Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014

If you scroll through and read the stories, most of them seem to be either terrible car crashes or violent criminals.

Presuming that officers work 2080 hours a year and there are 765,000 with arresting power, you are 1755 times more likely to interface with a not-a-cop than a cop on the job. Therefore, you are 160 times more likely to be killed X minutes with a police officer than X minutes with some stranger. 15 seconds with 1 cop is as dangerous as 15 seconds with 160 random people.

My friends in south LA from different backgrounds have a mantra to never call the cops under any condition. The idea is that however bad a situation can get, introduction of the police will incontrovertibly make it a de facto worse situation. Whether true or not, this seems to be a gut intuition to many (search google for "never call the police" to see people express this view).

The crux of the question is two-fold:

1. Does bringing police into any situation generally lead to worse consequences than avoiding them?

2. If we believe that violence is always an inferior solution that lacks efficacy, then why should we invite state-sanctioned violence into our lives voluntarily? Stated another way, why is the government provided service to someone with psychological distress two people with firearms locking them in a cage? Shouldn't we provide a more appropriate government service for this?

It may be in there depending on how you count. Police deaths account for 0.34 per 100,000, greater than war (0.30) and less than tetanus (0.38).

Let's you and I both smoke six packs of cigarettes per day for 20 years as an experiment and see whether we can control getting lung cancer and or emphysema to a very large degree.

Is it complete control? No, it's very near that.

Obesity? (which causes numerous other diseases) Yep, we can control that too.

Last time our place was burgled, they ignored laptops and cameras and went for the jewelry.

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hb9411.pdf

Table 5 sort of shows what I was getting at, burglaries of lower income households dropped a lot more than burglaries in general. One explanation of that is that lower end break ins aren't worth it anymore.

If that is the case, the average would go up without the rest of the burglaries really changing.

(I guess that could be described as a change in the distribution of burglaries rather than a shift in the distribution; I read your reply here as pointing to a shift)

None; even outside the "secured" areas, airports are one of the most heavily patrolled places open to the public.

Obviously, that doesn't make attacks impossible, but characterizing that locale as "unprotected" is unreasonable.

The fact that a hearing is part of the process is largely irrelevant because other parts of the system to conspire to keep victims from reaching the hearing or getting justice.

1. Presumption of accuracy Just because the cops claim that the money is "Drug money" doesn't make it so. As a victim of asset forfeiture, that money was claimed to be "Terrorism" money but it was laughable on its face.

2. Presumption of guilt. Even if it was taken from a genuine drug dealer, the dealer is innocent until proven guilty, but the money is taken before this proof is achieved. Thus this denies the dealer the opportunity to provide for his defense.

Someone I went to high school with was the victim of this. He was not a drug dealer, he was a doctor. An oncologist who had a great many terminal patients. He was raided by the DEA because he was giving these cancer patients "too much" pain medication. His assets and house were frozen, he was taken to jail and his wife and kid were left homeless while he had to try and defend himself...with no money to hire a lawyer. His wife worked part time as a receptionist in his office- so the prosecutor threatened to put her in jail as an accomplice, forcing his kids into the "Care" of the state if he didn't take a plea deal. He had no money for counsel, and no choice so he plead guilty. This is a doctor whose "crime" was caring for his patients. You would say he must have been guilty because he was convicted. And therefor this is drug money, but that's a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, and misses the point that he was forced to plead guilty by having his ability to hire a defense team denied to him via the theft.

Finally, you're being absurd to say that you have access to the courts and that they are impartial. As my case showed me, the judge knew that the affidavit for seizure of the property was fraudulent-- he knew it, because he had been presented proof of it the week prior-- yet he still authorized the theft. The cops and the judges and the prosecutors all work for the state, and the judges are not independant. They are dependent on keeping their job by towing the line.

This is why cops and judges are almost never prosecuted. No cop would dare testify, no prosecutor will bring charges and no judge would allow the case in his court.

In all seriousness, that is getting very close to a police state.

http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html?page=1

It's also somewhat wrong for this purpose, but it's less wrog. Traditionally the word has been associated with banana republics and politically unstable nations whose heads of state and ruling elite sell off national assets, rob their citizens and otherwise stripmine their entire countries, before fleeing.

In this case you have police turning into criminal gangs, protected by the justice system. And with civil forfeiture they are literally engaging in legalised highway robbery.