Apparently, police officers pulled over a guy and his friends. They “smelled marijuana” (yeah, sure they did), but found none. They did find, however, an xbox 360 and several games. They said they wanted to check the serial numbers to see if they were stolen merchandise (I call BS on this as well, do the computers in cop cars really have access to a list of stolen xbox serial numbers? I doubt it). They then claimed that although the serial numbers came back clean, they were still going to confiscate the console and the games, and that the only way they were getting them back was to bring a receipt. The guys then went to the station with box AND receipt, and the xbox was no where to be found.
The guys still haven’t gotten their xbox 360.
They robbed them. Plain and simple. A bunch of fucking ass hole cops committed blatant theft.
The fuck is wrong with these people?
Dopers of the world, people, protect your rights, because apparently they can be violated this easily. Do not talk to the police beyond identification and the required driver’s paper work. DO NOT consent to a search of your person or property. Ask firmly if you are free to go. And most importantly, NEVER travel with your console! Or donuts. Either are apparently too much temptation to the average cop.
That part was hyperbole. Still, you gotta figure that this wasn’t just 1 cop. It was probably his partner as well, and every other cop they bragged about it to at the station.
I’m hoping the media attention will cost these assholes their job and teach the rest a lesson.
But here we get to the dilemma - cops crooked enough to outright steal an X-Box will have no qualms about searching you and stealing from you regardless of your protests standing by the side of the road. In fact, if you piss them off enough, who knows? Maybe a baggie of pot materializes in your glove box. Maybe a gun does, and you get a full takedown. Maybe you get 3 cops swearing an oath you “took a swing” at one of them. I’ve personally had cops lie to me and make up offenses (4 made-up traffic tickets in one stop, with a threat that I’d better shut up unless I wanted to go to jail for “resisting”), so I know for a fact it can and will happen.
I agree 100% with your principle. In practice, I do not.
I understand that a cop will lie to get his ass out of trouble as often as the guy two cubicles down from you (and have had many lie about situations I was involved in as well as threaten myself and my family, etc) and many are down right criminals, but we can’t just say “Oh well” and throw our hands up! Can we?
I have a little book somewhere at home called You and the Police, which offers advice about what to do if you come into contact with law enforcement in a variety of situations.
The author believes that there are three types of cop:
Peace officers - the good and honest cops who really believe in doing their job properly, and who treat citizens with respect and within the bounds of their authority.
Intimidating cops - these police will push the bounds of their constitutional authority, and will try to intimidate you into waiving your rights, often by lying, at every opportunity.
Rogue cops - these are the truly corrupt police, actually willing to actually break the law, to plant evidence, to steal, and generally do just about anything to get their way.
The author of the book believes that the majority of cops are Intimidating Cops, and he says that his book is designed for dealing with those cops. With a true Peace Officer, you won’t need most of the advice, and with Rogue Cop the advice will basically be useless, because the advice itself relies on the fact that the cop, at some level, actually cares about your rights and about the possible consequences of his actions.
Cops, even good ones, have a tradition of stealing through informal confiscation. I don’t think I’ve ever known even one cop, outside of those who worked only traffic, who didn’t have a knife or two and perhaps a gun or two that he had taken off of some mook.
Sometimes the mook in question, due to being or parole or a convicted felon, couldn’t legally have the item in question to begin with. Sometimes the mook in question had it taken away from him during a situation where he was facing legal troubles over something unrelated e.g. having a knife seized after getting stopped for possible DUI.
Sometimes the mook in question is a juvenile and not in much of a position to fight city hall and get his property back.
Hell, I’ve known cops who had whole gun collections made up of guns that were “seized as evidence.”
The new generation of cops just has different interests than the cops I knew.
Actually, they might. Not just stolen game systems but stolen anything with a serial number that has been entered into the NCIC/State/local DB is accessable by LE.
This dickhead cop did a dickhead thing and needs time off for it. There was no solid reason evident from the information we have here to say that the removal of the system was appropriate. Now, a scenario I CAN imagine is officer dickerson smelling the dope, finding a little roach or small baggie and exchanging this dude’s freedom for the xbox. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s possible.
From a related site *“But the console could not be found because it had not yet been transferred to the evidence room”. *That too is common, and it can take a day for an item to be loged in. Really, until we give this a day or so, there’s no reason to be calling this cop a theif.
The link in the OP doesn’t answer the basic question in my mind: how do you know that the pothead wasn’t lying?
“Hey, man, we just have to accuse the cop of stealing my Xbox and boom, we get a free one!”
Seriously. It’s entirely possible that this whole thing was made up by a guy who was looking for a way to score something for free. Why is the policeman automatically wrong?
The problem is, though, that we can now never really know either way.
Of course, once this story hit the news, there’s no way the cop is going to keep the XBox. But we have no way of knowing what he would have done had the owner not gone to the media.
I think the very fact that he confiscated the property without making an arrest, and without any evidence that it was stolen, weighs pretty heavily against him.
By definition, someone who steals is a thief. A good cop and a thief are mutually exclusive terms.
Part of being a ‘good cop’ means being a ‘good person’ which means you don’t steal from other people. If you want a knife, a gun, or a gaming console, you buy it your damn self.
When you have a gun and you take someone’s property by force, that’s called robbery. It is not excused if the person doing it also has a badge. If anything, it’s worse.
That’s just it. Even if we accept only the story of the cops: taking property without any clear indication that it is stolen seems to be a pretty big violation of the whole presumption of innocence thing. Of course the RICO statutes have kicked holes in that already.