Backwoods Bud
Member
http://forfeiturereform.com/
Pretty good site with lots of info. WARNING! A lot of the stuff will piss you off.
Michigan’s incentives for seizures
By Scott Alexander Meiner, on July 12th, 2011
On June 30th, the Michigan House of Representatives passed HB 4349, permitting asset forfeiture funds to be used for any law enforcement purposes not already otherwise budgeted for. Specifically, the legislation would strip the requirement that asset forfeiture funds be used for drug related police activity. Other than a provision safeguarding that the funds not be used as a substitute for what is already budgeted, the bill states only that asset forfeiture funds should be used for law enforcement. That rather vague description could presumably be just about anything law enforcement wants it to be.
It is clear (at least to us) that providing unchecked cash incentives to police departments to commit seizures is not in the public interest. And the foreseeable harm to the public interest is only exacerbated by the State of Michigan’s lack of due process protections concerning property rights. Michigan already allows for property to be seized without conviction. Upon seizure, property owners are placed in the adversarial position of proving the innocence of their property without the traditional presumptions of innocence that would accompany a criminal proceeding. And to add further worry, this bill amends the law to allow courts to require that property owners be made “to pay the expenses of the proceedings of forfeiture to the entity having budgetary authority over the seizing agency” without making any dispensations for innocence or predatory prosecution.
If Michigan were without any history of corruption, perhaps it would be more understandable that the Michigan House of Representatives has enacted legislation to incentivize police seizures. That simply is not the case. Michigan is awash in a history of police corruption. In March of this year, the FBI and the Michigan State Police Department raided the Romulus Michigan Police Department amid rumors of missing and/or misappropriated asset forfeiture funds, missing cocaine, and falsified time sheets. In February, members of the Michigan State Narcotics were charged with racketeering and embezzlement. A former member of the Michigan House of Representatives and a former Mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, is currently incarcerated in a federal prison after years of corruption that has also served to stain the Michigan State Police and Detroit Police Departments. The longest serving Detroit Chief of Police, Bill Hart, was convicted of embezzling millions of taxpayer dollars. From 1994 to 2000, an estimated 220 pounds of cocaine was stolen from the Detroit Police Department evidence room to be resold on the streets of Detroit.
This isn’t to say that the police or Michigan police are bad. It is simply that if you craft laws that give human beings incentives to act badly in situations with little oversight, at least some of those humans are going to act badly. The stakes are too high to risk corrupting our police departments with these stupid, even if well intentioned, laws.
Legalized Plunder
By John Payne, on July 5th, 2011
Journalist William Norman Grigg describes the recent robbery and murder of an elderly Virginia man:
The invaders who murdered Hampton, Virginia resident William Cooper swiped about $900 in cash. They seized his gun collection. They took the Lexus from his driveway. By some oversight they neglected to extract the gold fillings from his teeth.
While they made off with a decent haul, the robbers were doubtless disappointed that they couldn’t locate the large stash of illicit prescription drugs they had expected to find. They had the luxury of tossing the home at leisure without worrying about being interrupted by the police – on account of the fact that they were the police.
William Cooper, a 69-year-old retiree who suffered from the familiar variety of afflictions attendant to age, was startled awake on the morning of June 18 by two men who had barged into his home with their guns drawn and ready. Since he lived in a neighborhood in which home invasions (of the non-State-sanctioned variety) were commonplace, Cooper slept with a loaded handgun on his nightstand. He made an entirely proper but regrettably ineffective use of that weapon in an effort to repel the intruders, and was gunned down in his bedroom.
The police raid was triggered by an unsubstantiated tip from a still-anonymous informant that the NASA retiree – who walked with a cane and, according to his neighbors, never seemed to have any visitors – was illegally selling prescription drugs from his home. After they murdered Hampton, the police found about two-dozen different prescription drugs in the home, including various painkillers and medications for blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes.
In other words, the kinds of drugs you would expect to find in a senior citizen’s home. That didn’t stop the police from busting down his door, shooting him, and taking his property, however. But wait: It gets worse!
Grigg soon turns his attention to Arizona’s drug task forces, and starts putting the pieces of the global drug war jigsaw puzzle together:
The policy objective of the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission – as is true in each of the other fifty federal administrative units called “state governments” – is not to eliminate the narcotics trade, or even to abate it in any dramatic way, but rather to transmute it into a reliable source of revenue for the political class and its armed auxiliaries. Toward that end, the Commission in Arizona, with the help of plundered money provided by Washington, created sixteen state-level “drug task forces” in 2007. Those task forces have “a permanent institutional tie” with the Attorney General’s Office of Financial Remedies.
As Tom Barry of the Center for International Policy observes, the Commission’s strategy document leaves the impression it “is a drug war agency, not one dedicated to finding ways to improve criminal justice in Arizona.” Once again, this is typical of law enforcement nation-wide: “Whether at the state or county government level, the war on drugs is the main prism through which criminal justice and law enforcement agencies view crime and violence.”
What this means, of course, is that “local” police agencies are essentially support systems for a plundering army that is literally waging war against the people in the guise of narcotics enforcement. In fact, a good case can be made that these paramilitary task forces – or, to use the proper German translation, einsatzgruppen – are carrying out the precise role that would be played by the dreaded blue-helmeted UN “peace enforcement” units that haunt the imagination of many “law and order” conservatives.
Pretty good site with lots of info. WARNING! A lot of the stuff will piss you off.
Michigan’s incentives for seizures
By Scott Alexander Meiner, on July 12th, 2011
On June 30th, the Michigan House of Representatives passed HB 4349, permitting asset forfeiture funds to be used for any law enforcement purposes not already otherwise budgeted for. Specifically, the legislation would strip the requirement that asset forfeiture funds be used for drug related police activity. Other than a provision safeguarding that the funds not be used as a substitute for what is already budgeted, the bill states only that asset forfeiture funds should be used for law enforcement. That rather vague description could presumably be just about anything law enforcement wants it to be.
It is clear (at least to us) that providing unchecked cash incentives to police departments to commit seizures is not in the public interest. And the foreseeable harm to the public interest is only exacerbated by the State of Michigan’s lack of due process protections concerning property rights. Michigan already allows for property to be seized without conviction. Upon seizure, property owners are placed in the adversarial position of proving the innocence of their property without the traditional presumptions of innocence that would accompany a criminal proceeding. And to add further worry, this bill amends the law to allow courts to require that property owners be made “to pay the expenses of the proceedings of forfeiture to the entity having budgetary authority over the seizing agency” without making any dispensations for innocence or predatory prosecution.
If Michigan were without any history of corruption, perhaps it would be more understandable that the Michigan House of Representatives has enacted legislation to incentivize police seizures. That simply is not the case. Michigan is awash in a history of police corruption. In March of this year, the FBI and the Michigan State Police Department raided the Romulus Michigan Police Department amid rumors of missing and/or misappropriated asset forfeiture funds, missing cocaine, and falsified time sheets. In February, members of the Michigan State Narcotics were charged with racketeering and embezzlement. A former member of the Michigan House of Representatives and a former Mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, is currently incarcerated in a federal prison after years of corruption that has also served to stain the Michigan State Police and Detroit Police Departments. The longest serving Detroit Chief of Police, Bill Hart, was convicted of embezzling millions of taxpayer dollars. From 1994 to 2000, an estimated 220 pounds of cocaine was stolen from the Detroit Police Department evidence room to be resold on the streets of Detroit.
This isn’t to say that the police or Michigan police are bad. It is simply that if you craft laws that give human beings incentives to act badly in situations with little oversight, at least some of those humans are going to act badly. The stakes are too high to risk corrupting our police departments with these stupid, even if well intentioned, laws.
Legalized Plunder
By John Payne, on July 5th, 2011
Journalist William Norman Grigg describes the recent robbery and murder of an elderly Virginia man:
The invaders who murdered Hampton, Virginia resident William Cooper swiped about $900 in cash. They seized his gun collection. They took the Lexus from his driveway. By some oversight they neglected to extract the gold fillings from his teeth.
While they made off with a decent haul, the robbers were doubtless disappointed that they couldn’t locate the large stash of illicit prescription drugs they had expected to find. They had the luxury of tossing the home at leisure without worrying about being interrupted by the police – on account of the fact that they were the police.
William Cooper, a 69-year-old retiree who suffered from the familiar variety of afflictions attendant to age, was startled awake on the morning of June 18 by two men who had barged into his home with their guns drawn and ready. Since he lived in a neighborhood in which home invasions (of the non-State-sanctioned variety) were commonplace, Cooper slept with a loaded handgun on his nightstand. He made an entirely proper but regrettably ineffective use of that weapon in an effort to repel the intruders, and was gunned down in his bedroom.
The police raid was triggered by an unsubstantiated tip from a still-anonymous informant that the NASA retiree – who walked with a cane and, according to his neighbors, never seemed to have any visitors – was illegally selling prescription drugs from his home. After they murdered Hampton, the police found about two-dozen different prescription drugs in the home, including various painkillers and medications for blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes.
In other words, the kinds of drugs you would expect to find in a senior citizen’s home. That didn’t stop the police from busting down his door, shooting him, and taking his property, however. But wait: It gets worse!
Grigg soon turns his attention to Arizona’s drug task forces, and starts putting the pieces of the global drug war jigsaw puzzle together:
The policy objective of the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission – as is true in each of the other fifty federal administrative units called “state governments” – is not to eliminate the narcotics trade, or even to abate it in any dramatic way, but rather to transmute it into a reliable source of revenue for the political class and its armed auxiliaries. Toward that end, the Commission in Arizona, with the help of plundered money provided by Washington, created sixteen state-level “drug task forces” in 2007. Those task forces have “a permanent institutional tie” with the Attorney General’s Office of Financial Remedies.
As Tom Barry of the Center for International Policy observes, the Commission’s strategy document leaves the impression it “is a drug war agency, not one dedicated to finding ways to improve criminal justice in Arizona.” Once again, this is typical of law enforcement nation-wide: “Whether at the state or county government level, the war on drugs is the main prism through which criminal justice and law enforcement agencies view crime and violence.”
What this means, of course, is that “local” police agencies are essentially support systems for a plundering army that is literally waging war against the people in the guise of narcotics enforcement. In fact, a good case can be made that these paramilitary task forces – or, to use the proper German translation, einsatzgruppen – are carrying out the precise role that would be played by the dreaded blue-helmeted UN “peace enforcement” units that haunt the imagination of many “law and order” conservatives.
