Policing for Profit????????????????

[mrsleeve]

Well I stumbled upon this again last night on the interwebs thought it may make for interesting topic here.

I give you Policing for profit aka Civil Asset Forfeiture laws. This shit can happen to any one of us, with the sniff of a dog, or on the "word" of a officer. look at the bottom of the 1st link to see how your state laws rank and then a little lower you can see many instances of abuse of these laws from all over the country.

http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3114&Itemid=165

Some other sources for of this.

http://www.kfor.com/news/local/kfor-news-policing-for-profit-story,0,730668.story

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704107204574469360661231536.html

Discuss

[BraveUlysses]

Another victory for our rights thanks to the War on Drugs!

[Victell]

This is a direct conflict of interest for law enforcement. They should never take profit or anything else for their department, other than cofiscated contraband or whatever to use in future stings and such.

I've always felt that all ticket revenue (moving violations and parking) should go somewhere else besides the police department. It creates motive for ticketing, as well as being unfair for the police departments to have to depend on ticketing reveune to balance their budget.

[mar1t1me]

This is a real problem....friend in Ohio who builds race cars came in and found one his sprint cars missing. Little did the thieves know, it had a GPS transponder on board. Friend went to the cops and said "here's where my car, and likely the thieves who stole it is located" and they asked if he insurance and said, just file a claim. They didn't want to spend time on the case if they weren't going to get to keep the car!

That is some kind of bullshit.

[wildstoats]

This is a real problem....friend in Ohio who builds race cars came in and found one his sprint cars missing. Little did the thieves know, it had a GPS transponder on board. Friend went to the cops and said "here's where my car, and likely the thieves who stole it is located" and they asked if he insurance and said, just file a claim. They didn't want to spend time on the case if they weren't going to get to keep the car!

That is some kind of bullshit.

I would say that is fairly accurate at least from my experience. My place of employment had 2 plasma screen televisions stolen. We had video evidence of the theft and then the thief used one of our office phones to call for his getaway driver (moron). We gave the video evidence and the call logs highlighting the time and phone number dialed to the police and nothing ever came of it. After a month or so of trying to get updates on the case we just gave up. I don't know if they are over burdened or just lazy but it sends the message to all of us in the area that unless someone is dead they aren't going to do squat. Well, unless you are speeding or make an illegal right on red, in which case you had better watch your ass, haha.

[joshh]

I've seen this shit before as well. And it's pretty fucked up.
Even when you go to court and are found innocent on charges, you're not really innocent.

The bigger Government gets the harder it is to correct it.
What absolutely amazes me is that many people are okay with this type of thing....till it happens to them.
Maybe if we paid our politicians less and our cops more (along with more training) and cleaned these type of laws of the books, thing would get a lot better.