Well they used a phony rationale for stopping me in the first place. Are you going to tell me they couldn’t come up with something in order to seize my property?
If a cop in Arizona uses a phony radar gun reading to pull over a car of Hispanics, will he stop there or continue violating the rights of the car’s passengers.
No question that they could. I disagree with the claim that they most certainly would have.
What stops him from doing that now, though? I mean, if you posit a cop willing to lie under oath about his radar results, why wouldn’t he do so right now? How will this law make that possibility worse?
I already acknowledged what I see as your deliberate attempt to obfuscate by claiming that I was being unclear.
By now, I’m sure, most other people reading are coming to the conclusion that you aren’t interested in anything other than another pointless derailing of a thread by a lawyer trying to score points based on misinterpreting minutae.
But, hey, you go right ahead and keep on trying to “lawyer” this one out.
Or did you have something meaningful to offer to the actual, you know, OP topic?
What the hell kind of answer is that?
Look, we can be very simple here:
The cops search cars and find cash 1,000 times.
How many times do you say they keep it? __________
And how many of those times do they have to return it? ________
Do the Arizona cops have the right to ask for proof of legal status at this time?
You just keep on lawyerin’ that out, Bricker.
I thought it was fairly clear that Bo meant that because these cops had already concocted a reason to pull someone over, that it’s likely that they would concoct a reason to confiscate the cash, had they discovered it. Although Bo could’ve been more clear with the term “find”, I’d say, taken in context, it’s a reasonable word to use. The intent of the words mean they can be taken as synonyms in this context, so arguing about definitions is kind of weird.
Well, even if he is the only person who didn’t understand it, he’s the one you’re seeking answers from, so it seems reasonable that you’d restate things in a way that your claim is clear to him. Not doing so is odd, since you seem to be so invested in the discussion. Why run away in the middle of the discussion?
That’s fine, but before I undertook to discover if there existed any of the proof he was ardently demanding, didn’t it make sense to clarify precisely what he was claiming?
So, if your theory of his claim is correct, he’s saying for every 1,000 cases the cops discover cash during a search, they seize, confiscate at least 501 times.
Yes?
I’m not seeking answers from him anymore. That was resolved. Do try and keep up. He is now challenging an assertion of mine, sort of.
I can’t restate things any clearer than they already are. I’ve already done it twice, both times using the same language, even the same words. IMo, he’s being deliberately obtuse in an effort to get me to contradict myself so he can claim a win. He’s trying to lawyer himself up some points in this discussion, although at this point I have no idea why.
Since Bricker and I are both still here, who is it that you think ran away?
Since I’m still not getting it, can you help me out a bit more?
Is this correct:
For every 1,000 cases the cops discover cash during a search, they seize, confiscate at least 501 times.
i haven’t kept up on the thread since page… 2ish but i was listening to npr today reporting on the summit of police chiefs all of whom now twice (one in 2006, and again now) unanimously decided to say no to enforcing immigration and talked to the attorney general about this. when asked about the many sheriffs who support this, one chief (from LA i think?) said that sheriffs are elected officials and have different “aims” which is pretty much saying that the arizona law makes for pretty rhetoric for elections but for “appointed officials” such as himself, this is a pain in the tuccus.
a particularly compelling argument, to me at least, is that this sets precedence for police to enforce civil laws, and not just criminal ones. the chief (LA again i think) said that this was analogous to the local PDs collecting on IRS backtaxes, or enforcing OSHA standards. Completely out of juristiction, and spreads the force thin.
Just wanted to bring that up.
At the time that you’re pulled over for speeding?
No. They are required to reasonably attempt to determine your immigration status, but they cannot ask for proof.
Again, though, let’s be clear about what words mean: they can, literally, ask. But if you’re pulled over for speeding, and they ask if you’re a citizen, and you say yes, but you have no proof… that ends the inquiry.
Unless, of course, you’re claiming to be a citizen but carrying a Mexican passport in plain sight, or some other piece of evidence exists that isn’t in our simply speeding hypo.
OK once again I failed to make myself clear. What I meant is the new law now enforcable?
My point is that the new law will encourage profile stops. Since they can ask the driver or cars inhabitants about their citizenship. They know they will get away with it in 99% cases where they bust undocumented residents.
Plus they can easily trick people into admitting their status just as they do when they “ask” permission to search a vehicle.
“Are you an American citizen?”
“Yes”
“Do you have anything to prove it”
“Yes”
“Would you care if I see it?”
Then you know what happens.
That’s all true.
Except that they can already do that now. The only thing the law does is make it mandatory to check. So if there are Arizona cops that are willing to make profile stops, they can do so right now. The law doesn’t give them any more tools in this regard.
Oh, I think your request for a clarification was perfectly reasonable. I obviously can’t speak for Bo, who has declined to elaborate further. But I believe the claim is this:
Considering the nature of the police’s initial actions, it is safe to assume that they would confiscate the money had they found it. Money that is confiscated is very rarely returned to its owner, and even rarer to be returned in whole. Thus, had **Escapee’s ** money be found there is a very strong chance that he would be taking an (presumably, given our assumption of the police’s involved corruption) unjust financial penalty.
So no, he’s not saying that for every 1,000 times cops discover cash that they confiscate it 501 times, but that confiscation is an assumption that we can reasonably make. And since we’re assuming confiscation, out of every 1,000 times money is confiscated at least 501 times the confiscatee (no idea if that’s a word) suffers a financial loss.
Thanks, I appreciate it. When I see these off-hand remarks that imply, “Oh, everyone but you understands me perfectly, and your request for restatement is just absurd,” I really appreciate feedback that suggests that it might not be so.
I don’t want to crowd you into defending a position that isn’t yours, but perhaps for the sake of fun and learning we can continue to explore this.
There are two claims here:
It’s safe to assume they’d confiscate the money, because they lied about the speeding, and —
Once confiscated, most often money is not returned, or at the very least, getting it back involves some cost.
I’m finding it hard to directly map either of those statements to this one:
But OK.
It’s difficult to know how to test either of these claims. The first: “It’s safe to assume they’d confiscate the money, because they lied about the speeding.” How can we possibly judge this? I guess we might imagine three categories of cops: scrupulously honest; willing to lie about speeding as a pretext to a traffic stop but not willing to lie or cheat to confiscate cash; and amoral enough to lie about both speeding and cash circumstances.
But what evidence could I possibly present to rebut this inference? I doubt there are any studies of how often traffic cops fabricate stories and seize cash.
The second: “Once confiscated, most often money is not returned, or at the very least, getting it back involves some cost.”
Now, this claim I agree with. But I would argue it’s because most often, the money seized is in fact the fruit of a crime, or incident to a crime, and it’s correctly seized. In other words, most of the time, the asset forfeiture law works as it should, and what’s getting seized and kept is cash that the law is intended to seize and keep.
So the implication I got from *Snowboarder Bo is that usually there is some kind of manifest injustice surrounding cops seizing cash, and I don’t agree with that.
Of course, the evidence I have for that would be to show the result of asset forfeiture hearings, but I assume that *Snowboarder Bo or others would contend that the cops routinely lie in those proceedings.
So… what kind of evidence would be acceptable to show that the majority of seizures are handled as the law intended them to be handled, if we can’t use the results of the proceedings themselves? What else might I point to?
No problem. I’ve been lurking this board longer than I probably should’ve, and I think you get a lot of flak because you make very precise, ‘lawerly’ arguments. I tend to do the same thing, although I have no formal training (yet!). It gets frusterating for people because in most conversations, the specifics of a message tend to get overlooked in favor of a persons point. When someone says ‘the government doesn’t do anything right’, to pick an arbitrary example, they’re not looking for examples of the government doing anything right. They’re making the argument that the government, by and large, is incapable of or ineffective in its methods of achieving goals.
You, on the other hand, seem to miss this point occasionally, and take people on their literal word, when oftentimes they don’t mean it, and it can be extremely frusterating for some people.
I agree, examining matters in this way is quite fun and usually enlightening.
I find your inference to be sound. I do agree that there’s really no evidence to rebut this statement, we really just have to accept that there are corrupt people of any sub group, no matter how noble. We really have two things to evaluate here.
Are Escapee’s claims credible? If so, of the three degrees of moral/immoral police we have established, we can safely say they lie in the middle, as their initial stop was unjust at worst, unsupported by law at best. I find these claims credible because, well, if I didn’t find anonymous claims by strangers credible on a message board there’d be very little point of debating on one.
Is it a reasonable assumption that if a police officer is amoral/immoral enough to commit an unnecessary stop, that they would amorally/imorrally confsicate the money? This is much more contentious, I admit. I’d make the argument that there is implicit racial/culturally bias showed in the actions of the police during the initial stop, and do believe, based upon stories of how abuse of police power works, that they would have allowed their biases to control their opinions of what to do with the discovered money, and would have seized it eventually. I concede that I cannot prove this point, and that at the end of it, their justification may be perfectly legal, even if the reason they sought to persue this matter is because of bias or something else that is legally sketchy.
I agree with your assessment that the reason money is not often returned is because it is most often seized fairly.
If you give me the point that it’s reasonable to assume the police would continue to act in an unethical manner (you by no means have to), then the parties involved are making a claim that ‘money seized unfairly is more likely not to be returned than returned.’ Given that the person whose money was seized was just involved in a negative confrontation with the police, and the amount of time he spends in another country, I find it to be a reasonable conclusion.
Well, you can only really be expected to provide so much evidence. Someone can make the claim that I’m a member of a cast of The Truman Show, but can’t really prove that I’m not, as everything I say can be construted as being said to protect the show. In this case, I think the burden of proof is on the person making the accusation that asset seizure hearings are routinely lied at (I don’t think **Bo **and others are trying to make this claim, although it may become implicit in how they phrase their arguments). However, do keep in mind we’re not dealing in a neutral world here. We’re assuming that the judicial system is acting prejudicially against its citizens.
I think you have to defeat the argument that the police acted with prejudice, or that the prejudice in this case isn’t systemic and the money would be returned, in full or in reasonable part, to a person who spends a signfiicant amount of time in another country. I think you’ll win this argument, but I don’t find it’s counter to be irrational, just overly cynical.
Dude, that is incredible coming from you. I already pointed out to you how circular your argument is.
I think part of the claim here is that asset forfeiture laws themselves are ridiculous, and that the seizure of assets or cash as incidental to a crime is as much a revenue stream for law enforcement as a tool for justice.
Of course, debating asset forfeiture laws themselves is probably outside the scope of this thread.