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Civil asset forfeiture makes it really annoying to travel through some of the prettiest parts of America. Say that you like the parks and forests in places lik

Civil asset forfeiture makes it really annoying to travel through some of the prettiest parts of America. Say that you like the parks and forests in places like Montana, Arkansas, Utah, New Mexico, etc. You're going to do a lot of driving along state highways with a lot of nice things packed away, and maybe a small water/dirt vehicle. Most of those state highways have small towns every 20-80 miles where the speed limits briefly drop in increments of 10mph down to 30-40mph. In these towns, if you have out-of-state plates, you will regularly be pulled over for doing 5mph below the speed limit. You can expect a dog to sniff around your car if the patrol has one. You can feel the desire to just take everything that you own; it's palpable. I've gotten enough "warnings" to make a suit out of carbon-copy paper. That's to say nothing of racial prejudices in many areas of the US, and you'll probably have to stop for CBP checkpoints in states like New Mexico, even in the middle of 80mph+ interstates. It was a bad situation in 2018-2019, and I can't see it getting much better when restrictions start to lift in 2021. We badly need our courts to strongly re-assert the 4th Amendment.

oh_sigh 6y ago
I've road tripped all over the US without ever encountering that kind of behavior. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but your characterization of expecting to be pulled over and have a dog search your car is a bit melodramatic.
- meekrohprocess 6y ago
  I understand your misgivings, and I'll admit that I don't literally have enough carbon paper to make a suit out of warnings. But I do have a lot of them, and no actual tickets from those areas. I have had multiple K-9 searches with a clean car, and I did regularly get pulled over for doing less than the posted speed limit. I can't prove that civil asset forfeiture is the reason, but my vehicle would have been a juicy target because of the things attached to it.
  - satisfaction 6y ago
    Doing less than the speed limit is indeed strange, that behavior is probably exhibited by drunk/doped up drivers more often than sober drivers. The fact that you get warnings demonstrates that they pull overs are not due to ill will, if they wanted to steal from you they were half way there: too slow is probable cause for a traffic stop and they could easily plant some drugs or just lie, the statement of a police officer is evidence. Set your cruise control at the speed limit or 1 mph over and don't swerve.
    - patmcc 6y ago
      Driving below the speed limit is strange, driving above the speed limit is illegal. Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like, weird.
      - jet_32951 6y ago
        Driving over the speed limit is speeding, therefore actionable. Driving under the speed limit indicates impairment, therefore actionable. Driving exactly at the speed limit indicates a wise-ass and we can't have that.
      - CWuestefeld 6y ago
        I just finished taking a defensive driving course to get a speeding ticket washed. The course material mentioned a couple of times that, quote, "driving at an unsafe speed" is illegal. And what's unsafe takes into account the prevailing conditions (so you can be ticketed when going the speed limit if, say, it's raining), and also the fact that deltas in speed are more dangerous than absolute speed (so if the speed limit is 55, everybody else is going 60, and you're going 40, you may well get a ticket 'cause you're creating a danger. Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like Yep, that's true within 100 miles of the border - an area that accounts for the vast majority of US residents. I've been stopped several times near the Mexico border for no real reason; one office asks me questions for a minute or two, just long enough for their drug-sniffing dog to make the full round of my car and come up empty.
- yummypaint 6y ago
  Me neither, but I also know people who do experience that. The difference is that I'm a white guy and they are not.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  The only time I ever got pulled over in that part of the country is when I was doing about a hundred mph. I think that was a bit unfair since the road was straighter than an arrow from horizon to horizon, but breaking dumb laws is still lawbreaking I guess.
  - wahern 6y ago
    Driving a hundred mph on a remote, empty road can be one of the most dangerous things you could possibly do. Large animals can and will jump right out in front of you; more than usual as they're not habituated to the dangers of cars. I remember once driving through West Texas on US-90 (the highway, not the interstate) in the evening on a cross-country drive. I don't think I passed more than a handful of cars, if that, but after barely missing several antelope despite driving well under the speed limit, I just called it a night and pulled into the next motel I found. It really drove home the point that the dangers aren't only the obvious ones. So even on a straight, empty road as flat as Kansas[1] and in broad daylight I would never go so fast. Who knows what might jump out at you, from any which way. [1] I've driven US-50 coast-to-coast. Not much of interest in Kansas other than experiencing exactly how flat it is, particularly the western portion coming down from Colorado.
    - meowster 6y ago
      Also, if your tire is damaged (visible to the exterior of the tire or otherwise), fast speeds could cause a blowout. A blowout at fast speed can induce a rollover. If your going to speed, at least make sure your car is in good shape the best you can.
      - bigbubba 6y ago
        I agree. This occurred about a week I had the car in the shop to be checked out before the trip. I only had about a thousand miles on it since it was last in a garage.
    - panopticon 6y ago
      Totaled a car doing around 90mph on I-90 outside of Buffalo, WY when a deer jumped into the side of the car. It hasn't changed my driving behaviors, but I start to sweat bullets when the sun sets. Large animals are part of the reason most people I know who can afford to do so drive large pickups and SUVs around these parts. My mother-in-law seems to have a deer run-in every other year.
- shakezula 6y ago
  I’m a white guy. I can absolutely attest to the type of policing the parent comment is referencing. I’ve grown up in and traveled all over the midwestern and southwestern United States and I can tell you right now, police in rural areas absolutely _are_ looking for any and every excuse in the book to pull you over, search your vehicle, and question you far more intensely than the situation warrants. I’ve also had my car searched by K-9 after getting pulled over for an alleged turn signal violation, so it’s definitely not melodramatic or hyperbolic. For reference, I was driving a stock Acura with in-state plates when that happened. Not anything flashy or suspect. They rely on asset forfeiture for income to make up budget differences and it’s absolutely immoral to leverage law enforcement like that. They know that what they seize goes directly into their budgets and they act on it. More than likely we have the war on drugs to thank for it, too, but that’s a different argument for a different day.
  - D895n9o33436N42 6y ago
    Your comment echoes my experience... in New York City. I’m white too, and I’d gotten pulled over more times in NYC than anywhere else. There’s always something: you drove over the yellow line for a second; your hands weren’t on 10 and 2; we may have seen a cell phone at your ear; why does your car have a big dent? The NYPD is one huge pain in the ass. I live in Florida now; sheriff’s deputies in my county are very chill. They wave and say hello, and they don’t care why there’s something weird in the back of my truck.
    - winter_blue 6y ago
      Huh, this is strange. My experience has been the opposoite When did you live in NYC? I'm not white (I'm of Indian / South Asian ancestry.) I lived in NYC for years, and even owned and drove my own car in NYC for a few years (2017, 2018, and 2019). There were many times that I'd been speeding, and I've never been pulled over for speeding (not even once) inside of NYC. I've only been pulled over by NYPD once, and that one time was not without reason (I had made a right turn where right turn were not allowed). That one time they were pretty professional. There was even a time when I was distracted, and drove partially through a red light (in Queens), and the car coming from the other side was a NYPD cruiser. If I hadn't braked, I would have hit them. The officers inside the NYPD cruiser glared at me (with a very angry face), and I braked, and then reversed back to behind the red light. But they went on their way (and didn't give me a ticket or anything). I'm not sure why my experience has been so different. Maybe the NYPD changed after wave of BLM/etc. protests that started in 2014?
- macksd 6y ago
  I've had a lot of problems crossing the borders between Colorado and neighboring states, presumably because my Colorado plates are considered probable cause that I'm smuggling marijuana. It's always "oh I thought your tail light was out but now I see it's not", "your registration has expired... oh I must have read it wrong". I've been ticketed for things that when I showed up to court were laughed at or dismissed for not even being a thing. I've yet to have a drug dog search the car, but I've had a handful of very confrontational and aggressive police officers get in my face and take a good look around my car making vague comments about how something fishy is going on, asking where I'm going, where I've come from, who's who in the car, etc.
- jancsika 6y ago
  It's worth noting that these civil asset forfeiture programs were sold to a lot of these small towns as a way of generating revenue off of popular drug routes. E.g., a town is off a highway that's a known part of a drug route. A consultant comes in to the police dept. and does a powerpoint showing an average annual amount of drug money they can confiscate in order to fund the police/town budget. And the consultant probably has numbers from other towns who did the same. Boom-- you've got yet another civil asset forfeiture program in yet another small town. So you get this town's police pulling over a larger and larger set of people who fit whatever description they've taught themselves rakes in the dough. There's a big incentive to do this, and to enlarge the set of who can be pulled because-- until relatively recently-- there has been very little risk. I'm going to rankly speculate that the value of the OP's stuff he was lugging was high enough for such officers to take the time to pull OP over. But since OP didn't fit the drug runner description and the officer couldn't find any other pretense, they let them go. I'll also rankly speculate you've carried stuff of much less value visible to an officer who sees you drive by. Race almost certainly plays into this as well, but I haven't read a study to know the numbers on that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
giantg2 6y ago
Decades ago, it was well known in many areas that if you had a military sticker on your car you were to be pulled over whenever possible. They did this because they knew you weren't a local. It seems the courts treat the 4th amendment about as well as they do the 2nd and the 10th.
- syshum 6y ago
  More than anything the War on Drugs, which Civil Asset Forfeiture is a part of, has lead to the direct destruction of the bill of rights. This is one of the primary things that lead me to be a political and philosophical libertarian, and why I oppose prohibition completely (even for so called hard drugs) Most people think anyone that oppose prohibition on weed or other drugs simply wants to use them, but for me it is recognition that the War on Drugs has lead to the complete subversion of every single right protected by the US Bill of rights, every single one. Not just the 4th, 2nd, and 10th, but all of them
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it.
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. >Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it. But don't forget the economic impact either: 1. We spend Billions on "interdiction" and "enforcement", even though the vast majority of folks who do use drugs that are currently illegal don't have a dependency problem, and treatment on demand for the small number that do would be significantly less expensive; 2. Putting someone in prison costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and that person isn't contributing to the local economy where they lived, a double negative impact on the economy; 3. The stigma of a felony conviction usually makes most better paying jobs unavailable to folks convicted, further reducing economic output; 4. Building ever larger prisons and hiring more and more prison guards, administrators, etc. takes money away from other, more productive endeavors, often limiting economic growth due to lack of infrastructure, better quality of education and a host of other factors.
gameswithgo 6y ago
have never been pulled over in the manner you describe and drive through those states all the time. sounds like a made up or embellished story
- ct0 6y ago
  You must have shorter hair than the OP.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  I have been. New Mexico in particular with out of state plates I've been pulled over 3 times for little to nothing. Then I moved to NM and have lived here for over a decade (with NM plates) and have been pulled over once and let go with a warning. I have to back OP up on the little towns, rapidly dropping speed limits and desire for revenue because it matches my experience completely. Interstates are a different situation so maybe that's the difference in perception. Or maybe I just got unlucky. There were no dogs in any of the pull overs although in one case they did want to look through the car.
bsanr2 6y ago
When posters from rural areas complain about "coastal elites" (often a dogwhistle for PoC) stealing from their hard-earned living via taxes, this is one of the things that flashes through my mind. So many - SO many - of America's small towns cannot sustain themselves through honest business and labor. https://texasmonitor.org/in-small-town-texas-speeding-drivers-keep-the-lights-on-at-city-hall/ https://texasmonitor.org/in-small-town-texas-speeding-driver... These are the people who erase the visceral horror of slavery from textbooks, who detest cosmopolitanism, who advise hard-up city-dwellers to simply "move to where the jobs are" (nevermind that they denigrate immigrants). But god forbid you suggest that these small towns aren't solvent, can never be so, that they have to move. That the future for America is a progressive urbanism with higher population density (and the advances in public infrastructure policy that will have to come with it). That's socialism. But dragging travelers out of their cars for a protection bribe (if you're lucky enough not to get Sandra Bland-ed) is a-ok. /s
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > When posters from rural areas complain about "coastal elites" (often a dogwhistle for PoC) Coastal elites are wealthy, educated, mostly white liberal/progressive members of the professional managerial class who think they know how everyone else should live. > So many - SO many - of America's small towns cannot sustain themselves through honest business and labor. Thats because tax-and-spend policies crowd the rural populace out of markets. > who advise hard-up city-dwellers to simply "move to where the jobs are" (nevermind that they denigrate immigrants) You forgot "illegal" in front of "immigrants" > But god forbid you suggest that these small towns aren't solvent, can never be so The crowded urban spaces you prefer are largely dependent on rural areas for their food. > That the future for America is a progressive urbanism with higher population density (and the advances in public infrastructure policy that will have to come with it). That's socialism. Its weird that you conflate forcing people to live in 3m^3 tubes like the Japanese and high tax rates on capital. They don't have to go together, do they? > But dragging travelers out of their cars for a protection bribe (if you're lucky enough not to get Sandra Bland-ed) is a-ok. /s These same rural people don't approve of the extortion but when you have a system where the government decides what people pay they don't have any recourse.
refurb 6y ago
No need for the hyperbole. Yes, plenty of people unjustly have their property seized. No, the chance of it happening to you just driving through these states on a vacation is very, very low. For example, there were 400 total forfeitures in Utah in 2015[1] and well over 10M tourist visit the national parks in Utah alone.[2] But yes, that 400 is 400 too many. [1]https://ij.org/new-data-shows-utah-law-enforcement-overwhelmingly-prefer-civil-criminal-forfeiture/ https://ij.org/new-data-shows-utah-law-enforcement-overwhelm... [2]https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019-TTtrifold.pdf https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019-TTtrifold.p...
- hedora 6y ago
  Drive through El Paso, then tell me what you think about probable cause and illegal searches.

oh_sigh 6y ago

I've road tripped all over the US without ever encountering that kind of behavior. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but your characterization of expecting to be pulled over and have a dog search your car is a bit melodramatic.

meekrohprocess 6y ago
I understand your misgivings, and I'll admit that I don't literally have enough carbon paper to make a suit out of warnings. But I do have a lot of them, and no actual tickets from those areas. I have had multiple K-9 searches with a clean car, and I did regularly get pulled over for doing less than the posted speed limit. I can't prove that civil asset forfeiture is the reason, but my vehicle would have been a juicy target because of the things attached to it.
- satisfaction 6y ago
  Doing less than the speed limit is indeed strange, that behavior is probably exhibited by drunk/doped up drivers more often than sober drivers. The fact that you get warnings demonstrates that they pull overs are not due to ill will, if they wanted to steal from you they were half way there: too slow is probable cause for a traffic stop and they could easily plant some drugs or just lie, the statement of a police officer is evidence. Set your cruise control at the speed limit or 1 mph over and don't swerve.
  - patmcc 6y ago
    Driving below the speed limit is strange, driving above the speed limit is illegal. Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like, weird.
    - jet_32951 6y ago
      Driving over the speed limit is speeding, therefore actionable. Driving under the speed limit indicates impairment, therefore actionable. Driving exactly at the speed limit indicates a wise-ass and we can't have that.
    - CWuestefeld 6y ago
      I just finished taking a defensive driving course to get a speeding ticket washed. The course material mentioned a couple of times that, quote, "driving at an unsafe speed" is illegal. And what's unsafe takes into account the prevailing conditions (so you can be ticketed when going the speed limit if, say, it's raining), and also the fact that deltas in speed are more dangerous than absolute speed (so if the speed limit is 55, everybody else is going 60, and you're going 40, you may well get a ticket 'cause you're creating a danger. Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like Yep, that's true within 100 miles of the border - an area that accounts for the vast majority of US residents. I've been stopped several times near the Mexico border for no real reason; one office asks me questions for a minute or two, just long enough for their drug-sniffing dog to make the full round of my car and come up empty.
yummypaint 6y ago
Me neither, but I also know people who do experience that. The difference is that I'm a white guy and they are not.
bigbubba 6y ago
The only time I ever got pulled over in that part of the country is when I was doing about a hundred mph. I think that was a bit unfair since the road was straighter than an arrow from horizon to horizon, but breaking dumb laws is still lawbreaking I guess.
- wahern 6y ago
  Driving a hundred mph on a remote, empty road can be one of the most dangerous things you could possibly do. Large animals can and will jump right out in front of you; more than usual as they're not habituated to the dangers of cars. I remember once driving through West Texas on US-90 (the highway, not the interstate) in the evening on a cross-country drive. I don't think I passed more than a handful of cars, if that, but after barely missing several antelope despite driving well under the speed limit, I just called it a night and pulled into the next motel I found. It really drove home the point that the dangers aren't only the obvious ones. So even on a straight, empty road as flat as Kansas[1] and in broad daylight I would never go so fast. Who knows what might jump out at you, from any which way. [1] I've driven US-50 coast-to-coast. Not much of interest in Kansas other than experiencing exactly how flat it is, particularly the western portion coming down from Colorado.
  - meowster 6y ago
    Also, if your tire is damaged (visible to the exterior of the tire or otherwise), fast speeds could cause a blowout. A blowout at fast speed can induce a rollover. If your going to speed, at least make sure your car is in good shape the best you can.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      I agree. This occurred about a week I had the car in the shop to be checked out before the trip. I only had about a thousand miles on it since it was last in a garage.
  - panopticon 6y ago
    Totaled a car doing around 90mph on I-90 outside of Buffalo, WY when a deer jumped into the side of the car. It hasn't changed my driving behaviors, but I start to sweat bullets when the sun sets. Large animals are part of the reason most people I know who can afford to do so drive large pickups and SUVs around these parts. My mother-in-law seems to have a deer run-in every other year.
shakezula 6y ago
I’m a white guy. I can absolutely attest to the type of policing the parent comment is referencing. I’ve grown up in and traveled all over the midwestern and southwestern United States and I can tell you right now, police in rural areas absolutely _are_ looking for any and every excuse in the book to pull you over, search your vehicle, and question you far more intensely than the situation warrants. I’ve also had my car searched by K-9 after getting pulled over for an alleged turn signal violation, so it’s definitely not melodramatic or hyperbolic. For reference, I was driving a stock Acura with in-state plates when that happened. Not anything flashy or suspect. They rely on asset forfeiture for income to make up budget differences and it’s absolutely immoral to leverage law enforcement like that. They know that what they seize goes directly into their budgets and they act on it. More than likely we have the war on drugs to thank for it, too, but that’s a different argument for a different day.
- D895n9o33436N42 6y ago
  Your comment echoes my experience... in New York City. I’m white too, and I’d gotten pulled over more times in NYC than anywhere else. There’s always something: you drove over the yellow line for a second; your hands weren’t on 10 and 2; we may have seen a cell phone at your ear; why does your car have a big dent? The NYPD is one huge pain in the ass. I live in Florida now; sheriff’s deputies in my county are very chill. They wave and say hello, and they don’t care why there’s something weird in the back of my truck.
  - winter_blue 6y ago
    Huh, this is strange. My experience has been the opposoite When did you live in NYC? I'm not white (I'm of Indian / South Asian ancestry.) I lived in NYC for years, and even owned and drove my own car in NYC for a few years (2017, 2018, and 2019). There were many times that I'd been speeding, and I've never been pulled over for speeding (not even once) inside of NYC. I've only been pulled over by NYPD once, and that one time was not without reason (I had made a right turn where right turn were not allowed). That one time they were pretty professional. There was even a time when I was distracted, and drove partially through a red light (in Queens), and the car coming from the other side was a NYPD cruiser. If I hadn't braked, I would have hit them. The officers inside the NYPD cruiser glared at me (with a very angry face), and I braked, and then reversed back to behind the red light. But they went on their way (and didn't give me a ticket or anything). I'm not sure why my experience has been so different. Maybe the NYPD changed after wave of BLM/etc. protests that started in 2014?
macksd 6y ago
I've had a lot of problems crossing the borders between Colorado and neighboring states, presumably because my Colorado plates are considered probable cause that I'm smuggling marijuana. It's always "oh I thought your tail light was out but now I see it's not", "your registration has expired... oh I must have read it wrong". I've been ticketed for things that when I showed up to court were laughed at or dismissed for not even being a thing. I've yet to have a drug dog search the car, but I've had a handful of very confrontational and aggressive police officers get in my face and take a good look around my car making vague comments about how something fishy is going on, asking where I'm going, where I've come from, who's who in the car, etc.
jancsika 6y ago
It's worth noting that these civil asset forfeiture programs were sold to a lot of these small towns as a way of generating revenue off of popular drug routes. E.g., a town is off a highway that's a known part of a drug route. A consultant comes in to the police dept. and does a powerpoint showing an average annual amount of drug money they can confiscate in order to fund the police/town budget. And the consultant probably has numbers from other towns who did the same. Boom-- you've got yet another civil asset forfeiture program in yet another small town. So you get this town's police pulling over a larger and larger set of people who fit whatever description they've taught themselves rakes in the dough. There's a big incentive to do this, and to enlarge the set of who can be pulled because-- until relatively recently-- there has been very little risk. I'm going to rankly speculate that the value of the OP's stuff he was lugging was high enough for such officers to take the time to pull OP over. But since OP didn't fit the drug runner description and the officer couldn't find any other pretense, they let them go. I'll also rankly speculate you've carried stuff of much less value visible to an officer who sees you drive by. Race almost certainly plays into this as well, but I haven't read a study to know the numbers on that.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

giantg2 6y ago

Decades ago, it was well known in many areas that if you had a military sticker on your car you were to be pulled over whenever possible. They did this because they knew you weren't a local. It seems the courts treat the 4th amendment about as well as they do the 2nd and the 10th.

syshum 6y ago
More than anything the War on Drugs, which Civil Asset Forfeiture is a part of, has lead to the direct destruction of the bill of rights. This is one of the primary things that lead me to be a political and philosophical libertarian, and why I oppose prohibition completely (even for so called hard drugs) Most people think anyone that oppose prohibition on weed or other drugs simply wants to use them, but for me it is recognition that the War on Drugs has lead to the complete subversion of every single right protected by the US Bill of rights, every single one. Not just the 4th, 2nd, and 10th, but all of them
- t-writescode 6y ago
  The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >The War on Drugs is the mechanism through which an enormous amount of the bad laws and precedents have been created and permitted. >Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it. But don't forget the economic impact either: 1. We spend Billions on "interdiction" and "enforcement", even though the vast majority of folks who do use drugs that are currently illegal don't have a dependency problem, and treatment on demand for the small number that do would be significantly less expensive; 2. Putting someone in prison costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and that person isn't contributing to the local economy where they lived, a double negative impact on the economy; 3. The stigma of a felony conviction usually makes most better paying jobs unavailable to folks convicted, further reducing economic output; 4. Building ever larger prisons and hiring more and more prison guards, administrators, etc. takes money away from other, more productive endeavors, often limiting economic growth due to lack of infrastructure, better quality of education and a host of other factors.

gameswithgo 6y ago

have never been pulled over in the manner you describe and drive through those states all the time. sounds like a made up or embellished story

ct0 6y ago
You must have shorter hair than the OP.
mythrwy 6y ago
I have been. New Mexico in particular with out of state plates I've been pulled over 3 times for little to nothing. Then I moved to NM and have lived here for over a decade (with NM plates) and have been pulled over once and let go with a warning. I have to back OP up on the little towns, rapidly dropping speed limits and desire for revenue because it matches my experience completely. Interstates are a different situation so maybe that's the difference in perception. Or maybe I just got unlucky. There were no dogs in any of the pull overs although in one case they did want to look through the car.

bsanr2 6y ago

When posters from rural areas complain about "coastal elites" (often a dogwhistle for PoC) stealing from their hard-earned living via taxes, this is one of the things that flashes through my mind. So many - SO many - of America's small towns cannot sustain themselves through honest business and labor. https://texasmonitor.org/in-small-town-texas-speeding-drivers-keep-the-lights-on-at-city-hall/ https://texasmonitor.org/in-small-town-texas-speeding-driver... These are the people who erase the visceral horror of slavery from textbooks, who detest cosmopolitanism, who advise hard-up city-dwellers to simply "move to where the jobs are" (nevermind that they denigrate immigrants). But god forbid you suggest that these small towns aren't solvent, can never be so, that they have to move. That the future for America is a progressive urbanism with higher population density (and the advances in public infrastructure policy that will have to come with it). That's socialism. But dragging travelers out of their cars for a protection bribe (if you're lucky enough not to get Sandra Bland-ed) is a-ok. /s

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> When posters from rural areas complain about "coastal elites" (often a dogwhistle for PoC) Coastal elites are wealthy, educated, mostly white liberal/progressive members of the professional managerial class who think they know how everyone else should live. > So many - SO many - of America's small towns cannot sustain themselves through honest business and labor. Thats because tax-and-spend policies crowd the rural populace out of markets. > who advise hard-up city-dwellers to simply "move to where the jobs are" (nevermind that they denigrate immigrants) You forgot "illegal" in front of "immigrants" > But god forbid you suggest that these small towns aren't solvent, can never be so The crowded urban spaces you prefer are largely dependent on rural areas for their food. > That the future for America is a progressive urbanism with higher population density (and the advances in public infrastructure policy that will have to come with it). That's socialism. Its weird that you conflate forcing people to live in 3m^3 tubes like the Japanese and high tax rates on capital. They don't have to go together, do they? > But dragging travelers out of their cars for a protection bribe (if you're lucky enough not to get Sandra Bland-ed) is a-ok. /s These same rural people don't approve of the extortion but when you have a system where the government decides what people pay they don't have any recourse.

refurb 6y ago

No need for the hyperbole. Yes, plenty of people unjustly have their property seized. No, the chance of it happening to you just driving through these states on a vacation is very, very low. For example, there were 400 total forfeitures in Utah in 2015[1] and well over 10M tourist visit the national parks in Utah alone.[2] But yes, that 400 is 400 too many. [1]https://ij.org/new-data-shows-utah-law-enforcement-overwhelmingly-prefer-civil-criminal-forfeiture/ https://ij.org/new-data-shows-utah-law-enforcement-overwhelm... [2]https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019-TTtrifold.pdf https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019-TTtrifold.p...

hedora 6y ago
Drive through El Paso, then tell me what you think about probable cause and illegal searches.