Policing for Profit. Police stole $4.2 Billion from citizens without due process last year

This shit just raised my heart rate 30 beats per second.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken

One of many examples in this long story:

Quote :

On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with BIG potential."

They pulled into a mini-mart for snacks. When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.


He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.

No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.

Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.

The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

Quote :

In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund....

... More revelatory was a nine-page spreadsheet listing items funded by Tenaha’s roadside seizures. Among them were Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations, “Have a Nice Day” banners, credit-card late fees, poultry-festival supplies, a popcorn machine, and a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation that was said to be important to Lynda Russell’s reëlection. Barry Washington, as deputy city marshal, received a ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus from the fund.

Quote :

In Bal Harbour, Florida, an upscale seaside village of thirty-three-hundred residents, a small vice squad ran a forfeiture network that brought in nearly fifty million dollars in just three years.

Asking the main officer in the story why he felt justified in forfeitures:

Quote :

“Well, there could be several things,” Washington explained. “The No. 1 thing is you may have two guys stopped, and these two guys are from New York. They’re two Puerto Ricans. They’re driving a car that has a Baptist Church symbol on the back, says ‘First Baptist Church of New York.’ They’re travelling during the week, when most people are working and children are in school. They’ve borrowed this car from their aunt, and their aunt is back in New York.” Profile factors like these, Washington explained, could help justify the conclusion that the two men’s money was likely tainted by crime. But also, he said, “we go on smells, odors, fresh paint.” In many cases, he said he smelled pot. In other cases, things smelled too fresh and clean, perhaps because of the suspicious deployment of air fresheners.

I don't approve.

I used to go back and forth from P'cola to New Orleans when I was doing consulting, sometimes very early in the morning and was followed for miles one night by a parrish cop. He tried the old "turn one headlight off trick" but I had seen him sitting behind some trees and pull out after I went by. After a few miles I rolled my window down and stuck my bald head out and yelled "what do you want?". He turned his second head light back on and pulled off the road. Thieving bunch of jerks in some of those small places.

Very late at night I was headed home from a job in Alabama. I was entering a small town. I saw a big old Lincoln sitting on  a side road from-half a mile away. As I got closer the Lincoln spun it's tires and jumped from the side road turning it's rear end toward me as it did. I  stood on my brakes because he had purposely not given me much time to stop. I missed his bumper by inches. The Lincoln moved on and at the next street up sat a cop. That I am sure saw the whole thing. I know they were working together trying to cause an accident for profit...but how could I have ever proved it ?

This should be illegal. If they stop someone the should either prosecute to keep any items or if no prosecution, all items go free with.

Its almost like bribery. You can go, but we are keeping your stuff. I'm guessing that people who leave that kind of cash may be guilty of something. Because Id spend the night in jail for enough money to buy a car. Either way, I agree its bribery and wrong.

It was found out the police in Washington state were running drug deals in various bars then taking the bar away from the owner under the drug laws there. There were over a 100 bars there owned by police using this tactic. The problem is it's legal but certainly unethical. Kind of like a sting for profit. They all do this crap to make money whether directly for personal profit or as a unit like WACO to justify their budget.

There's certainly a pattern. I heard on npr that since 1990 the violent crime rate has dropped by a quarter... but the prison population has doubled. Even things you think you own are not entirely at your disposal... control is effective ownership.

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.” —Author Tom Clancy