Hacker News Reader

Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

The atrocities have been going on for decades, yet suddenly everyone is interested. Any ideas what changed, so that press is paying attention now?

View on HN

Those particular geese only lay golden eggs until you kill them.

My guess is they got greedy and then got attention. It was fine and good when they took PimpDaddy's caddy because drugs, but not so fine when they took his grandma's house too because he parked there for an hour last tuesday.

man you're not even trying with the racial dogwhistles here but it speaks to a deeper truth

The racial aspect of this is a great big elephant-in-the-room stomping-on-your-toes issue in this situation. I figure if you're gonna whistle about it, whistle loud.

Curious, where was race mentioned?

if you're incapable of reading subtext i can't help you, apologies

> when they took PimpDaddy's caddy because drugs

...which noonespecial acknowledged was a racial "dog whistle", although I think it's just an insinuation, not a "dog whistle."

In the world of interconnectivity news travels fast. Take for example, ebola. Everyone was informed about it and hospitals took great measures because of an unprecedented disease awareness. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and Google make incredibly powerful distribution channels.

In the past, TV stations were incentivized to work with local police for a large percentage of their news stories, so they couldn't publish defamatory content. In today's world brains are connected more efficiently. One of the benefits is increase in transparency. For example, the ratio of security cameras to civilian cameras has flipped. Civilians have much better oversight over people they pay to protect them, increasing accountability. Similarly, the ratio of news publishers has flipped to civilians. Now the press has to follow reddit and twitter posts or risk loosing readership.

From what I've read, the rate of seizure has increased something like 10-fold in the last decade. That's at least part of it.

With the wrong incentives given, it is clear, that those things multiply ... and it is sad, because it also means, that mischief has multiplied in those people that should uphold justice.

As @roymurdock posted, the NY Times article has a video of the guy being quite explicit in the "benefits": http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-w...

He describes how excited the cops were to steal a guy's car. He even says "and gulp we had to give it back" because they didn't follow procedure. Put aside the inanity involved in stealing people's property in cases like this, it's a pure greed motive where cops are looking at the population to go raiding.

They sound little better than privateers.

Harry Connelly, the one discussing "little goodies" to be seized can be contacted at harryc@las-cruces.org

I've sent him an email expressing my displeasure at his use of Civil Asset Forfeiture.

they started applying it to affluent white people

I think that it happened (can't find the link) because up to some point, the departments didn't get any money from forfeitures - when this changed, forfeitures exploded.

The media attention has been going on for decades too. It's just that nothing changes.

This month, the two largest newspapers in the USA and NPR covered the story. To my knowledge, that's substantially greater coverage than it has ever received before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com