This may well fit better in the Pit, as the behaviour described is so nasty, but for a start I’ll put it in MPSIMS. I have been reading repeatedly about the powers of the US police to seize assets from people they stop, for instance during traffic controls, but also on the street. They just seem to take the money and keep it. The excuse is that it might be money gathered from illegal activities, so they can take it. Is this true? Frequent? Has it happened to anyone here? Here is an article from a Canadian source warning about this practice, they quote “61,998 cash seizures on roadways and elsewhere without use of search warrants”: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/american-shakedown-police-won-t-charge-you-but-they-ll-grab-your-money-1.2760736
From the article:
The Washington Post this week reported that in the past 13 years, there have been 61,998 cash seizures on roadways and elsewhere without use of search warrants.
The total haul: $2.5 billion, divided pretty much equally between the U.S. government and state and local authorities (hence the Kafkaesque “equitable sharing” euphemism).
Yes, it is a real thing. To read about, the search terms are “civil asset forfeiture” and “criminal asset forfeiture”.
The logic is an initially sounding very reasonable, “don’t let criminals use money they obtained through criminal means.” What happens though is mere accusation of a crime is enough to seize cash or other assets. In many cases the asset (money, car, etc.) is the what is accused of a crime, so you’re free to go, just not with your $10,000.
ETA: Oops, I’d linked to a John Oliver episode from 2014, not a new one. and I can’t link to youtube again in an edit. A search for “John Oliver civil asset forfeiture” will turn up several youtube results.
A particularly egregious example. https://thehill.com/opinion/5188501-civil-forfeiture-fair-act/
Briefly: Marine retires, has life savings in cash(almost 90K) with paycheck stubs and withdrawal receipts, gets pulled over and the police seize his savings. He did get his money back months later.
IMO, once in our history is far too often. But across the totality of the USA, up until now it’s really pretty rare.
Unfortunately, I fully expect the newly emboldened police in our shiny new police state to begin doing this on a widespread basis. The case law was already on their side, and once nobody in the government or judiciary is willing to restrain them, it’ll be rapidly normalized.
IOW
Nice car you have there, “sir”. Sure be a shame if I happened to take it.
So it has not happened to anyone on the board yet? Good! OK, the US is a big country, so 61,998 (curiously precise number, BTW) in 13 years is 13 cases a day. Is that much? Is there perhaps underreporting?
Although there are accessible statistics of seizures at the federal level, it often happens that the totals of forfeitures from both criminals and innocent owners are combined; for example, one report was that in 2010, government seized $2.5 billion in assets from criminals and innocent owners by forfeiture methods,[15] and the totals of assets seized incorrectly from innocent owners was not separated statistically. Further, since the United States is a federal republic with governments at both the national and state level, there are civil forfeiture seizures at the state level, which are not tracked and recorded in any central database,[11] which make it difficult to make assessments, since state laws and procedures vary widely. According to The Washington Post, federal asset forfeiture in 2014 accounted for over $5 billion going into Justice and Treasury Department coffers, while in comparison, official statistics show that the amount stolen from citizens by burglars during that same year was a mere $3.5 billion.[33]
After the American Revolution, the early Congress wrote forfeiture laws based on British maritime law to help federal tax collectors collect customs duties, which financed most of the expenses of the federal government in the early days of the Republic.
Those are the very tariffs your president has wet dreams about! The ones he imposed today, I can’t get them out of my mind, sorry for the hijack. So $5 billion a year, according to your numbers? That is $15 per capita. And just over $10 for burglaries. Who would have thought that the USA were such a safe country?
Watch any documentary program which follows police around (e.g.: “On Patrol: Live” or “Police 24/7”) often enough and you’ll eventually see this happening. Particularly when there is a large supply of drugs and a large amount of cash in the same vehicle: the former heavily implying that the latter was obtained via illegal sales.
I have no specific knowledge besides the various sites here, plus some of my own reading.
The USA is a big place. 380 million people live here. We have tens of thousands of courtrooms working every day. 13 cases per day is homeopathic levels of dilution.
As to comments by others:
As I said, the right answer is zero. The entire concept is an outrage. Just one more way the USA has been turning into a police state since I was a child.
OTOH, $3.5B is about 10 dollars per American per year. I spend about that much on postage stamps.
This.
It is doctrinal evil. But it is predictable doctrinal evil. And is presently evil at pinprick levels statistically speaking. I seriously fear that it will become very very common very soon. To lots of cheering by the usual suspects until their own pickup truck is seized.
That is just federal, not state and we all know that the burden is not shared evenly across America. I wonder who suffers this kind of injustice the most in America? I’m guessing not the cul-de-sac crowd.
Wow, usually I see it referred to as modern day highway robbery.
Except it’s not evenly distributed, which is the problem. I’d pay $10/year to end police theft, but I don’t get that choice, instead I have a non-zero probability of losing any cash I’m carrying at any random moment.
Not just cash. They can decide they like your car and take that for themselves.
I’ve also heard of them using it to keep lawyers from taking cases, threatening to take the lawyers house or whatever as being the “proceeds of criminal activity” if the lawyer takes the money of the accused.
First, the number is something closer to 260 million for people over 18 (I assume we can ignore kindergarten kids for this).
Second, this is not a tax evenly spread across all citizens. Some much smaller number of people will be affected. Best I could find is around 20 million traffic stops per year in the US. That’s now $175/person. You get pulled over, you hand the cops $175 even if you actually did nothing wrong…above and beyond whatever ticket you might get. Just a fee for being pulled over. Where do you draw the line?
You said never (which I agree with). What I do not agree with is pretending it really isn’t all that bad overall.