Civil forfeiture scam lets police collect billions from innocent Americans
Police agencies across the United States are seizing billions of dollars annually in assets and money from people never convicted of crimes, and they’ve been getting away with it for decades.
Law enforcement uses civil forfeiture to make fortunes in towns around the US, and only a select few of the innocent parties impacted by the practice are lucky enough to have their cash and other goodies ever returned.
And while police groups started collecting assets through civil forfeiture in order to take down drug lords and mob bosses, a 12-page report published in the New Yorker this week by Sarah Stillman reveals that agencies are using it to drive people to poverty, often without rhyme or reason.
“The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing,” Stillman wrote. “It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime.”
According to the author, the US Department of Justice went from raking in 25 million dollars through civil forfeiture nearly 30 years ago to a record $4.2 billion last year. Often, those funds are then used to pay for police salaries and award officers with annual bonuses. And unless victims have the resources to find a well-equipped attorney, they are often without any sort of recourse.
Stillman reveals that civil forfeiture is used by state and federal agencies to penalize the people behind cockfighting rings and basement gambling groups, among others, but the board scope allows many people to be punished for seemingly no reason.
“In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with ‘probable cause’ is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one,” she wrote. “Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.”
Stillman profiles several instances where families across the US lose upwards of millions apiece because of civil forfeiture abuse. In one instance, an elderly couple from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had their home seized after their son allegedly sold $20 worth of marijuana from the property’s porch; in another, a Pentecostal church secretary had all $28,500 worth of donations in his car seized when a state trooper in Virginia stopped him for speeding.
"We could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the money was church money from parishioners’ donations,” the secretary’s attorney, David Smith told The New Yorker. “But these were people who didn’t have the means to fight back. They weren’t well-to-do. They didn’t know any senators or congressmen, they weren’t citizens. They had no voice.”
Often there’s no chance of leniency from the court, either. According to a report this week in ProPublica, only 30 of the 2,000 civil forfeiture cases that occurred in Philadelphia between 2008 and 2012 ended with the judge rejecting the seizure. Other times, victims who aren’t even convicted come out of the case clasping to whatever assets remain.
At ProPublica, journalist Isaiah Thompson recalled another case in Philadelphia where the police tried to seize the home belonging to a grandmother of 18 because one of her residents, her 24-year-old son, had been charged with selling cocaine.
“Police reported finding unused packets, though not drugs, in a rear bedroom,” Thompson wrote. “Rochelle Bing was not present and was not accused of a crime. Yet she soon received a frightening letter from the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.”
"For me to lose my home," Bing told ProPublica, "for them to take that from me, knowing I had grandchildren - that would have hurt me more than anything."
"On the federal level, you tend to see bigger cases get attention - kingpins and that sort of thing - which is what Congress intended with forfeiture," Louis Rulli, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Thompson. "But coming after the parents and the grandparents, who have nothing to do with it?" he says. "The logic does not hold up to me."
Why Have Police In America Turned Into Such Ruthless Thugs?
Michael SnyderAmerican Dream
August 9, 2013
August 9, 2013
Once upon a time, the police were one of the most respected institutions in America, but now most Americans fear them. Almost every single day there are multiple stories of police brutality or misconduct that make the national news. Just this week, there have been stories about police killing a baby deer at an animal shelter, about police killing a 95-year-old World War II veteran in a retirement home, and about police using legal technicalities to “legally” steal massive amounts of money from innocent citizens. Why are police acting like this? Why have police in America turned into such ruthless thugs? In the case of the baby deer that was killed, 13 armed agents stormed the animal shelter up in Wisconsin where it was being cared for. Is this really the kind of country that we want our children to grow up in? A country where Bambi is hunted down by armed thugs working for the government? Sadly, the story about that deer is not an isolated incident. The truth is that police all over the country kill animals every single day. In fact, police in Chicago have shot 488 animals since 2008. No wonder people are so afraid to have the police come to their homes.
Increasingly, police departments all over the United States are being transformed into military-style units. These days, even very minor violations of the law can result in a SWAT team raid. The following is from a recent article by John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute…
Consider that in 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US. By 2001, that number had grown to 45,000 and has since swelled to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year. On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. In fact, there are few communities without a SWAT team on their police force today. In 1984, 25.6 percent of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team. That number rose to 80 percent by 2005.
But it is not just local police departments that are being militarized. This is happening on the federal level as well. In fact, according to Whitehead even the Department of Education and NASA now have their own SWAT teams…
When it comes to SWAT-style tactics being used in routine policing, the federal government is one of the largest offenders, with multiple agencies touting their own SWAT teams, including the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Consumer Product Safety Commission, NASA, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the US National Park Service, and the FDA.
What in the world does NASA need a SWAT team for?
The police culture in America has fundamentally changed. In the old days, most police officers were extremely helpful and would give you directions or help you get your cat out of a tree.
But if you stop and ask a police officer for help today, you will be lucky if all you get is some dirty language. These days, police all over the nation are actually being trained to bark orders at you and to respond to the least bit of resistance with overwhelming force.
The results of this kind of training can often be extremely tragic. Just the other day, a 95-year-old World War II veteran living in a retirement home near Chicago was murdered by police just because he did not want to undergo high-risk surgery…
A 95-year-old man who served his country during World War II is now dead after police stormed his retirement home with riot shields, Tasered him and shot him with bean bag rounds – all because he adamantly refused to undergo high-risk surgery.U.S. Army Air Corps veteran John Wrana, who was honorably discharged as a sergeant after he served in the India-Burma campaign, used a walker because family members said he was “wobbly” on his feet, according to the Chicago Tribune. The elderly veteran was shot down by enemy fire during the war.On July 26, a doctor reportedly told Wrana if he survived surgery, he would likely be put on life support. The elderly man refused the operation, and paramedics attempted to involuntarily transport him for medical treatment. He was sitting in a chair, holding a cane and a shoe horn when police arrived at the Victory Centre senior living facility located just south of Chicago.
Why did the police have to act like that?
Is there any police officer out there that cannot physically handle a 95-year-old man?
That 95-year-old veteran survived fighting the Japanese, but he was not able to survive the thuggish behavior of our own police.
And most Americans don’t realize this, but when police pull you over they can take cash and property from you even if you have not done anything wrong. It is called “civil forfeiture” and it is one of the worst things about U.S. law. Civil forfeiture was described in a recent article by Becket Adams…
Did you know that the police can confiscate items such as cash and property from people who have never been convicted of a crime?It’s true, and it’s all because of a little-known police tactic called civil forfeiture.A product of the so-called “war on drugs,” civil forfeiture was part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984passed by Congress 29 years ago. The bill gives law enforcement officials a portion of the assets seized during drug raids and similar investigations.
The following are some examples of the abuse of civil forfeiture that were detailed in a recent article in the New Yorker…
-Police took the home of an elderly couple in Philadelphia because their son allegedly sold $20 worth of marijuana on their front porch.
-Police in Virginia pulled over a speeder and took $28,500 that was intended to be used to purchase a new parcel of land for a Pentecostal church.
-One town in Texas has actually been caught threatening to take children away from innocent couples if they don’t sign over the cash that they are carrying to the police…
The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.
If you have not read the new article in the New Yorker that goes into great detail about all of this, you can find it right here.
So why are police all over America acting like this?
Well, one of the primary factors is that they are just following the example that is being set on the federal level.
The entire country is rapidly being transformed into a “Big Brother” police state, and most Americans seem to like it that way.
And with each passing year, it just gets even worse. For example, we were originally told that the TSA would only be hassling us at our airports, but now they are everywhere. As the New York Times recently reported, TSA “VIPR teams” are now being deployed almost everywhere there are large gatherings of people…
With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals.
This “VIPR team” program is “growing rapidly”, and apparently these “VIPR teams” conducted 8,800 “unannounced checkpoints” last year…
The program now has a $100 million annual budget and is growing rapidly, increasing to several hundred people and 37 teams last year, up from 10 teams in 2008. T.S.A. records show that the teams ran more than 8,800 unannounced checkpoints and search operations with local law enforcement outside of airports last year, including those at the Indianapolis 500 and the Democratic and Republican national political conventions.
So where is the outrage?
A small minority of the American people have been sounding the alarm about NSA snooping and other abuses, but most Americans don’t really seem to care about these things very much.
In fact, according to a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of all Americans don’t even want the media to report on secret government surveillance programs.
So not only do they not want the surveillance to stop, 47 percent of all Americans do not even want to hear anything about it on the news.
How sickening is that?
Sadly, this is not the first survey that has produced this kind of a result. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “19 Surveys Which Prove That A Large Chunk Of The Population Is Made Up Of Totally Clueless Sheeple“.
In the end, we will get the government that we deserve. And according to the New York Times, at this point our government is even willing to manufacture fake terror threats in order to distract us from their surveillance activities…
Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now was a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the N.S.A.’s data-collection programs, and that if it showed the intercepts had uncovered a possible plot, even better.
What in the world is happening to America?
Is there any hope for us?
US Military Caught Manipulating Social Media, Running Mass Propaganda Accounts
Anthony Gucciardi
Infowars.com
August 9, 2013
Infowars.com
August 9, 2013
It has been common knowledge to anyone paying attention within the alternative news community for years, but once again the media is now admitting that the US military and intelligence agencies are indeed running massive propaganda campaigns that cover a vast array of online networks.
How many times now has such ‘conspiracy nonsense’ now been reported years later by the mega media as undeniable fact? In the case of the US intelligence propaganda machine that even the New York Times has covered in an article entitled ‘The Real War on Reality‘, we are seeing just that. The New York Times report goes on to detail information uncovered from hacked data regarding the military operation to stage ‘grassroots’ responses and organizations in order to deceive via psyop. Professor of philosophy Peter Ludlow writes for the Times:
“The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.”
This cyber warfare is clearly not just in the capacity of ‘improving international reputation’ as military commanders are claiming on record (just like there is ‘no such thing’ as domestic spying and it’s only for terrorists). Instead, we’re talking about running a major network of computers that are constantly running code specifically written to post to social media and news comment pages. Something that was revealed all the way back in 2011 by RawStory and brushed off in the name of national security by the military.
INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES RUNNING MASS NUMBER OF PROPAGANDA ACCOUNTS
And remember, this is the same military that says political activists are terrorists and need to be targeted. At the highest levels, combating ‘terrorism’ simply means going after law-abiding citizens and journalists — especially so-called ‘leakers’. With propaganda scripts that run 24/7 and are intended to discredit people like Edward Snowden, top level intelligence agencies are teaming up with the military to combat whistleblowers through such phony means.
An excerpt from a particularly concerning summary of a recent German report on how political activists are targeted reads:
“The targets of these attacks are scientists… It does not stop at skirmishes in the scientific community. Hackers regularly target various web pages. Evaluations of IP log files show that not only Monsanto visits the pages regularly, but also various organizations of the U.S. government, including the military. These include the Navy Network Information Center, the Federal Aviation Administration and the United States Army Intelligence Center, an institution of the US Army, which trains soldiers with information gathering.”
Now admittedly the news is not getting nearly as much coverage as it should, especially when considering it highlights two essential points:
1. This means that the United States military and intelligence communities are highly afraid of alternative networks and the overall public perception when it comes to the United States government and the state of the corrupt political mafia at large.
2. This also means that the United States military and intelligence agencies are losing the informational battle, and the only way they can even fight back is to run a conglomerate of fake accounts attacking legitimate users and journalists. You know, the terrorists that dare to question anything.
Social media pages, comment systems on top news websites, and various other areas online are the targets of a pinpointed ‘cyber psyop’ by a government that simply can’t answer real questions. And instead of actually doing anything about the outrage, disinformation campaigns are of utmost priority.
No comments:
Post a Comment