Civil forfeiture is just one of those things that needs to die. Entire police department, prosecutors office, are exclusively funded by those funds. They have a gross incentive to violate peoples rights and take their money.

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thijson 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

They can also destroy your home in pursuit of a suspect without having to then repair the damage made.

https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/greenwood-village-h...

	▲	tehwebguy 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Another case taken on by the same group, Institute for Justice!

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FuriouslyAdrift 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a nasty little tool that became huge during the 1980's cut-all-budgets-but-war-on-drugs era.

The public LOVED it because it was used to nail all those drug kingpins... (remember all the ferraris and speedboats the undercover cops had on Miami Vice. It wasn't fiction)

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joshuaheard 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. Now that the War on Drugs is thankfully over, this tool is being used on everyday Americans who are not criminals. It should be outlawed.

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mavelikara 2 days ago | parent [-]

This is the problem with nodding yes to laws that will “only affect the bad people!”. If the law is ineffective, or if the law is effective and they run out of bad people to enforce it on - guess who they are coming after?!

	▲	potato3732842 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> guess who they are coming after?! The enablers either individually or demographically are low on the list. That's the problem, people feel justified being enablers because they rightly surmise the risk to them personally is low.

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croes 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

People love it when laws don’t matter unless they are affected.

	▲	Supermancho 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's easy to trust, when you've never been a victim. - Face to Face, Disconnected

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seanw444 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And qualified immunity. It's not an excuse for plebs to be ignorant of the law, but if it's not spelled out word for word to the police, they get to claim that obviously heinous violations of rights were not "clearly established boundaries" and get off completely scot-free. Rules for thee but not for me.

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BizarroLand 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And it is a violation of the 4th Amendment for it to even exist in the first place.

The fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

They're being sneaky and skirting around it by charging objects with crimes, but everyone knows that is such bullshit that it's the kind of stupid fuckery that would have been pulled in the Spanish Inquisition.

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wahnfrieden 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Police in the states steal more than all thieves combined. (The only other category which also steals more than burglars are employers through wage theft.) And that is just based off very incomplete data as we lack transparency into most civil forfeiture at the local municipality level.

The money also does not go back into public service use. It's often funneled into items such as F-350 trucks for personal use, commemorative Super Bowl badges, or premium salmon-jerky dogfood (actual recent examples from Georgia).

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ljf 2 days ago | parent [-]

Anyone down voting, can you provide proof that proves the opposite?

I know wage theft is massive (world over).

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wahnfrieden 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

There’s no proof against it because it’s factual. They just don’t like the narrative it forms by pointing it out, or they think it’s justified by the other value police/employers create, or they think the victims had it coming (by committing “time theft” or being criminals themselves even if I convicted because police only go after bad people / they are bad people because police went after them)

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Nasrudith 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well "wage theft" is also rhetorically abused to go beyond fraud, lack of payments or similiar actual misconduct and into bullshit Marx-tautology territory of "all profit is stolen from the worker". They think it helps spread their point but it really undermines it to anybody who catches on to their bullcrap.

	▲	dang 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sorry for the offtopicness, but please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760952. That thread is a bit old so I want to make sure you get the reply.
	▲	wahnfrieden 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well the statistic I mentioned does not include your Marxist reference and doesn't need to include such a number to hold true. There’s nothing Marxist about it.