves (I'll care a lot more about whether you drunk drive my car if I might lose the car). Partly its just the concept of contributory negligence or joint venture / accessory. It also avoids weird loopholes: if we're both drunk, we could drive each others cars home and both avoid part of the penalty when we're caught.
    - Meph504 6y ago
      I think you are missing a key element of civil asset forfeiture, its based around the government starting legal proceedings against the property itself for "participating" in criminal activity. This is why the person who owns or posses the property doesn't have to be arrested or convicted of a crime for it to proceed. This goes back to English common law, but so did a lot of other really stupid ideas. Largely these laws are a result of judicial decisions of courts and not legislative bodies of government.
    - shaftway 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
holidayacct 6y ago
The reality is we need fewer, higher paid police with an extremely high barrier to entry. They should be required to go through the kind of training the military goes through for months so you see how they react under pressure. They should have people constantly giving them an opportunity to lie, cheat, steal and abuse their position of power to test if they are corrupt in any way. They should be monitored 24/7 and if they do anything that remotely looks suspicious they should be removed from their position of power. They should be required to go through intense training annually to see if they are still psychologically fit to do the job. Finally they should start as peace officers for several years and be required to communicate with people in difficult situations until it is possible to determine if they can be trusted. Everyone else should be put on peace officer duty with no weapons and no authority to do anything but observe and report information. The police don't need the amount of authority and power they have.
- opwieurposiu 6y ago
  Or just revoke qualified immunity and force them to pay for their own malpractice insurance. The most dangerous will be priced out.
  - holidayacct 6y ago
    I'm not in favor of removing qualified immunity because I have former classmates who are police officers and some of them work in places where they are constantly dealing with violent crime and they occasionally have to things that appear criminal but aren't. They have to spend weeks justifying why they made certain decisions and if they have a pattern of behavior they will lose their jobs. If you speak to really good police officers in an environment where they don't have to worry about retaliation they will tell you directly they don't trust most of the police force where they work. Some of them are more afraid of their co-workers than the people they encounter on the street.
    - Falling3 6y ago
      I genuinely do not understand the sentiment behind your first sentence after reading your last.
ausbah 6y ago
between this, qualified immunity, and their unions - its hard not to see how cops are nothing more than state protected racketeers
sbuttgereit 6y ago
Whenever I see a story pop up like this, and given the amount of advocacy I see on other topics discussed here on HN, I think it's fair to point out some charitable organizations that have been fighting this fight where it matters: in the courts. The Institute for Justice has long long fought against unjust takings such as described here: https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/ https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/ The Pacific Legal Foundation is also involved in this fight: https://pacificlegal.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-resist-reform-repeal/ https://pacificlegal.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-resist-refor... Of the charitable giving that I do, these organizations are at the top of my list. If you're in the U.S., I would urge you to consider contributing as well.
zby 6y ago
Hmm - shouldn't the title be like: "Law in the US ..."?

312 points by clouddrover 6y ago

I often compare law enforcement to the Matrix. The government is the machines, and the citizens are the humans whose energy is being siphoned off, only in this case it's money, not energy. It's unethical and unconscionable, and yet they still do it.

naringas 6y ago
money is (in an indicrect and rough sense) a form of energy energy is all about the capacity to do work. how do you make humans do work? you give them money so money is all about the capacity to make humans do work.
- bredren 6y ago
  Joules only do useful work when they are directed by humans. Money is the most quantifiable form of energy we have today.
- EarthIsHome 6y ago
  > how do you make humans do work? you give them money I don't know if I buy this argument. Think pre-Columbus Native Americans in North America. Members of tribes still did work without money. What about people with the most money? Do they do the most work? We need to define what "most work" or "capacity" for work is. Money is a tool/technology that acts as a bridge between two quantities/qualities. More simple, money is a common means of exchange. Money is only an incentive to work for poor people because they will die without it. But this has to do with the capitalist system we live in, and it is not inherent to money itself.
  - duutfhhh 6y ago
    Money is when I conspire with a few thugs to block access to the only source of water in town and demand special tokens for access and when people ask where they can get those tokens, I tell that they can earn some by doing some work, like building a house for me or cooking some food.
pfundstein 6y ago
The original premise was that the machines used the computational power of the human brains rather than using the humans to generate electricity. Seems a lot more plausible to me, though not as apt in your analogy. </tangent>
- noneeeed 6y ago
  This has always bothered me about the Matrix. The idea that the Matrix was made up of the human's brains made so much more sense than using them to generate heat. I always just watch it with this version in my mind and ignore the energy nonsense.
  - bena 6y ago
    You don't even have to change any of the movie. Morpheus can believe in the battery thing. He can tell everyone this because it's what he's been told, because it's what the person before told, etc. But I don't think it's been confirmed or denied in any of the material from the franchise. It's just been assumed. Morpheus could just be wrong.
    - iso1210 6y ago
      https://i.imgflip.com/4dkxhj.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/4dkxhj.jpg
    - foxdev 6y ago
      I always thought of him as an unreliable narrator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
      - MayeulC 6y ago
        https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/main/unreliablenarrator https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/main/unreliablenarrat... also, I guess?
    - salawat 6y ago

twic 6y ago

This particular case is not nearly as bad as it sounds. Someone used a car to commit a crime, so the state seized the car. The car was owned by another person, who had lent it to the person who committed the crime. This sounds like a powerful deterrent to allowing your car to be used to commit crimes. > "You're asking one drunk person to determine whether another person is fit to drive. That's absurd," said attorney Chuck Ramsay. No, it's not. Just assume they aren't. What's the alternative? Merrily lend your car to someone who might be drunk, and not bear any consequences?

vidanay 6y ago
“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.” - John Adams
- darksaints 6y ago
  A wonderful quote. I can't help but see the similarity between this quote and the words of a 90 year old BLM protester that I met in Seattle recently: "No, I don't really care about the looters. Let them take what they want. Because it doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. Because guilty or innocent, if they're black, they're gonna end up in prison at some point before they die. Just like I did. For 24 years."
  - rimliu 6y ago
    So he was innocent and spent 24 years in prison? Or was he just trying to downplay his own responsibility?
    - darksaints 6y ago
      He claimed he was innocent, and I think I believe him. My therapist does some work in the state prison system, and he told me once that most prisoners go through the full 5 stages of grief usually within a couple of months. And by the end of those stages of grief, it is no longer painful for them to accept and openly admit that they committed a crime. He can only recall two long term prisoners that he worked with that refused to admit guilt after a year in prison...one of them has already been fully exonerated (not commuted, but actually cleared of all guilt), and the other was recently granted a retrial. Anecdotal, sure, but I find it believable.

dougmwne 6y ago

I think I'm more bothered by the misaligned incentives in this situation. Since the police department gets to keep the proceeds of the asset forfeitures, they will take as many cars as they can. Maybe a good fix would be to have proceeds go to education or social welfare. And the arresting officer shouldn't make the decision because it might lead to an abuse of power. An uninvolved third party should decide if they take the person's stuff. I'm not personally in favor of asset forfeiture but I do understand that enough people probably are that the law isn't likely to get repealed.

endymi0n 6y ago
This. If you allow capitalism to absorb the government itself, what you get is for-profit persecution. If crime generates income, be it through asset forfeiture, private prisons or a law system where you can win by just making the case big enough the other side can't pay defending the case, you align the incentives towards finding crime where there is none. It's no surprise the US has the highest prison population per capita in all the developed world and nobody trusts cops. The US is an interesting experiment in what you get if you try to run a government on market forces, but I prefer to live in a country where police don't have to earn their own income, but are civil servants, tenured for life. That may lead to inefficiencies, fine, but at least the incentives are aligned towards helping out and preventing crime instead of generating more of it. I haven't had a single instance I can remember where I was ever scared by police.
- jliptzin 6y ago
  What country are you in?
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    According to a recent post, they are in Germany.
- dougmwne 6y ago
  I have a number of European friends and they can't even wrap their heads around the USA's policing and crime issues. It's literally a foreign concept to them. Their attitude seems to be, "You're so rich. How could you get this so wrong?" I'd say you get it better than most, just add a big scoop of institutional racism and you're there. In the spirit of HN, I'm not trying to push a political opinion, but just to explain that to the BLM protesters, this is their reality.

pjc50 6y ago

And people wonder why there are massive anti-police protests all across the US.

aazaa 6y ago

> A controversial law that allows police in Minnesota to take and sell someone's personal property is coming under more scrutiny after the state patrol seized a woman's car during a drunk driving stop late last year, even though she was not driving or charged with a crime. > ... > Troopers seized Dietrich's car under Minnesota's forfeiture law that has allowed police agencies across the state to take close to 14,000 vehicles, generating nearly $10 million for those departments in just three years, according to a review of statewide data by 5 INVESTIGATES. How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country? The system of "checks and balances" that we're taught (maybe not anymore) has clearly failed here and in hundreds if not thousands of other cases, ranging from ravenous petty theft of private property owned by people charged with no crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... to secret courts and clear violations of the constitution: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790281142/scathing-report-puts-secret-fisa-court-into-the-spotlight-will-congress-act https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790281142/scathing-report-put... This is not what freedom looks like. It resembles another system, though. One that gets trotted out pretty regularly to smear political candidates and organization that try to effect change.

microcolonel 6y ago
It's not so much that the "checks and balances" have failed, but that some places are so partisan that they would literally rather support the people who are telling you the police can take your stuff without trial than consider voting for a different politican than they're used to. The checks and balances work when there are people actually on the other side of the scale.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 6y ago
  That’s a failure of checks and balances. If the same people are in charge of all sides it’s really just a one party system. The US constitution was not designed for political parties. If it it was you might see things mostly the same except the house was elected based on national vote for proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation Which would result in more fluid party representation.

csilverman 6y ago

My undertanding of asset forfeiture was that its original intent was to target criminal enterprises. If you bust a drug cartel, their (often significant) assets might as well go towards the common good. And somehow, that turned into a system where cops can stop you and take your property according to mere presumption of guilt, as in this stupefying example from a few years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/30/drug-cops-took-a-college-kids-life-savings-and-now-13-police-departments-want-a-cut/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/30/drug-... Any system with such a glaring conflict of interests and profound lack of accountability is going to be abused to the hilt, as this is. I don't have a problem with confiscating cars from habitual drunk drivers, but there has absolutely got to be more justification for it than this—to say nothing of due process—and it should go without saying that the confiscating agency should not directly benefit from these actions.

csharptwdec19 6y ago
The other part of it was to be able to 'chip away' at criminal enterprises. Especially in the past (i.e. before the age of digital surveillance, cheap/easy video, etc.) it was much more difficult to get enough evidence to catch some of the more-organized criminals. Remember, for a criminal act you are supposed to be considered guilty 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. That's a huge part of why asset forfeiture is civil and based on 'presumption of guilt'. Remember, the only thing they every got a solid conviction on for Al Capone was Tax Evasion. Unfortunately it is a system that provides perverse incentives for law enforcement that have been abused more and more over time.
- watwut 6y ago
  > That's a huge part of why asset forfeiture is civil and based on 'presumption of guilt'. Remember, the only thing they every got a solid conviction on for Al Capone was Tax Evasion. Now of course, the big part of why Capone could not be caught otherwise was corruption - cops and officials paid by Capone or trading favors. Making asset forfeiture available with little oversight gives it to hands of the same people eager to cooperate with Capone. Had all cops and prosecutors and judges and jail workers bean ethical, we would not need oversight and simultaneously Capone would be caught sooner.

eric_b 6y ago

> She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul. So she lets someone else drive her car at felony reckless driving speeds while she sits in the passenger seat? I mean... this law sounds like it has some problems but I'm not sure this is the case that proves it. Surely she bears some responsibility here? Additionally, the car was used in a crime. Should you get your gun back if you loan it out and it's used to shoot somebody?

bena 6y ago
It does prove it. Here's what the police could have done instead. Arrest the driver for "felony reckless driving". Have the car impounded for the night. Drive the passenger to her place. Give her written instructions on how to reclaim her vehicle the next day. There. You've made the roads safer. You've made the people safer. And you haven't stolen someone's property. And you know what, yes, you should get eventually your gun back if it's loaned out and used to shoot someone (provided you didn't loan it out for the purpose of shooting someone). The law doesn't have "some problems". It is a problem.
iso1210 6y ago
If she wasn't in the car? What if the car was a rental? Is there a law against being a passenger? If so what level of proof is there?
watwut 6y ago
Yeah, it absolutely does prove it. The driver is responsible for driving the car, not other person sitting next to driver. Also, you can not loan your gun to random people, you can borrow your car to whoever you want to. In the situation when someone else can legally borrow your gun and uses it for crime, the item should be returned to you at the same exact moment when other evidence is returned after trial. Keeping gun as evidence is necessary for trial, keeping car as evidence is not necessary here. Aaaaand keeping evidence and seizing item for profit are also massively different actions.
jedimastert 6y ago
> Surely she bears some responsibility here? If you're sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving an insane speed, what do you do? Hit the e-break? You're almost certainly going to die. Call thew police? The person is driving that crazy and you're in a locked room. You do the math. There is absolutely nothing a passenger can do.

TheButlerian 6y ago

The US pigs are in a league of their own.

arnonejoe 6y ago

What if the car is a lease?

Dirlewanger 6y ago
Guarantee there's probably some obscure clause in lease agreements that allow the dealership to sue you (or allow them to seize collateral from you) if you can't produce the car at the end.
- kube-system 6y ago
  You don't need an obscure clause for that. Leases have a term.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Confiscation\Destruction of items used in crimes irrespective of ownership is pretty standard, even a little old fashioned. Owner\Lender beware is the principle here. Sometimes laws even specifically ban the loaning of items (say guns) to give added culpability. The point being, that you're at least somewhat responsible for the things people do with what you lend them...

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WhompingWindows 6y ago
So, I shouldn't loan things I value to people who may fall under police scrutiny?
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Yeah, pretty much. Certainly for anything valuable or dangerous or potentially criminal. I won't comment on whether this is fair or effective or necessary or whatever. But it is quite standard in the USA and elsewhere. Partly its a way to make people enforce laws themselves (I'll care a lot more about whether you drunk drive my car if I might lose the car). Partly its just the concept of contributory negligence or joint venture / accessory. It also avoids weird loopholes: if we're both drunk, we could drive each others cars home and both avoid part of the penalty when we're caught.
  - Meph504 6y ago
    I think you are missing a key element of civil asset forfeiture, its based around the government starting legal proceedings against the property itself for "participating" in criminal activity. This is why the person who owns or posses the property doesn't have to be arrested or convicted of a crime for it to proceed. This goes back to English common law, but so did a lot of other really stupid ideas. Largely these laws are a result of judicial decisions of courts and not legislative bodies of government.
  - shaftway 6y ago

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holidayacct 6y ago

The reality is we need fewer, higher paid police with an extremely high barrier to entry. They should be required to go through the kind of training the military goes through for months so you see how they react under pressure. They should have people constantly giving them an opportunity to lie, cheat, steal and abuse their position of power to test if they are corrupt in any way. They should be monitored 24/7 and if they do anything that remotely looks suspicious they should be removed from their position of power. They should be required to go through intense training annually to see if they are still psychologically fit to do the job. Finally they should start as peace officers for several years and be required to communicate with people in difficult situations until it is possible to determine if they can be trusted. Everyone else should be put on peace officer duty with no weapons and no authority to do anything but observe and report information. The police don't need the amount of authority and power they have.

opwieurposiu 6y ago
Or just revoke qualified immunity and force them to pay for their own malpractice insurance. The most dangerous will be priced out.
- holidayacct 6y ago
  I'm not in favor of removing qualified immunity because I have former classmates who are police officers and some of them work in places where they are constantly dealing with violent crime and they occasionally have to things that appear criminal but aren't. They have to spend weeks justifying why they made certain decisions and if they have a pattern of behavior they will lose their jobs. If you speak to really good police officers in an environment where they don't have to worry about retaliation they will tell you directly they don't trust most of the police force where they work. Some of them are more afraid of their co-workers than the people they encounter on the street.
  - Falling3 6y ago
    I genuinely do not understand the sentiment behind your first sentence after reading your last.

ausbah 6y ago

between this, qualified immunity, and their unions - its hard not to see how cops are nothing more than state protected racketeers

sbuttgereit 6y ago

Whenever I see a story pop up like this, and given the amount of advocacy I see on other topics discussed here on HN, I think it's fair to point out some charitable organizations that have been fighting this fight where it matters: in the courts. The Institute for Justice has long long fought against unjust takings such as described here: https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/ https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/ The Pacific Legal Foundation is also involved in this fight: https://pacificlegal.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-resist-reform-repeal/ https://pacificlegal.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-resist-refor... Of the charitable giving that I do, these organizations are at the top of my list. If you're in the U.S., I would urge you to consider contributing as well.

zby 6y ago

Hmm - shouldn't the title be like: "Law in the US ..."?