The cops’ agenda is keeping the shinies all in the name of ‘fighting crime’ :rolleyes::rolleyes: They sell the stuff at police auction which goes right to the department. I wouldn’t be surprised if some stuff ‘disappeared’ from time to time.
When I was in school, the police would run the DARE program (one of the most worthless anti-drug education systems I’ve ever seen) and would drive up in a shiny new Camaro or Corvette. There’d be placard saying it was seized in a drug raid. The point was supposedly to show that being a drug dealer would mean your stuff would be taken by the police. To me, it meant that being a drug dealer means you can buy a SWEET ass car!
Bout all I remember from DARE was the bottom of each drug worksheet would say “America: Drug-Free by 2000!”. That was back in the “Just say no!” days, but it always makes me laugh thinking back on it.
The forfeiture laws are known as RICO, which stand for something like Racketeering Influenced Criminal Organization. They were originally passed to make sure mobsters didn’t hide assets when they were busted. In the Reagan era the govmint decided that the drug trade qualified for RICO. So since then, cops can take property, including houses and cars and wads of cash, if they think a drug crime may have been committed. They don’t actually have to convict or even charge the accused. Sometime in the 1990s I read that no one was charged in about 70% of seizures. There was a flurry of stories at the time because the Monkey Business, a charter boat made famous by Gary Hart’s onboard affair, was later seized because the people who chartered it (not the owner) were busted. The govmint gave the boat back because of the press but the practice goes on. This is one of the most blatant examples–but far from the only example–of ways current law routinely violates freedoms in the Bill of Rights.
Thise DARE programs are such bullshit. We had them in high school and the cops would be all like “drugs or alchohol often influences people to have sex with people they wouldn’t normally have sex with” and “this tends to make people confident and more outgoing” or “that stuff makes your parents disappear”. Um…yeah…all that sounds kind of awesome dude.
We had something similar in college where they came around to all the fraternities with some video. In the video, a student volunteered to take a shot every x minutes so you can see the effects. I guess the idea is we see this dude acting like a drunk jackass and it discourages us from drinking. Needless to say, as soon as they saw the video, ever guy in every fraternity tried to recreate the experiment themselves with predictable results.