Policing For Profit: Cops Stealing Billons In Unconstitutional Forfeitures--Some Keep The Money [ Picture, Video }
People are always complaigning abut high taxes, but the forfeiture pirates are in a class all by themselves. They put Blackbeard and a hundred other buccaneers to shame. muckracker
Here’s an accounting where other innocent people also had their cash taken by people who are supposed to be enforcing the law.
Shelby County: Memphis police took $32,000 from an African-American woman — money she’d been saving for a down payment on a building that she planned to buy the next day. A state administrative law judge later called it “highly inappropriate … to deprive a citizen of her property based simply on such speculation and conjecture.”
Hamilton County: A sheriff’s deputy seized $28,000 from a Vietnamese businessman — money that the man had borrowed to buy a restaurant. A judge later ruled that was “not the proceeds from the sale of drugs.”
Bradley County: Police took $20,000 from an African-American man who had won the Georgia Lottery. The man said he had been to Knoxville trying to buy a car. A judge later ruled “there was no proof that Claimant had any connection with illegal drugs.”
In another case, police seized $31,000 from a Korean businessman who had collected the money as repayment of a loan. A judge later ruled that “there was no ‘reasonable suspicion’ or ‘probable cause’ to make the traffic stop.”
Also, in Bradley County, a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer took $135,504 from an African-American businessman who had been using cash to buy flooded properties in New Orleans. The money was returned after the state failed to pursue the case.
Monroe County: Police confiscated $17,300 from three Hispanic men. They were about to wire the money to family in El Salvador to buy a house. A judge later ruled that “there was absolutely no proof that Claimants sold any drugs.”
Sullivan County: An interdiction team took $27,500 from a Hispanic mahttp://www.collapsingintoconsciousness.com/policing-for-profit/n. He was transporting the money his mother had saved to Virginia, where she’d moved from California. The state later returned the money to the woman.
