11 ms·

> 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

by 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.
- tallship2020 6y ago
  Originally introduced : https://www.congress.gov/bill/98th-congress/senate-bill/948 https://www.congress.gov/bill/98th-congress/senate-bill/948 Sponsor: Sen. Biden, Joseph R., Jr. [D-DE] (Introduced 03/24/1983) A quick check with Congress shows various bills introduced to address excesses : https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr5212 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr5212 Tim Walberg Sponsor. Representative for Michigan's 7th congressional district. Republican. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1219/all-info https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1219... Sponsor: Rep. Collins, Doug [R-GA-9] (Introduced 02/14/2019)
- salawat 6y ago
  The two party system doesn't help either. The political spectrum encompasses enough nuance that a winner-take-all duopoly on candidate selection and orchestration is severely crippling the quality and variety of political inputs to the System. To be honest, I'd almost prefer a neutral organization specialized in facilitating any political campaign to the System of Political parties we have now. If I have to hear "You have to vote Republican or Democrat or it's a wasted vote," again from people cavetching about the state of the political climate and situation in the U.S., and I may not continue to be so adept at not lashing back with a sharp-tongued response. Until the Establishment on both major political parties come to terms with the fact that both of them can lose there will be no fundamental change in direction of politics. I don't even count the pathetic excuse for statesmanship we're currently experiencing, because those are mainly differences in amplitude of already established patterns and tendencies rather than an appreciable shift in Qualitative policymaking.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  That doesn’t explain civil asset forfeiture in states with a supermajority of one party or another.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    The supermajority is the core of the problem.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Hardly, you also don’t see states doing much better on this issue when the legislature is heavily contested.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
It boggles my mind that there’s any debate about whether there are systemic issues with police when we literally have laws on the books that explicitly allow cops to steal from civilians.
- dylan604 6y ago
  A law meant to deter crime instead gets used as a budget booster. Proposing to change that law in support of personal property rights and nothing else, and you will immediately be tagged with supporting de-funding of the police. They will cry about how they use this system to prop up their budgets when the local governments fail to adequately fund them.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  In fairness, "systemic" is not well-defined, and it's routinely used as a weasel word. For example, if we're talking about police shootings of Black Americans, and I invoke "systemic racism" to imply that police are prejudice against blacks in their killings and thus America is a racist ethnostate, you could point out that police kill whites and blacks at comparable rates when accounting for crime rates, at which point I would retreat to "'systematic' refers to whatever system is causing blacks to commit crimes at elevated rates, i.e., legacy of slavery and racism" which is probably correct but supports an opposite set of moral implications and solutions. In my experience, people who are willing to be honest, precise, and consistent in their terminology tend to have more reasonable and productive debates. They can often agree on many things with the people who are supposed to be their enemies and the disagreements are more understandable. Notably, most Americans probably agree that this law is heinously unjust. EDIT: People are fixating on the example and assuming that crime rate disparities are manufactured or a result of law-enforcement bias, but that doesn't hold up to the criminology literature, which controls for LEO bias in a number of ways, including by comparing data sources against victim surveys. So while it's fair to argue that criminologists are failing to account for something, we're not talking about ignorant people making stupid extrapolations. If we're going to go off-topic, then let's at least make it a productive, enlightening digression.
  - 6y ago
iso1210 6y ago
So 1) Rent a car from Hertz 2) Drink drive 3) Car gets forfeited Or 1) Rent a hotel room from IHG 2) Drug deal in room 3) Room gets forfeited Or 1) Hire an EC2 instance from AWS 2) Use it to try to hack NASA 3) AWS datacentre is forfeited Do I have that right? Or are there different rules for large organisations?
- rtkwe 6y ago
  There have always been different rules for large corporations (and the rich) because they have money to challenge the state in court. White collar crime isn't prosecuted as much because the laws were written with 'intent' clauses that make it easier to avoid convictions and difficult to prove so cases are more expensive and complicated. Most suits against corporations take years and millions of dollars to resolve. Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft, the only reasonable justification for it is for unclaimed property, the second someone is found to be the owner you're seizing their property which there are (theoretically) [0] constitutional protections against. [0] I say theoretically because legal protections only 'really' exist when they're enforced against the government.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- eloff 6y ago
  That would violate rule number one of being a bully, never pick on someone who can fight back. You have to look for that struggling single mother, she doesn't have the time, energy, or resources to protest if you steal from her.
- dylan604 6y ago
  If you read the fine print of your rental agreement, you will find that if for any reason the car becomes unrentable while you are in possession of it, you are responsible for the rental fee until the car is good to go. The cops would not be interested in the other scenarios though. They can only make money from the confiscated items if they can sell/auction them. I guarantee AMZN has more lawyers than any 3 letter agency, and will not get close to the front door. The hotel room concept is just too far even in a hyperbolic sense. Change it to rent an AirBnB that is a single family domicile, and you have a better leg to stand on
NoOneNew 6y ago
Here's the issue that lots of people fail to understand. Once it's figured out, a lot of fixes can happen. The "Police" are departments of city/state politicians. "Sheriff" is an elected offices for a county. The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ". Within a county, the sheriff has the highest law enforcement jurisdiction below the US Marshal cowboying in and taking away their badges. They can even arrest FBI, ATF and ignore Fed requests in general (limitations to this, especially due to paperwork, but the legal right is there). This is why you get plenty of Sheriffs saying, "I and my deputies will not enforce XYZ law". Why? Because the Sheriff reports directly to "the people" of the county. He/she is an elected official. Sometimes, they're not even prior law enforcement. But they have a direct dialogue with their voter base (most of the time) because they have a rather direct cause/effect of their time in "office". Also why it's called a Sheriff's Office instead of department (when people know what they're doing... some states are weird/dumb). The "police" report to the politicians of their jurisdiction. When certain mayors say, "The police are doing naughty things"... dude... they're on the mayor's orders. The chief can be instantly booted out by the mayor. "It's a travesty that police are overly patrolling certain sectors". YOU APPROVE THE SECTORS AND MADE THE LAWS FOR THEM TO DO SO! "The cops shouldn't be funded through forfeiture/tickets/etc." The politicians are the ones who put that system in place! Police don't make laws, they enforce them according to their hiring governing body... their city/town. Please, people of the USA, for the love of all things good, learn about your local politicians and vote. Quit this crap of these mayors acting surprised and shifting the blame to the police. The politicians are the ones telling them what to do. Stop being surprised and ignorant. In the end, the public is to blame for, "Politicians have our best interests at heart if we don't pay attention to what they're doing." I don't care what party you belong to, it's your responsibility to keep a politician in check, no matter their party as well.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ". If you actually follow local politics, you'll often find that, if the police are even following directions are all, that behind those directions, the most powerful interest group promoting those local policies and able to defeat politicians that displease them is...the police.
dghughes 6y ago
> generating nearly $10 million for those departments Any forfeiture law should state proceeds would go to a third party. Having the same party (police) that implements the law benefiting from it is just plain wrong.
- chmod775 6y ago
  Forfeiture laws like that should not exist if you want to have separation of powers. It's a form of punishment and thus should only be a power wielded by the judicative, for reasons neatly demonstrated by Minnesota police.
- jrs235 6y ago
  Did you get to the part where the agency is seizing some vehicles and then has to pay to store them? Someone should do a little more digging into that... wouldn't doubt it if the owners of some of those storage facilities have connections with some of the people seizing the vehicles..
  - mdavis6890 6y ago
    Yes, and the towing companies as well. I'm sure they are very much in favor of these laws.
vmchale 6y ago
Police used to be very popular/trustworthy (in the public imagination) until recently.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Police used to be very popular/trustworthy (in the public imagination) until recently. The people who are most consistently and vividly at the receiving end of the untrustworthiness of police (whether racial minorities or otherwise) tend to be politically and socially marginalized, as historically has been support for their interests. For the less marginalized, if they were in the receiving end of police injustice, it was usually at least masked in a more convincing veil of plausible deniability. But those people who get the worst of it haven't seen police as trustworthy for, well, as long as there have been police. For the simple reason that police have never been, even in a simulated way, trustworthy for them.
- Kapura 6y ago
  That public perception has a lot to do with Dick Wolf creating the Law & Order television series. Historically, cops have not been loved by their communities (one of the reasons the supreme court saw fit to introduce the absurd doctrine of "qualified immunity" was because cops had it hard enough without also being legally on the hook for every action they take). The L.A. times had a very interesting piece on the topic of cops in the media: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-09/dick-wolf-law-and-order-chicago-pd-fbi-color-of-change https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-...
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Police are very loved by groups of people who are not targeted unfairly. Have you not seen the whole “Back the Blue” and “Blue Lives Matter”?
    - Kapura 6y ago
      I think that the popularisation of hero cops in media leads directly into these movements. I believe people would be more willing to examine the actions of police critically if they weren't being sold as "the good guys" for several hours of primetime television a week.
mc32 6y ago
It’s definitely overreach. I believe these will be changed over time. Laws change slowly, but on balance it’s a good thing. It’s more predictable and the landscape doesn’t change from admin to admin.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Please call it unConstitutional, because that is precisely what it is. Also the reasoning behind it is only supported by precedent, and has nothing to do with logic, fairness, or you constitutional rights.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country? Articles like this do genuinely fill me with patriotic anger. Still, my limited knowledge of American history is that it's filled with reprehensible (as well as noble) conduct. So I don't wonder "what happened" to this country because AFAIK it's always been flawed.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I'm not even American, not even living in the US, not even considering the idea of living in the US, and I'm angry at this. It's not patriotic anger - it's humanitarian anger.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MisterBastahrd 6y ago
There is a large segment of the American public who are absolutely fine with horrific punishments because they believe that they are safe from law enforcement because they "do everything right," and so if you don't "do everything right," you deserve to be harshly punished to get you back in line.
8bitsrule 6y ago
I'm generally against property being taken in association with crimes. Particularly by police without supporting paperwork and oversight. But in this case: "She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul. When the driver ... refused a breathalyzer, he was arrested on suspicion of DWI..." She was able to buy the car back. Drunk drivers cause many injuries and deaths. What happened to this country is that we decided that thousands of drunks on the road was not acceptable. MADD was founded in 1980 to get that fixed. Whatever it takes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jqvincent16 6y ago
  “She was able to buy the car back.” Think about that for a minute. A state sanctioned gang decided her car, that she owned, was no longer her property. Then they were graceful enough to allow her to buy back her stolen property. It’s absolutely disgusting and unacceptable in modern society. People like you who rationalize this behavior make me sick.
LiquidSky 6y ago
>How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country? Because, especially among those who self-identify as "patriotic American[s]", the discussion always goes something like this: if you're dealing with the police in any way then you must have done something wrong and are therefore a criminal >>> criminals are bad people who deserved to be punished >>> who cares what happens to them, we shouldn't coddle criminals Any suggestion that any part of this is wrong is met with accusations of being soft on crime or the like, which is generally a political death sentence in the US.
castratikron 6y ago
The rest of the article gives some context: >She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul. >When the driver, Syrgeo Perez, 30, refused a breathalyzer, he was arrested on suspicion of DWI and troopers seized Dietrich's car using Minnesota's forfeiture law. Do you really think that seizure was completely and totally unwarranted given the circumstances? If I were her, I would make him pay whatever it took to get my car back.
- snypher 6y ago
  I don't think blanket penalties should apply to some situation as described by one party. Eg, if the man's family member was in hospital and he was under a great deal of stress, he could have been speeding to the hospital, refused a traffic stop and so on. But this is a circumstance for the judge to decide on a case basis. See death penalty for murder, not everyone convicted of murder is guilty and some have been executed by the state. I personally don't think it's worth the risk of executing an innocent person just to satisfy some vengeance or whatever justification we put on it.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Absolutely unwarranted. The law has no right to do this. Sure they can take it and charge a fine. Keeping a vehicle for this? No, this basically means there is no limit to how they can punish you, they can just take any property you or someone else has (where the crime was committed) with the current precedents. That's what fines are for. Sometimes cars are kept for collateral for that, but these civil asset forfeitures are on top of crimes AND you don't even have to get convicted. They drop all charges and sue the car for going fast and then keep it. Yes it is that stupid and their reasoning has Siberian Sink Hole size holes in it.
sieabahlpark 6y ago
Oh the state that has been owned and run by single party (democrats in this case) for decades is corrupt? Duh, when people are guaranteed an election they tend to write laws for whoever pays them the most. There isn't anything surprising here it's a lack of accountability by anyone to talk about it. The only reason why it's causing issues now is because it involves police and it's cool to hate law enforcement now. I'm not surprised to see the democrats try to build a strong government here because that's what they were elected to do.
bsd44 6y ago
"How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country?" Because patriotism in America originates from fear, not from love for the country. Much like in China where people dare not say anything critical of the government to their peers because they worry that their peers will see them as traitors and they'll be shun from society; when everybody thinks like that then nobody dares to speak their mind and talk about issues honestly. So in America the patriotism and "love" for the country is expressed through various mantras such as "thank you for your service", saluting passing fighter jets, hanging American flags on every occasion and the unconditional support for suspicious budgets and laws of all sorts and war orgies orchestrated by the corporate government; many people I would argue don't actually support any of that but if they were to speak up, they would be seen as un-American which is the worst crime you can possibly commit living in America.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Libertarian party has spoken about this for decades and people automatically ignore them and here we are. Sheriffs are using it as an assumed revenue source. GF caught smoking in your car? Take it, let her off with a warning, and sell it and keep the $20k . They actually sue the car. The sheer stupidity of that if overwhelmingly apparent and yet they do it and get away with it. This isn't in podunk towns, this is all over the USA and only a few states have any laws limiting it.

by aazaa 6y ago

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.
tallship2020 6y ago
Originally introduced : https://www.congress.gov/bill/98th-congress/senate-bill/948 https://www.congress.gov/bill/98th-congress/senate-bill/948 Sponsor: Sen. Biden, Joseph R., Jr. [D-DE] (Introduced 03/24/1983) A quick check with Congress shows various bills introduced to address excesses : https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr5212 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr5212 Tim Walberg Sponsor. Representative for Michigan's 7th congressional district. Republican. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1219/all-info https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1219... Sponsor: Rep. Collins, Doug [R-GA-9] (Introduced 02/14/2019)
salawat 6y ago
The two party system doesn't help either. The political spectrum encompasses enough nuance that a winner-take-all duopoly on candidate selection and orchestration is severely crippling the quality and variety of political inputs to the System. To be honest, I'd almost prefer a neutral organization specialized in facilitating any political campaign to the System of Political parties we have now. If I have to hear "You have to vote Republican or Democrat or it's a wasted vote," again from people cavetching about the state of the political climate and situation in the U.S., and I may not continue to be so adept at not lashing back with a sharp-tongued response. Until the Establishment on both major political parties come to terms with the fact that both of them can lose there will be no fundamental change in direction of politics. I don't even count the pathetic excuse for statesmanship we're currently experiencing, because those are mainly differences in amplitude of already established patterns and tendencies rather than an appreciable shift in Qualitative policymaking.
ashtonkem 6y ago
That doesn’t explain civil asset forfeiture in states with a supermajority of one party or another.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  The supermajority is the core of the problem.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Hardly, you also don’t see states doing much better on this issue when the legislature is heavily contested.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

It boggles my mind that there’s any debate about whether there are systemic issues with police when we literally have laws on the books that explicitly allow cops to steal from civilians.

dylan604 6y ago
A law meant to deter crime instead gets used as a budget booster. Proposing to change that law in support of personal property rights and nothing else, and you will immediately be tagged with supporting de-funding of the police. They will cry about how they use this system to prop up their budgets when the local governments fail to adequately fund them.
throwaway894345 6y ago
In fairness, "systemic" is not well-defined, and it's routinely used as a weasel word. For example, if we're talking about police shootings of Black Americans, and I invoke "systemic racism" to imply that police are prejudice against blacks in their killings and thus America is a racist ethnostate, you could point out that police kill whites and blacks at comparable rates when accounting for crime rates, at which point I would retreat to "'systematic' refers to whatever system is causing blacks to commit crimes at elevated rates, i.e., legacy of slavery and racism" which is probably correct but supports an opposite set of moral implications and solutions. In my experience, people who are willing to be honest, precise, and consistent in their terminology tend to have more reasonable and productive debates. They can often agree on many things with the people who are supposed to be their enemies and the disagreements are more understandable. Notably, most Americans probably agree that this law is heinously unjust. EDIT: People are fixating on the example and assuming that crime rate disparities are manufactured or a result of law-enforcement bias, but that doesn't hold up to the criminology literature, which controls for LEO bias in a number of ways, including by comparing data sources against victim surveys. So while it's fair to argue that criminologists are failing to account for something, we're not talking about ignorant people making stupid extrapolations. If we're going to go off-topic, then let's at least make it a productive, enlightening digression.
- 6y ago

iso1210 6y ago

So 1) Rent a car from Hertz 2) Drink drive 3) Car gets forfeited Or 1) Rent a hotel room from IHG 2) Drug deal in room 3) Room gets forfeited Or 1) Hire an EC2 instance from AWS 2) Use it to try to hack NASA 3) AWS datacentre is forfeited Do I have that right? Or are there different rules for large organisations?

rtkwe 6y ago
There have always been different rules for large corporations (and the rich) because they have money to challenge the state in court. White collar crime isn't prosecuted as much because the laws were written with 'intent' clauses that make it easier to avoid convictions and difficult to prove so cases are more expensive and complicated. Most suits against corporations take years and millions of dollars to resolve. Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft, the only reasonable justification for it is for unclaimed property, the second someone is found to be the owner you're seizing their property which there are (theoretically) [0] constitutional protections against. [0] I say theoretically because legal protections only 'really' exist when they're enforced against the government.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
eloff 6y ago
That would violate rule number one of being a bully, never pick on someone who can fight back. You have to look for that struggling single mother, she doesn't have the time, energy, or resources to protest if you steal from her.
dylan604 6y ago
If you read the fine print of your rental agreement, you will find that if for any reason the car becomes unrentable while you are in possession of it, you are responsible for the rental fee until the car is good to go. The cops would not be interested in the other scenarios though. They can only make money from the confiscated items if they can sell/auction them. I guarantee AMZN has more lawyers than any 3 letter agency, and will not get close to the front door. The hotel room concept is just too far even in a hyperbolic sense. Change it to rent an AirBnB that is a single family domicile, and you have a better leg to stand on

NoOneNew 6y ago

Here's the issue that lots of people fail to understand. Once it's figured out, a lot of fixes can happen. The "Police" are departments of city/state politicians. "Sheriff" is an elected offices for a county. The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ". Within a county, the sheriff has the highest law enforcement jurisdiction below the US Marshal cowboying in and taking away their badges. They can even arrest FBI, ATF and ignore Fed requests in general (limitations to this, especially due to paperwork, but the legal right is there). This is why you get plenty of Sheriffs saying, "I and my deputies will not enforce XYZ law". Why? Because the Sheriff reports directly to "the people" of the county. He/she is an elected official. Sometimes, they're not even prior law enforcement. But they have a direct dialogue with their voter base (most of the time) because they have a rather direct cause/effect of their time in "office". Also why it's called a Sheriff's Office instead of department (when people know what they're doing... some states are weird/dumb). The "police" report to the politicians of their jurisdiction. When certain mayors say, "The police are doing naughty things"... dude... they're on the mayor's orders. The chief can be instantly booted out by the mayor. "It's a travesty that police are overly patrolling certain sectors". YOU APPROVE THE SECTORS AND MADE THE LAWS FOR THEM TO DO SO! "The cops shouldn't be funded through forfeiture/tickets/etc." The politicians are the ones who put that system in place! Police don't make laws, they enforce them according to their hiring governing body... their city/town. Please, people of the USA, for the love of all things good, learn about your local politicians and vote. Quit this crap of these mayors acting surprised and shifting the blame to the police. The politicians are the ones telling them what to do. Stop being surprised and ignorant. In the end, the public is to blame for, "Politicians have our best interests at heart if we don't pay attention to what they're doing." I don't care what party you belong to, it's your responsibility to keep a politician in check, no matter their party as well.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ". If you actually follow local politics, you'll often find that, if the police are even following directions are all, that behind those directions, the most powerful interest group promoting those local policies and able to defeat politicians that displease them is...the police.

dghughes 6y ago

> generating nearly $10 million for those departments Any forfeiture law should state proceeds would go to a third party. Having the same party (police) that implements the law benefiting from it is just plain wrong.

chmod775 6y ago
Forfeiture laws like that should not exist if you want to have separation of powers. It's a form of punishment and thus should only be a power wielded by the judicative, for reasons neatly demonstrated by Minnesota police.
jrs235 6y ago
Did you get to the part where the agency is seizing some vehicles and then has to pay to store them? Someone should do a little more digging into that... wouldn't doubt it if the owners of some of those storage facilities have connections with some of the people seizing the vehicles..
- mdavis6890 6y ago
  Yes, and the towing companies as well. I'm sure they are very much in favor of these laws.

vmchale 6y ago

Police used to be very popular/trustworthy (in the public imagination) until recently.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Police used to be very popular/trustworthy (in the public imagination) until recently. The people who are most consistently and vividly at the receiving end of the untrustworthiness of police (whether racial minorities or otherwise) tend to be politically and socially marginalized, as historically has been support for their interests. For the less marginalized, if they were in the receiving end of police injustice, it was usually at least masked in a more convincing veil of plausible deniability. But those people who get the worst of it haven't seen police as trustworthy for, well, as long as there have been police. For the simple reason that police have never been, even in a simulated way, trustworthy for them.
Kapura 6y ago
That public perception has a lot to do with Dick Wolf creating the Law & Order television series. Historically, cops have not been loved by their communities (one of the reasons the supreme court saw fit to introduce the absurd doctrine of "qualified immunity" was because cops had it hard enough without also being legally on the hook for every action they take). The L.A. times had a very interesting piece on the topic of cops in the media: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-09/dick-wolf-law-and-order-chicago-pd-fbi-color-of-change https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-...
- scarface74 6y ago
  Police are very loved by groups of people who are not targeted unfairly. Have you not seen the whole “Back the Blue” and “Blue Lives Matter”?
  - Kapura 6y ago
    I think that the popularisation of hero cops in media leads directly into these movements. I believe people would be more willing to examine the actions of police critically if they weren't being sold as "the good guys" for several hours of primetime television a week.

mc32 6y ago

It’s definitely overreach. I believe these will be changed over time. Laws change slowly, but on balance it’s a good thing. It’s more predictable and the landscape doesn’t change from admin to admin.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Please call it unConstitutional, because that is precisely what it is. Also the reasoning behind it is only supported by precedent, and has nothing to do with logic, fairness, or you constitutional rights.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

> How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country? Articles like this do genuinely fill me with patriotic anger. Still, my limited knowledge of American history is that it's filled with reprehensible (as well as noble) conduct. So I don't wonder "what happened" to this country because AFAIK it's always been flawed.

rbanffy 6y ago
I'm not even American, not even living in the US, not even considering the idea of living in the US, and I'm angry at this. It's not patriotic anger - it's humanitarian anger.

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MisterBastahrd 6y ago

There is a large segment of the American public who are absolutely fine with horrific punishments because they believe that they are safe from law enforcement because they "do everything right," and so if you don't "do everything right," you deserve to be harshly punished to get you back in line.

8bitsrule 6y ago

I'm generally against property being taken in association with crimes. Particularly by police without supporting paperwork and oversight. But in this case: "She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul. When the driver ... refused a breathalyzer, he was arrested on suspicion of DWI..." She was able to buy the car back. Drunk drivers cause many injuries and deaths. What happened to this country is that we decided that thousands of drunks on the road was not acceptable. MADD was founded in 1980 to get that fixed. Whatever it takes.

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jqvincent16 6y ago
“She was able to buy the car back.” Think about that for a minute. A state sanctioned gang decided her car, that she owned, was no longer her property. Then they were graceful enough to allow her to buy back her stolen property. It’s absolutely disgusting and unacceptable in modern society. People like you who rationalize this behavior make me sick.

LiquidSky 6y ago

>How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country? Because, especially among those who self-identify as "patriotic American[s]", the discussion always goes something like this: if you're dealing with the police in any way then you must have done something wrong and are therefore a criminal >>> criminals are bad people who deserved to be punished >>> who cares what happens to them, we shouldn't coddle criminals Any suggestion that any part of this is wrong is met with accusations of being soft on crime or the like, which is generally a political death sentence in the US.

castratikron 6y ago

The rest of the article gives some context: >She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul. >When the driver, Syrgeo Perez, 30, refused a breathalyzer, he was arrested on suspicion of DWI and troopers seized Dietrich's car using Minnesota's forfeiture law. Do you really think that seizure was completely and totally unwarranted given the circumstances? If I were her, I would make him pay whatever it took to get my car back.

snypher 6y ago
I don't think blanket penalties should apply to some situation as described by one party. Eg, if the man's family member was in hospital and he was under a great deal of stress, he could have been speeding to the hospital, refused a traffic stop and so on. But this is a circumstance for the judge to decide on a case basis. See death penalty for murder, not everyone convicted of murder is guilty and some have been executed by the state. I personally don't think it's worth the risk of executing an innocent person just to satisfy some vengeance or whatever justification we put on it.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Absolutely unwarranted. The law has no right to do this. Sure they can take it and charge a fine. Keeping a vehicle for this? No, this basically means there is no limit to how they can punish you, they can just take any property you or someone else has (where the crime was committed) with the current precedents. That's what fines are for. Sometimes cars are kept for collateral for that, but these civil asset forfeitures are on top of crimes AND you don't even have to get convicted. They drop all charges and sue the car for going fast and then keep it. Yes it is that stupid and their reasoning has Siberian Sink Hole size holes in it.

sieabahlpark 6y ago

Oh the state that has been owned and run by single party (democrats in this case) for decades is corrupt? Duh, when people are guaranteed an election they tend to write laws for whoever pays them the most. There isn't anything surprising here it's a lack of accountability by anyone to talk about it. The only reason why it's causing issues now is because it involves police and it's cool to hate law enforcement now. I'm not surprised to see the democrats try to build a strong government here because that's what they were elected to do.

bsd44 6y ago

"How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country?" Because patriotism in America originates from fear, not from love for the country. Much like in China where people dare not say anything critical of the government to their peers because they worry that their peers will see them as traitors and they'll be shun from society; when everybody thinks like that then nobody dares to speak their mind and talk about issues honestly. So in America the patriotism and "love" for the country is expressed through various mantras such as "thank you for your service", saluting passing fighter jets, hanging American flags on every occasion and the unconditional support for suspicious budgets and laws of all sorts and war orgies orchestrated by the corporate government; many people I would argue don't actually support any of that but if they were to speak up, they would be seen as un-American which is the worst crime you can possibly commit living in America.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Libertarian party has spoken about this for decades and people automatically ignore them and here we are. Sheriffs are using it as an assumed revenue source. GF caught smoking in your car? Take it, let her off with a warning, and sell it and keep the $20k . They actually sue the car. The sheer stupidity of that if overwhelmingly apparent and yet they do it and get away with it. This isn't in podunk towns, this is all over the USA and only a few states have any laws limiting it.