16 ms·

Cops still take more stuff from people than burglars do (2021)

480 points by wahnfrieden 3y ago

taeric 3y ago
I can hope that the numbers "seized" don't include things that are returned after verification of ownership or any other exonerating circumstances. Is that tracked? That is, this is much less concerning if the numbers are such that 90%, say, is proven illicit.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Well the $100k story was determined to not have any evidence/proof beyond police suspicion (you can find more details that were released after this was written - the cops didn't like that her eyes darted once during questioning, that she said the luggage was gray not black, the cops said they smelled weed even though there was none found, etc - that was sufficient justification to seize the cash and close the case without filing any charges) and the money was not returned To get the money back, it must be fought in court. Legal fees are not returned if the case is won, and if lost, you must cover the defense fees. In Illinois the median forfeiture was about $1k, with many <$100 forfeitures clustered in the poorest neighborhoods, while lawyer fees are ~$3k for state/local police cases. Federal seizures are much more expensive to fight. There's no process where the police further verify the provenance of the cash they seize and return it without it being fought for in court. It's taken and they celebrate it and move on. So as with most police oversight, the numbers you're asking for don't exist.
  - taeric 3y ago
    That is infuriating, to say the least. :(
- hgsgm 3y ago
  The number also includes funds that were seized after criminal conviction.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Do you have a breakdown that distinguishes that?
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Houses too? In that case the numbers don't say much.
    - taeric 3y ago
      Only house news I remember was the one that went to the supreme court, and that is more than a touch different. They didn't seize the house before court actions, but as a court action. Right? This is very different.
- strathmeyer 3y ago
  When I was arrested the cop took the money out of my wallet and asked if I knew he could just take it, he didn't seem to concerned about "verification of ownership or any other exonerating circumstances" such as I just took the money out of an ATM. You have to wonder what fantasy world you people are living in.
Joker_vD 3y ago
> Basically, you must prove a negative: that you did not commit a crime. It’s a complete inversion of the “innocent until proven guilty” philosophy driving most of the criminal justice system. That's because it's civil forfeiture. There is no presumption of innocence in civil law; it's part of criminal law.
- bigbacaloa 3y ago
  How can the state taking something be considered civil?
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Because "civil" means "having to do with people and government office as opposed to the military or religion" /s Next time on the program: why "assault" in "battery and assault" doesn't actually mean the same as "assault" in colloquial speech.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    Because the action is against the property being seized, not the owner of said property[0]. Property cannot commit a crime, and therefore cannot be the defendant in a criminal proceeding, but at the federal level and in almost every state, there are civil statutes permitting these cases to be litigated by the government in rem.[1] 0 - note that if this happens to your property, it sure will feel like it is happening to you. Lawyers will be happy to lawsplain their BS theory[2] to you for a nominal hourly fee. This will not make you feel any better for having been robbed at gunpoint. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction 2 - Spoiler alert: the theory is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
    - Joker_vD 3y ago
      Interestingly enough, property used to be able to commit a crime (back when slavery was a thing) but it still could not be sued or be the plaintiff in a lawsuit.
ortusdux 3y ago
And employers take more than both combined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
- cma 3y ago
  I can imagine employers + landlords is a pretty big cut off the top.
- dbingham 3y ago
  Yep. If you are a retail worker and your boss withholds $20 from your paycheck, it's not considered criminal theft. It's a civil matter. You have no recourse except civil law. In many states, you have to file a complaint with the Attorney General's office which may or may not do anything about it. If you decide to simply take $20 out of the till to pay yourself - that's criminal theft. You get arrested, go to jail, and have to fight criminal charges. It's one of the more blatant examples of how the laws of the United States are written to unjustly empower those with wealth that I am aware of.
  - sneed_chucker 3y ago
    > It's one of the more blatant examples of how the laws of the United States are written to unjustly empower those with wealth that I am aware of. The most blatant thing for me will always be the tax code. Alone way that W2 income vs long term capital gains is taxed (not to mention that losses are fully tax deductible) makes the message very clear.
    - dontknowwhyihn 3y ago
      Losses are not fully tax deductible.
      - sneed_chucker 3y ago
        Fair enough. It's fully deductible when used to offset capital gains as far as I know. To offset regular income, it's only $3000 a year but losses can be carried forward (though it stays at the dollar value, no inflation is taken into account). So often largely deductible with some caveats. It still seems asinine that bad investments are essentially tax subsidized, but whatever.
chayesfss 3y ago
[dead]
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Civil asset forfeiture is disgusting and ought to be ruled unconstitutional. However, most of the stuff they seize really is crime-related.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Source? Or did you make that up
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    It doesn’t pass the smell test that it could be false. Call that “made up” if you like.
    - fnordfnordfnord 3y ago
      Hand waving a reasonable question away.
- standardUser 3y ago
  That's because there's too many crimes, mostly relating to drugs. If we were to make caffeine illegal tomorrow then there would be a lot of "crime-related" money seized from the coffee industry, but it's only "crime-related" because we're dumb enough to consider a victimless act a crime.
  - 221qqwe 3y ago
    Technically indiscriminately selling literal poison with a very low LD50 to people with "somewhat" poor impulse control is a victimless crime, sure. Of course, I guess, fentanyl et al. are a thing because more benign drugs were criminalized for so long. However in no way does that make hard drugs comparable to caffeine though... Do you believe that all substances must be legalized and widely available?
    - standardUser 3y ago
SkipperCat 3y ago
Civil forfeiture should have a time boundary. If police seize your property, they should have 90 days to indite you with a crime and if they don't they should be forced to return all of your property. I've read articles about how some police departments are training their staff to engage in this behavior and using forfeiture as a profit center. What they are doing is wholesale theft.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  The money is often used on personal expenditures like a new F-350 truck for personal use, commemorative Super Bowl badges, or premium salmon-jerky dogfood (actual examples from Georgia). Most seized money does not even get put into a general fund for budget-based reallocation and is left up to discretionary "slush fund" use.
- bsder 3y ago
  The "proper" solution is that any property, cash, fines, etc. produced by the "criminal justice" system goes only to victims and anything extra should always go into a fund that gets returned directly to the citizens. It doesn't go into a budget. It doesn't fund anything else. Anything collected goes to victims or it goes back to the people. This would stop ALL of the perverse incentives.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    Not quite all, the arbitrary exercise of power is itself an incentive. You can use it to intimidate people or to punish people you don't have the evidence to prosecute (which is to say, those with the presumption of innocence). That would help a ton though.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    After thinking of this exact thing for maybe 30 years I think all fines, etc should be turned over to the Social Security Administration. Advantage something like 98% of the money transferred to SS goes right back out the door.
    - 3y ago
hgsgm 3y ago
[flagged]
- phyllistine 3y ago
  The rate of Forfeiture is going up [1] while the rate of burglary is going down. Unless you hold the position that dwindling number of burglars are becoming massively more efficient over time, it is clear that civil asset forfeiture is a major problem. [1] https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/pfp3content/forfeiture-is-lucrative-for-governments-nationwide/state-and-federal-forfeiture-revenues/ https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/pfp3content/forf... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191243/reported-burglary-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191243/reported-burglary...
  - coolspot 3y ago
    Burglary going down after 2020 ? Nah, maybe only if people just stopped reporting (because Police won’t do anything).
    - seadan83 3y ago
      The comment with citation you are responding to shows a clear down line. The year over year trend is pretty strong and goes back a couple decades now. Perhaps you are thinking of violent crime which did go up in 2020. That is also down in 2021 from 2020 (and I was really surprised that there has been such a strong downward trend since 1990, I would not have guessed that the violent crime rate of today is almost half of 1990!) https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
      - wahnfrieden 3y ago
        The commenters here who attempt to bring balance to the discussion by pointing out how scary SF is and the like are more afraid of visible homelessness than actual violence
highfrequency 3y ago
[flagged]
- akira2501 3y ago
  > , that’s $10 per person that gets taken by police in civil forfeiture That's the "average civil forfeiture." No proceeding for civil forfeiture is for the average amount; though, it's often for quite a bit more, generally thousands of dollars. This is an inappropriate way to understand the impact of this issue.
  - highfrequency 3y ago
    Sure, but it is useful to compare the scale of things. This is about 0.0005 of the money taken by the government in tax revenues, concentrated in situations where crime is suspected
- sam0x17 3y ago
  I look at these same numbers and think holy crap that's a lot.
- orev 3y ago
  Wow. Where to start… In the US you’re innocent until proven guilty, so a 25% failure rate is criminally high. Also, it’s not the job of police to punish anyone. That’s what the courts are for. William Blackstone wrote,"[B]etter that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Would you like $1M taken from you and distributed to 500K people? It's only $2 each. Can I buy civil forfeiture insurance?
  - highfrequency 3y ago
rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
My brother had his phone stolen when he was in middle school. He and everyone suspected one classmate. Cops searched him and found the phone and other stolen phones. They were all taken into “evidence” and refused to give it back no matter how many times we asked. We had to buy a new phone. Fuckers.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  It's completely astonishing how low the ethics standards are for police officers in the US! Even if this is the standard procedure, you'd expect that a decent person tries to work the system in favor of kids whose phone was stolen. But what do we expect from police officers who typically require less training to become an officer than is needed to get a license as a cosmetician?! I dream of a US where it takes 1.5 to 2 years of schooling to become a police officer. Where officers take hundreds of hours in law, ethics and de-escalation classes. I want police officers who have book clubs in which they have heated discussions about Kant's and Foucault. I want police officers who are passionate and knowledgeable about justice, are true experts in law enforcement and improving our society and hold each other accountable! I don't think that's unreasonable, given this is equivalent to the professionalism I expect from other people who are good at their profession.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  There's a process for recovering property from the police. Did you do more than ask some beat cop who's first instinct is likely to be unhelpful because they're an untouchable mafia? https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-basics/getting-property-back-after-an-arrest.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-bas...
justrealist 3y ago
This conflates "Civil Asset Forfeiture" with "Asset Forfeiture", and any analysis which doesn't preserve that distinction is meaningless. Bernie Madoff had his assets seized. That's not wrong, illegal, or unconstitutional.
_ea1k 3y ago
I see a lot of commenters pointing out that this includes legitimate forfeiture due to criminal activity. That is certainly true. But how do you measure legitimate vs illegitimate taking of property? With burglary, it is fairly trivial. But otherwise? I'm not aware of statistics breaking down the amount of money and assets that get taken without any charges.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  I seriously doubt the police ever publish stats on seized property they were forced to return because no crime was committed. Most of the time, the people who are robbed by the police can't afford or don't know how to get their property back. https://archive.is/o7xdQ https://archive.is/o7xdQ
toss1 3y ago
>>a cash-sniffing dog with the Dallas Police Department alerted on a suitcase that had been checked in at Love Field for a domestic flight to Chicago. Officers subsequently searched the bag and found over $100,000 in cash inside. Likely alerted to the scent of drug residues on the bills, which is supposedly on essentially every bill in circulation. So, perhaps the owner of the cash might have been better off by first putting it in a washing machine with soap, i.e. physically laundering the money?
- tristor 3y ago
  No. They actually train dogs to alert on cash, specifically. The scent they train on is the scent of the special ink used to print US currency. They do this because large amounts of cash moving between cities/states is often a hallmark of organized crime.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    And because they can freely take cash for personal use when they find it.
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Cash sniffing dogs for the express purpose of robbing citizens without any reasonable suspicion, much less probable cause. If contraband or other crimes were involved, then I say seize property, but the police shouldn't be the Sheriff of Nottingham looking for citizens to rob.
- nick-of-time 3y ago
  Or the dog alerted on nothing, since they have a bonkers false positive rate: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/sniffer-dogs-get-it-wrong-four-out-of-five-times-20111211-1oprv.html https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/sniffer-dogs...
umvi 3y ago
I want closure on the 25 year old woman and the $100k she was transporting in a suitcase. Did she go to court to get it back? Or is this a situation where 9 times out of 10 the cash was ill-gotten and so it is forfeited to avoid criminal charges?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Almost certainly. I can't think of any other reason you'd take $100k on a plane. But there are plenty of stories out there of people having very large amounts taken from them on their way to buy cars or whatever. The story probably picked a bad example but the police are definitely just taking whatever they can get without any regard for justice.
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Rushing to close a deal on a high value asset such as a boat, aircraft, or real estate where the seller insists on actual cash. Granted, you should probably use some form of durable check, but some buyers want actual cash. There are also cultural business habits in some ethnicity/national backgrounds to prefer actual cash over safer bank instruments. It really doesn't matter: if someone wants to carry a large quantity of cash on a plane, this is still an open society and freedom must be defended.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      Wouldn't you withdraw your cash at your destination to avoid the obvious and huge risk of your luggage being lost? I agree there probably are times that it happens, but it's very unlikely. There are much better examples where the police steal large amounts of cash even when there's an obvious legitimate explanation.
      - breakpointalpha 3y ago
        Nope. You can't just walk into any bank branch you have an account with an expect to withdraw 10s of thousands of dollars without notice. Also, there are tons of people with online only banks. No physical branches at all!
elcritch 3y ago
Everytime this comes up I'm utterly shocked how such blatant violation of the fourth amendment hasn't been struck down by the supreme court. Especially for conservatives it should be a clear case of governmental overreach. For the liberal side what about defunding the police stuff? Its clear niether political party actually cares about following the constitution, which is just a let down. Maybe we need a "NRA" for money, property, and encryption.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  its been upheld by the courts in a variety of ways: one that the 4th amendment doesn't apply because you haven't proved its yours. the text says "The right of the people to be secure in their" so it applies after you prove it is something you have the right to be secure of to begin with! and if there is something illegal you incriminate yourself in the process and it switches to a criminal charge against you and the associated criminal asset forfeiture. but our new supreme court will re-examine it more decisively, lets wait till next year and see what happens!
  - elcritch 3y ago
    > one that the 4th amendment doesn't apply because you haven't proved its yours. the text says "The right of the people to be secure in their" so it applies after you prove it is something you have the right to be secure of to begin with! Wow, that's almost literally the logic of a playground bully: "well you can't prove it's yours therefore it's mine".
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      yeah that’s the point of the bill of rights, intended to restrict the government because there is low trust for what it will do, and lo and behold, the people comprising it keep trying to wiggle around and make it do anything
yieldcrv 3y ago
The rationale for civil asset forfeiture should be applied to random bank branches, and the practice will meet its natural conclusion extremely quickly. but that is the clearest depiction of this caste system. people that can obviously fight do not have their cash and effects seized.
- brewdad 3y ago
  Ah, see, the cash that was stolen? That was your cash. We, the bank, only hold onto your cash for safekeeping. Your balance has been reduced appropriately.
jokoon 3y ago
The US is such a scary country
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Civil forfeiture is a problem in Canada as well. I don't know much about elsewhere
  - TheHappyOddish 3y ago
    Lots of other countries have it, but they call it 'corruption'.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Almost everything is ugly when you look at it up close
legitster 3y ago
> That pattern has held true for three of the last six years, although numbers in 2014 and 2015 were skewed somewhat by big, legitimate forfeiture cases involving huge sums of cash: the Bernie Madoff scandal, for instance. This is a pretty big freaking caveat. If you actually look at the DOJ source, about $1 billion a year comes from low-level seizures (https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2020/02/09/afp_narrative_-_fy_2021_presidents_budget_-_2.07.20_final.pdf https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2020/02/09/afp_...) Almost all of the rest comes from huge white-collar busts. The white collar seizures almost work the exact same way. Toyota was never charged with a crime over their accelerator pedal issue. But the government just seized 1.2 billion from them and kept a huge chunk of it for themselves.
XxCincinnatusxX 3y ago
They used this law against me in East Texas. Cost me $8000 to get my car back. They threatened me into signing a confession note. There police station looked like a pawn shop on steroids.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  What did you confess to?
joker_minmax 3y ago
I'd like to get more into cash budgeting (i.e., withdraw a set amount at the beginning of the month so I have to physically analyze my spending, in-person at least) but this kind of thing has always made me nervous to do it. I can only feel like civil forfeiture will be used as a part of the broader attack on cash in coming years.
tim333 3y ago
As a Brit I'm puzzled Americans put up with this. Couldn't you lobby your politicians to like stop the cops stealing?
- breakpointalpha 3y ago
  We do. The politicians actively support it because they are pro-cop.

480 points by wahnfrieden 3y ago

I can hope that the numbers "seized" don't include things that are returned after verification of ownership or any other exonerating circumstances. Is that tracked? That is, this is much less concerning if the numbers are such that 90%, say, is proven illicit.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Well the $100k story was determined to not have any evidence/proof beyond police suspicion (you can find more details that were released after this was written - the cops didn't like that her eyes darted once during questioning, that she said the luggage was gray not black, the cops said they smelled weed even though there was none found, etc - that was sufficient justification to seize the cash and close the case without filing any charges) and the money was not returned To get the money back, it must be fought in court. Legal fees are not returned if the case is won, and if lost, you must cover the defense fees. In Illinois the median forfeiture was about $1k, with many <$100 forfeitures clustered in the poorest neighborhoods, while lawyer fees are ~$3k for state/local police cases. Federal seizures are much more expensive to fight. There's no process where the police further verify the provenance of the cash they seize and return it without it being fought for in court. It's taken and they celebrate it and move on. So as with most police oversight, the numbers you're asking for don't exist.
- taeric 3y ago
  That is infuriating, to say the least. :(
hgsgm 3y ago
The number also includes funds that were seized after criminal conviction.
- taeric 3y ago
  Do you have a breakdown that distinguishes that?
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Houses too? In that case the numbers don't say much.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Only house news I remember was the one that went to the supreme court, and that is more than a touch different. They didn't seize the house before court actions, but as a court action. Right? This is very different.
strathmeyer 3y ago
When I was arrested the cop took the money out of my wallet and asked if I knew he could just take it, he didn't seem to concerned about "verification of ownership or any other exonerating circumstances" such as I just took the money out of an ATM. You have to wonder what fantasy world you people are living in.

Joker_vD 3y ago

> Basically, you must prove a negative: that you did not commit a crime. It’s a complete inversion of the “innocent until proven guilty” philosophy driving most of the criminal justice system. That's because it's civil forfeiture. There is no presumption of innocence in civil law; it's part of criminal law.

bigbacaloa 3y ago
How can the state taking something be considered civil?
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  Because "civil" means "having to do with people and government office as opposed to the military or religion" /s Next time on the program: why "assault" in "battery and assault" doesn't actually mean the same as "assault" in colloquial speech.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  Because the action is against the property being seized, not the owner of said property[0]. Property cannot commit a crime, and therefore cannot be the defendant in a criminal proceeding, but at the federal level and in almost every state, there are civil statutes permitting these cases to be litigated by the government in rem.[1] 0 - note that if this happens to your property, it sure will feel like it is happening to you. Lawyers will be happy to lawsplain their BS theory[2] to you for a nominal hourly fee. This will not make you feel any better for having been robbed at gunpoint. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction 2 - Spoiler alert: the theory is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Interestingly enough, property used to be able to commit a crime (back when slavery was a thing) but it still could not be sued or be the plaintiff in a lawsuit.

ortusdux 3y ago

And employers take more than both combined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

cma 3y ago
I can imagine employers + landlords is a pretty big cut off the top.
dbingham 3y ago
Yep. If you are a retail worker and your boss withholds $20 from your paycheck, it's not considered criminal theft. It's a civil matter. You have no recourse except civil law. In many states, you have to file a complaint with the Attorney General's office which may or may not do anything about it. If you decide to simply take $20 out of the till to pay yourself - that's criminal theft. You get arrested, go to jail, and have to fight criminal charges. It's one of the more blatant examples of how the laws of the United States are written to unjustly empower those with wealth that I am aware of.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  > It's one of the more blatant examples of how the laws of the United States are written to unjustly empower those with wealth that I am aware of. The most blatant thing for me will always be the tax code. Alone way that W2 income vs long term capital gains is taxed (not to mention that losses are fully tax deductible) makes the message very clear.
  - dontknowwhyihn 3y ago
    Losses are not fully tax deductible.
    - sneed_chucker 3y ago
      Fair enough. It's fully deductible when used to offset capital gains as far as I know. To offset regular income, it's only $3000 a year but losses can be carried forward (though it stays at the dollar value, no inflation is taken into account). So often largely deductible with some caveats. It still seems asinine that bad investments are essentially tax subsidized, but whatever.

chayesfss 3y ago

[dead]

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

Civil asset forfeiture is disgusting and ought to be ruled unconstitutional. However, most of the stuff they seize really is crime-related.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Source? Or did you make that up
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  It doesn’t pass the smell test that it could be false. Call that “made up” if you like.
  - fnordfnordfnord 3y ago
    Hand waving a reasonable question away.
standardUser 3y ago
That's because there's too many crimes, mostly relating to drugs. If we were to make caffeine illegal tomorrow then there would be a lot of "crime-related" money seized from the coffee industry, but it's only "crime-related" because we're dumb enough to consider a victimless act a crime.
- 221qqwe 3y ago
  Technically indiscriminately selling literal poison with a very low LD50 to people with "somewhat" poor impulse control is a victimless crime, sure. Of course, I guess, fentanyl et al. are a thing because more benign drugs were criminalized for so long. However in no way does that make hard drugs comparable to caffeine though... Do you believe that all substances must be legalized and widely available?
  - standardUser 3y ago

SkipperCat 3y ago

Civil forfeiture should have a time boundary. If police seize your property, they should have 90 days to indite you with a crime and if they don't they should be forced to return all of your property. I've read articles about how some police departments are training their staff to engage in this behavior and using forfeiture as a profit center. What they are doing is wholesale theft.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
The money is often used on personal expenditures like a new F-350 truck for personal use, commemorative Super Bowl badges, or premium salmon-jerky dogfood (actual examples from Georgia). Most seized money does not even get put into a general fund for budget-based reallocation and is left up to discretionary "slush fund" use.
bsder 3y ago
The "proper" solution is that any property, cash, fines, etc. produced by the "criminal justice" system goes only to victims and anything extra should always go into a fund that gets returned directly to the citizens. It doesn't go into a budget. It doesn't fund anything else. Anything collected goes to victims or it goes back to the people. This would stop ALL of the perverse incentives.
- maxbond 3y ago
  Not quite all, the arbitrary exercise of power is itself an incentive. You can use it to intimidate people or to punish people you don't have the evidence to prosecute (which is to say, those with the presumption of innocence). That would help a ton though.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  After thinking of this exact thing for maybe 30 years I think all fines, etc should be turned over to the Social Security Administration. Advantage something like 98% of the money transferred to SS goes right back out the door.
  - 3y ago

hgsgm 3y ago

[flagged]

phyllistine 3y ago
The rate of Forfeiture is going up [1] while the rate of burglary is going down. Unless you hold the position that dwindling number of burglars are becoming massively more efficient over time, it is clear that civil asset forfeiture is a major problem. [1] https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/pfp3content/forfeiture-is-lucrative-for-governments-nationwide/state-and-federal-forfeiture-revenues/ https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-3/pfp3content/forf... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191243/reported-burglary-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191243/reported-burglary...
- coolspot 3y ago
  Burglary going down after 2020 ? Nah, maybe only if people just stopped reporting (because Police won’t do anything).
  - seadan83 3y ago
    The comment with citation you are responding to shows a clear down line. The year over year trend is pretty strong and goes back a couple decades now. Perhaps you are thinking of violent crime which did go up in 2020. That is also down in 2021 from 2020 (and I was really surprised that there has been such a strong downward trend since 1990, I would not have guessed that the violent crime rate of today is almost half of 1990!) https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      The commenters here who attempt to bring balance to the discussion by pointing out how scary SF is and the like are more afraid of visible homelessness than actual violence

highfrequency 3y ago

[flagged]

akira2501 3y ago
> , that’s $10 per person that gets taken by police in civil forfeiture That's the "average civil forfeiture." No proceeding for civil forfeiture is for the average amount; though, it's often for quite a bit more, generally thousands of dollars. This is an inappropriate way to understand the impact of this issue.
- highfrequency 3y ago
  Sure, but it is useful to compare the scale of things. This is about 0.0005 of the money taken by the government in tax revenues, concentrated in situations where crime is suspected
sam0x17 3y ago
I look at these same numbers and think holy crap that's a lot.
orev 3y ago
Wow. Where to start… In the US you’re innocent until proven guilty, so a 25% failure rate is criminally high. Also, it’s not the job of police to punish anyone. That’s what the courts are for. William Blackstone wrote,"[B]etter that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hgsgm 3y ago
Would you like $1M taken from you and distributed to 500K people? It's only $2 each. Can I buy civil forfeiture insurance?
- highfrequency 3y ago

rm_-rf_slash 3y ago

My brother had his phone stolen when he was in middle school. He and everyone suspected one classmate. Cops searched him and found the phone and other stolen phones. They were all taken into “evidence” and refused to give it back no matter how many times we asked. We had to buy a new phone. Fuckers.

ajmurmann 3y ago
It's completely astonishing how low the ethics standards are for police officers in the US! Even if this is the standard procedure, you'd expect that a decent person tries to work the system in favor of kids whose phone was stolen. But what do we expect from police officers who typically require less training to become an officer than is needed to get a license as a cosmetician?! I dream of a US where it takes 1.5 to 2 years of schooling to become a police officer. Where officers take hundreds of hours in law, ethics and de-escalation classes. I want police officers who have book clubs in which they have heated discussions about Kant's and Foucault. I want police officers who are passionate and knowledgeable about justice, are true experts in law enforcement and improving our society and hold each other accountable! I don't think that's unreasonable, given this is equivalent to the professionalism I expect from other people who are good at their profession.
1letterunixname 3y ago
There's a process for recovering property from the police. Did you do more than ask some beat cop who's first instinct is likely to be unhelpful because they're an untouchable mafia? https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-basics/getting-property-back-after-an-arrest.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-bas...

justrealist 3y ago

This conflates "Civil Asset Forfeiture" with "Asset Forfeiture", and any analysis which doesn't preserve that distinction is meaningless. Bernie Madoff had his assets seized. That's not wrong, illegal, or unconstitutional.

_ea1k 3y ago

I see a lot of commenters pointing out that this includes legitimate forfeiture due to criminal activity. That is certainly true. But how do you measure legitimate vs illegitimate taking of property? With burglary, it is fairly trivial. But otherwise? I'm not aware of statistics breaking down the amount of money and assets that get taken without any charges.

1letterunixname 3y ago
I seriously doubt the police ever publish stats on seized property they were forced to return because no crime was committed. Most of the time, the people who are robbed by the police can't afford or don't know how to get their property back. https://archive.is/o7xdQ https://archive.is/o7xdQ

toss1 3y ago

>>a cash-sniffing dog with the Dallas Police Department alerted on a suitcase that had been checked in at Love Field for a domestic flight to Chicago. Officers subsequently searched the bag and found over $100,000 in cash inside. Likely alerted to the scent of drug residues on the bills, which is supposedly on essentially every bill in circulation. So, perhaps the owner of the cash might have been better off by first putting it in a washing machine with soap, i.e. physically laundering the money?

tristor 3y ago
No. They actually train dogs to alert on cash, specifically. The scent they train on is the scent of the special ink used to print US currency. They do this because large amounts of cash moving between cities/states is often a hallmark of organized crime.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  And because they can freely take cash for personal use when they find it.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Cash sniffing dogs for the express purpose of robbing citizens without any reasonable suspicion, much less probable cause. If contraband or other crimes were involved, then I say seize property, but the police shouldn't be the Sheriff of Nottingham looking for citizens to rob.
nick-of-time 3y ago
Or the dog alerted on nothing, since they have a bonkers false positive rate: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/sniffer-dogs-get-it-wrong-four-out-of-five-times-20111211-1oprv.html https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/sniffer-dogs...

umvi 3y ago

I want closure on the 25 year old woman and the $100k she was transporting in a suitcase. Did she go to court to get it back? Or is this a situation where 9 times out of 10 the cash was ill-gotten and so it is forfeited to avoid criminal charges?

IshKebab 3y ago
Almost certainly. I can't think of any other reason you'd take $100k on a plane. But there are plenty of stories out there of people having very large amounts taken from them on their way to buy cars or whatever. The story probably picked a bad example but the police are definitely just taking whatever they can get without any regard for justice.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Rushing to close a deal on a high value asset such as a boat, aircraft, or real estate where the seller insists on actual cash. Granted, you should probably use some form of durable check, but some buyers want actual cash. There are also cultural business habits in some ethnicity/national backgrounds to prefer actual cash over safer bank instruments. It really doesn't matter: if someone wants to carry a large quantity of cash on a plane, this is still an open society and freedom must be defended.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Wouldn't you withdraw your cash at your destination to avoid the obvious and huge risk of your luggage being lost? I agree there probably are times that it happens, but it's very unlikely. There are much better examples where the police steal large amounts of cash even when there's an obvious legitimate explanation.
    - breakpointalpha 3y ago
      Nope. You can't just walk into any bank branch you have an account with an expect to withdraw 10s of thousands of dollars without notice. Also, there are tons of people with online only banks. No physical branches at all!

elcritch 3y ago

Everytime this comes up I'm utterly shocked how such blatant violation of the fourth amendment hasn't been struck down by the supreme court. Especially for conservatives it should be a clear case of governmental overreach. For the liberal side what about defunding the police stuff? Its clear niether political party actually cares about following the constitution, which is just a let down. Maybe we need a "NRA" for money, property, and encryption.

yieldcrv 3y ago
its been upheld by the courts in a variety of ways: one that the 4th amendment doesn't apply because you haven't proved its yours. the text says "The right of the people to be secure in their" so it applies after you prove it is something you have the right to be secure of to begin with! and if there is something illegal you incriminate yourself in the process and it switches to a criminal charge against you and the associated criminal asset forfeiture. but our new supreme court will re-examine it more decisively, lets wait till next year and see what happens!
- elcritch 3y ago
  > one that the 4th amendment doesn't apply because you haven't proved its yours. the text says "The right of the people to be secure in their" so it applies after you prove it is something you have the right to be secure of to begin with! Wow, that's almost literally the logic of a playground bully: "well you can't prove it's yours therefore it's mine".
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    yeah that’s the point of the bill of rights, intended to restrict the government because there is low trust for what it will do, and lo and behold, the people comprising it keep trying to wiggle around and make it do anything

yieldcrv 3y ago

The rationale for civil asset forfeiture should be applied to random bank branches, and the practice will meet its natural conclusion extremely quickly. but that is the clearest depiction of this caste system. people that can obviously fight do not have their cash and effects seized.

brewdad 3y ago
Ah, see, the cash that was stolen? That was your cash. We, the bank, only hold onto your cash for safekeeping. Your balance has been reduced appropriately.

jokoon 3y ago

The US is such a scary country

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Civil forfeiture is a problem in Canada as well. I don't know much about elsewhere
- TheHappyOddish 3y ago
  Lots of other countries have it, but they call it 'corruption'.
asdfman123 3y ago
Almost everything is ugly when you look at it up close

legitster 3y ago

> That pattern has held true for three of the last six years, although numbers in 2014 and 2015 were skewed somewhat by big, legitimate forfeiture cases involving huge sums of cash: the Bernie Madoff scandal, for instance. This is a pretty big freaking caveat. If you actually look at the DOJ source, about $1 billion a year comes from low-level seizures (https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2020/02/09/afp_narrative_-_fy_2021_presidents_budget_-_2.07.20_final.pdf https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2020/02/09/afp_...) Almost all of the rest comes from huge white-collar busts. The white collar seizures almost work the exact same way. Toyota was never charged with a crime over their accelerator pedal issue. But the government just seized 1.2 billion from them and kept a huge chunk of it for themselves.

XxCincinnatusxX 3y ago

They used this law against me in East Texas. Cost me $8000 to get my car back. They threatened me into signing a confession note. There police station looked like a pawn shop on steroids.

khazhoux 3y ago
What did you confess to?

joker_minmax 3y ago

I'd like to get more into cash budgeting (i.e., withdraw a set amount at the beginning of the month so I have to physically analyze my spending, in-person at least) but this kind of thing has always made me nervous to do it. I can only feel like civil forfeiture will be used as a part of the broader attack on cash in coming years.

tim333 3y ago

As a Brit I'm puzzled Americans put up with this. Couldn't you lobby your politicians to like stop the cops stealing?

breakpointalpha 3y ago
We do. The politicians actively support it because they are pro-cop.