Tuesday, February 12th, 2019
Stephan: I am increasingly concerned by the growing trend of police thuggery, whether it is civil forfeiture, as this report discusses, or violence, or death. Consider this from Atlantic Magazine: "Of the 1,146 and 1,092 victims of police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively, the authors found 52 percent were white, 26 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic. Together, these individuals lost 57,375 years to police violence in 2015 and 54,754 to police violence in 2016. Young people and people of color were disproportionately affected: 52 percent of all the years of life lost were lost by nonwhite, non-Hispanic ethnic groups. Whites also tended to be killed by police at older ages than African Americans and Hispanics—though this is partly because in the general population, whites are older on average than the other groups."
More people are killed in the United States by law enforcement in a year than the entire population of all the countries of Europe Consider this from VOX, "Police officers in the US shoot and kill hundreds of people each year, according to the
FBI’s very limited data — far more than other developed countries like the UK, Japan, and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all.
We have a serious problem in this country, and it rarely even gets mentioned let along properly discussed.
In South Carolina, civil forfeiture targets black people’s money most of all, exclusive investigative data shows.
When a man barged into Isiah Kinloch’s apartment and broke a bottle over his head, the North Charleston resident called 911. After cops arrived on that day in 2015, they searched the injured man’s home and found an ounce of marijuana.
So they took $1,800 in cash from his apartment and kept it.
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When Eamon Cools-Lartigue was driving on Interstate 85 in Spartanburg County, deputies stopped him for speeding. The Atlanta businessman wasn’t criminally charged in the April 2016 incident. Deputies discovered $29,000 in his car, though, and decided to take it.
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When Brandy Cooke dropped her friend off at a Myrtle Beach sports bar as a favor, drug enforcement agents swarmed her in the parking lot and found $4,670 in the car.
Her friend was wanted in a drug distribution case, but Cooke wasn’t involved. She had no drugs and was never charged in the 2014 bust. Agents seized her money anyway.
She worked as a waitress and carried cash because she didn’t have a checking account. She spent more than a year trying to get her money back.
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The Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail examined these cases and every other court […]
Forfeiture is nothing more or less than burglary which is legalized. The police should not have this authority at all, and should be sued at their expense.
The asset forfeiture laws were NEVER intended to be used on American citizens. They were strictly for non-citizens coming in and breaking the law. The clearest example is ships which come into port with contraband. The laws allowed authorities to seize the ship and/or cargo.
They were NEVER to be used on citizens because American citizens are subject to the criminal laws of the country and can be punished that way. But to punish citizens by putting them in jail AND seizing assets is probably the worst SCOTUS decision ever (Bennis v Michigan). The rationale behind the decision was that asset forfeiture against citizens was constitutional because it had been practiced for so long.