Seems US cops are a menace to everyone
An Australian woman called the cops in Minneapolis after hearing suspicious noises outside, approached the car that responded and was shot dead by the cop in the passenger seat.
They had not turned on their body cameras.
R.I.P.
http://www.startribune.com/woman-killed … 4782213/#6When people's lives are insecure there will always be a lot of anxiety in the air. Many US policies promote insecurity.
Add the ready availability of guns, and you are mixing full blown fear with the anxiety.
Japan has more or less eliminated guns from civilian life in the last few years. The yakuza is losing membership fast because it is hard to terrorise ordinary folk without guns (ordinary folk fight back).
The police are struggling to find a new role as crime drops, too.
https://www.economist.com/news/asia/217 … olice-hunt
Yes, you are quite correct. But there is much more than that. Everyday lying:
Body camera video produced Wednesday appears to show a Baltimore police officer plant drugs
Annie Dookhan is a former chemist of a Massachusetts crime lab who admitted to falsifying evidence, affecting up to 34,000 cases.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions … 0600cbdd67
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/5 … t-to-coast
963 people killed by cops in US in 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics … ings-2016/What is interesting to me is the rolling back of protections from the police under Jeff Session DOJ who wants increased used of civil forfeitures.
Adoptive forfeitures:
"24 states have passed laws that restrict or prohibit civil forfeiture, but that local law enforcement can now circumvent these laws by relinquishing seized assets to the federal government, instead of returning them to owners—even those who have never been charged with a crime. Known as “adoption,” this strategy has allowed the federal government to take more than $1 billion in assets over the last 10 years." - https://qz.com/1033545/civil-forfeiture … ral-power/
Or it could be "The Justice Department's inspector general found that civil-asset forfeitures took in nearly $28 billion in the last decade. " - http://www.businessinsider.com/civil-as … icy-2017-7
I read the above to mean that 1 bill from states adoptive forfeiture and the 27 bill is direct from the Feds civil forfeiture.
"Instead of revising forfeiture practices in a manner to better protect Americans' due process rights, the DOJ seems determined to lose in court before it changes its policies for the better," said Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.
"Civil asset forfeiture is unjust and unconstitutional," tweeted Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan. "It's a big-government scheme to take people's property without due process. End it."
Texas Court Says There's No Remedy For Person Whose Vehicle Was Subjected To Civil Forfeiture After An Illegal Search - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160 … arch.shtml
Please note this is about civil asset forfeiture not criminal asset forfeiture - so please don't hijack this post to talk about criminal asset forfeiture .
What ever happened to the 'ASSET FORFEITURE PROCESS AND PRIVATE PROPERTY PROTECTION ACT ?
Section 7. {No Civil Asset Forfeiture} (A) There is no civil asset forfeiture. Section 8. {Rule of lenity}
(A) The court shall resolve any ambiguity in this chapter relating to the State taking property through asset forfeiture in favor of the property owner. - https://www.alec.org/model-policy/asset … ction-act/
This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses. According to one nationally publicized report, for example, police in the town of Tenaha, Texas, regularly seized the property of out-of-town drivers passing through and collaborated with the district attorney to coerce them into signing waivers of their property rights. In one case, local officials threatened to file unsubstantiated felony charges against a Latino driver and his girlfriend and to place their children in foster care unless they signed a waiver. In another, they seized a black plant worker’s car and all his property (including cash he planned to use for dental work), jailed him for a night, forced him to sign away his property, and then released him on the side of the road without a phone or money. He was forced to walk to a Wal-Mart, where he borrowed a stranger’s phone to call his mother, who had to rent a car to pick him up. These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings. Perversely, these same groups are often the most burdened by forfeiture. They are more likely to use cash than alternative forms of payment, like credit cards, which may be less susceptible to forfeiture. And they are more likely to suffer in their daily lives while they litigate for the return of a critical item of property, such as a car or a home. The issue, USSC Justice Thomas wrote, is "whether modern civil-forfeiture statutes can be squared with the Due Process Clause and our Nation’s history.” Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 … nce-thomas
'Utah is one of just a few states in the country to require an annual report on asset forfeiture. 400 forfeiture cases in Utah during 2016, with cash being seized in 99 percent of those cases.
Cops like to publicize such busts because it feeds a narrative that asset forfeiture is used primarily against big-time drug dealers. But they're rather out of the ordinary, the report shows.
Most forfeitures (69 percent) take place during traffic stops and most of the time only money is seized. According to the state report, cash was taken in 99 percent of forfeitures during 2016, with the median seizure amounting to only $1,031.
That means, in many cases, the amount seized was considerably less than four-figures. In one instance, the report shows, police took $16 from a motorist.' - Elsewhere in Chicago, cops have seized as little as 34 cents from motorists http://reason.com/blog/2017/07/15/repor … e-just-103
What compelling reason does the State have in seizing 34 cents without economic due process? This highway robbery and state brigandage. These are not Centurions merely upholding the law but Tax Revenuers of the most disgustingly obnoxious type.
And that just the start:
" A review of Ferguson’s financial statements indicates that court fine collections now account for one-fifth of total operating revenue. The St. Louis suburb of about 21,000 residents took in more than $2.5 million in municipal court revenue last fiscal year, representing an 80 percent increase from only two years prior, when fines netted about $1.4 million." - http://www.governing.com/topics/public- … udget.html
"Folks have the impression that this is a form of low-level harassment that isn't about public safety. It's about money," - Thomas Harvey
The millions of dollars in fines and fees paid by black residents served an ultimate goal of satisfying "revenue rather than public safety needs," the U.S. Justice Department found.
"Many states, including Nevada, have faced budget shortfalls since the Great Recession began. But this one isn’t caused by a decline in tax revenue, but by a decline in traffic tickets, which provide the majority of funding to the state supreme court. “Now with all due respect to the citizens of Nevada, I don’t think anyone is driving better,” Hardesty told legislators. “I think the truth is we’re seeing less traffic violations because law enforcement’s priorities have changed and it has changed dramatically.” - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar … es/389387/
Does DOJ Jeff Session think civil forfeiture is a good, fair idea?
"Maybe Sessions’ enthusiasm for getting the federal government back into the business of civil forfeiture is just the logical result of a worldview that treats all police officers as righteous agents of order and all suspects as presumptively deserving of punishment. It’s the same worldview that has led Sessions to dismiss painstaking DOJ research into unconstitutional police practices in Chicago as “anecdotal,” to claim marijuana users are by definition not “good people,” to shut down the National Commission on Forensic Science, and to demand that federal prosecutors always seek the most severe prison terms possible when bringing cases." http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ … ve_it.html
USSC": Not a Violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/94-8729.ZO.html
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