America’s police taught to ignore Constitution, confiscate billions from law abiding citizens

Coach is Right ^ | 9/22/14 | Doug Book

[Oldpuppymax]

Thirty years ago, the Department of Justice created a civil asset forfeiture program known as “Equitable Sharing.” Though originally created for the purpose of separating drug dealers from their ill-gotten assets and cash, since 2001 Equitable Sharing has been employed by the nation’s police to score $2.5 Billion in cash and assets from citizens “who were not charged with a crime and without a warrant being issued.” It is a high-dollar confiscation scam through which 298 police departments and 210 task forces have seized as much as 20 % of their operating budgets “…despite a federal ban [on the use of such money] to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets.”

A 2014 Washington Post article revealed that Equitable Sharing resulted in “…61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments.” And this plunder was indeed shared equitably with $1.7 billion going to state and local authorities as “…the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.” The rather meager number of less than $8,800 hardly represents automobiles, airplanes or vacation homes confiscated from international drug rings.

How far removed are the nation’s police from the “Protect and Serve” mission we hear so much about? In 2012, John Anderson of San Clemente, California was pulled over by part-time deputy David Frye in Seward County Nebraska for “failing to signal promptly when changing lanes.” The stop for an issued warning ticket took just 13 minutes.

But according to court papers filed by Frye, he claimed to find “…several indicators of possible suspicious activity: an air freshener, a radar detector and inconsistencies in the driver’s description of his travels.” The Deputy asked Anderson if he was in possession of cocaine, heroin or large amounts of...

[2ndDivisionVet]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[sickoflibs]

RE :”An hour later, after signing away his $25,000, Anderson was permitted to go.”

Something fishy here. Carrying that amount of cash around and then signing it away.

youtube has some vids on how to handle police : 'Am I being detained? Am I free to go? I don't answer questions. I don't give permission for searches"

[armydawg505]

Why don’t you pay your ticket and get over it.

[2ndDivisionVet]

I haven’t received a ticket since the early 90’s my man.

[Wolfie]

People won’t get it until it happens to them. By then (actually, now) it will be/is too late.

[gaijin]

Later

[familyop]

Over $20,000 snagged from a tourist on the CO Rockies a few years ago (no mention of drugs involved), and no one gets it back except to feed it all to the lawyers, judges and bureaucrats. Quite a racket, eh?