- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
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This demonstrates why no government agency should be self-funding. If fees are collected they should be refunded to taxpayers. If a budget is needed it should go through the normal budget process and be given a budget directly from incoming taxes. So everything’s aboveboard and transparent.
As soon as an organization is self-funding it’s open to both regulatory capture and corruption. We need to remove the incentives for bad actors, not just trying to catch bad actors after the fact.
This would have a huge impact on small police departments who self-fund through tickets in the community exploitation. Police should not be tax farmers. Police should be for the people and buy the people, tax farmers are exploitive by their very nature. They should not be the same person.
Cops are just gangsters most people trust sadly. They are a protection racket that steals from you (taxes) and is actually not required to protect you at all.
TaXaTiOn iS tHeFt
What do you call taking someone’s money without their consent, using force/threat of violence?
Listen, I hate cops too, but if you’re taking part in and benefitting from modern society, you’re gonna have to chip in for that convenience. If you don’t like it, live off the grid.
Taxes pays my education and healthcare, it funds the military that makes russia think twice before invading my country, it builds and maintains all the roads and bridges I use every day to move around, it pays food and housing for the people that can’t afford that themselves.
I’m gladly paying taxes as long as it’s not all going to the pockets of corrupt politicans.
Civil Forfeiture is theft and Qualified Immunity is a murder license. Not that there seems to be any way to convince anyone in power to fix it
This was a good article, US centric, but interesting. Would have been better if it didn’t start with a picture of a happy looking dog and a seizure of $100k cash which the author can’t even explain. The law says you have to prove you didn’t get the money illegally, if I had $100k in my suitcase I think I would be able to explain how I got it.
In the US, you are innocent until proven guilty. Civil asset forfeiture runs against this idea. The burden should be on the government to prove this stuff is ill-gotten gains, anything else is unamerican.
It must be nice to have thousands of dollars and have no idea where it came from. But realistically it’s highly unlikely that you would walk around with it.
Presumably you either were handed it in which case you know where you got it from, or you got it out of the bank in which case you must have a business or lottery winnings or inheritance you can point to.
I cannot imagine any innocent scenario where you have vast of money (in currency form) of which you are unable to provide origin information on.
This is the same argument as “you wouldn’t object to a search if you have nothing to hide.” The fact is that anyone walking around with thousands of dollars, however “nice” you imagine that to be, is entitled to do so without any explanation due to you or the government.
No it’s common for cash. Anytime you buy anything very expensive, such as a house or you want to take out a fun contract you have to submit to anti money laundering searches. This is also true of physical cash.
Sorry, but you’re conflating “using” cash with “having” cash. I can’t speak to the rest of the world, but in the United States, the 4th amendment of the Bill of Rights states that you’re to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. You can have any amount of money on your person for any reason you like, so long as you don’t do something illegal with it. These cops are stealing cash under the pretense that it could have been used for something illegal, which directly conflicts with the idea of being innocent until proven guilty. The sham they perpetrate is that it’s the cash being accused, not the person. It’s bullshit and they have no intention of doing anything other than keeping the cash.
Want to withdraw all of your cash in dollar bills so that you can lay on it like a mattress? Legal, and cops shouldn’t have any claim to it.
Want to withdraw all of your cash in golden dollar coins and try to swim in it like Scrooge McDuck? An ill-advised plan, considering how fucked the American healthcare system works, but legal, and once again, cops should have no claim to it.
Just having property - cash, gold, diamonds, very small unicorn figurines, whatever - is not an illegal or even inherently suspicious act.
Without probable cause, there’s no reason a government agent should ever be able to take any property from you.
