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Oklahoma State Troopers Use New Device To Seize Bank Accounts During Traffic Stops (news9.com)
mi writes from a report via news9.com KWTV: KWTV writes, "You may have heard of civil asset forfeiture. That's where police can seize your property and cash without first proving you committed a crime; without a warrant and without arresting you, as long as they suspect that your property is somehow tied to a crime. Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money." But do not worry: "If you can prove that you have a legitimate reason to have that money it will be given back to you. And we've done that in the past," said Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent.
I see no reference to the bank accounts, only the prepaid credit cards. Can anyone site something that actually talks about the attacks on bank accounts?
That's where police can seize your property and cash without first proving you committed a crime; without a warrant and without arresting you, as long as they suspect that your property is somehow tied to a crime.
I thought I was reading about some regime in the east! Not this USA. What is the difference? This saddens me.
Not that I am aware. This might be one where it crosses a line. It's one thing to seize someone's prepaid cards (along with items in their physical possession) at the time of an arrest. It's another to remove the money from an account without being arrested.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They were rolled in as part of The War On Drugs; so they've been afforded a very generous hearing.
It didn't help that, after Reagan signed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act in 1984, the police departments doing the seizing got to keep a substantial cut of the take. The legal theories involved go back considerably further; but the change in incentive structure was what created a...downright gleeful...enthusiasm for the practice among LEOs.
Some of the most visible characters involved either run or work with the "Desert Snow" outfit which does training on how to identifiy the juicy targets; and the associated "Black Asphalt Electronic Networking System", which is essentially a cop social network for trading tips and tales of highway robbery.
It's classy stuff.
I know, right? It's absolutely ridiculous, but that's the "innovation" that somehow makes it work.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
I can tell you've never dealt with the IRS (other than to file your return). This has been the general practice of a number of agencies, seize first and ask questions later. Much later, you give the "owner" of said asset a chance to ask for it back, but asking takes time and resources, and the agency who took your stuff is in charge of the process, hires the people who review your claim and makes the rules you have to follow..
The IRS can pretty much take everything you own without you having much to say about it if they think you owe them something. They can garnish your wages, seize assets and bank accounts in their efforts to collect what THEY say you owe. Other government agencies have similar abilities...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Posting anon for reasons. I'm friends with a young black guy around 25 yrs old that sells crack. He recently got busted and has to have a job as part of pre sentencing conditions, hoping to get probation. He got a job washing dishes at a nursing home, pretty easy compared to washing dishes at some place like Chili's. 40 hrs week, $8/hr. He quit, because he said he was losing money from people calling wanting crack while he was at work, and because "he ain't no $8/hr nigga", his words. This isn't even just a job, it's not even enough that his freedom is on the line. Some people just want that life, and aren't going to try to keep a legit job because culture has trained them to think it's beneath them.
If found to be driving with any amount of cash a person is "structuring" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to avoid the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and Internal Revenue Code by using the banking system with much smaller amounts of cash over time.
If no cash is found after a search, the deposit was just made or the vehicle has been altered with cash hiding compartments.
To be found with any digital banking details while driving is now fair game in that state.
Even with local plates, facial recognition of the driver and passenger can induce a "random" pull over and chat down with the "discovery" of cash or banking details.
The ability to track a face, cell phone powered on, licence plate is now so cheap any county, city, state can afford to stop anyone. If a state/federal database sees any pattern of movement or a degree separation or three of 'hops' from any suspect.
Every federal digital tracking system is now cheap enough for local law enforcement. Add in civil asset forfeiture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in many US states and just driving gets to be very interesting.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
... the underlying law has been expanded and abused over the decades ...
Which was predictable - and predicted at the time.
RICO and other asset forfeiture statutes recreate the incentive structure that drove the Spanish Inquisition:
- The inquisitors rolled into town.
- They busted some people for allegedly being a heretic, witch, etc. Typically a relatively well-to-do farmer with lots of assets and some jealous neighbors.
- They tortured them until they had something to use as "evidence". (If all else failed, "The Needle" would find one of the spots on the skin (where the nerves come up, like the blind spot in the eye) where pain sensitivity is absent and the victim doesn't flinch when pierced.)
- Then they did them in, seized their assets, and split it between the Inquisitors and the local authorities.
Needless to say there was a strong financial incentive to find ever more heretics.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The supreme court of the US has upheld the general principle of civil forfeiture, sadly. So we need congressional reform. And there are people for reforming it. While some Republicans are for it (as reintroduced by the Reagan administration) there is still opposition to it from the more libertarian wing of the Republican party, there's support against it from Democrats too. Currently though the "tough on crime" sorts are winning, so even a congress member worried about civil rights can be timid about seeming to be soft on crime during election years.
> Below that level, lots of crime; above it, relatively little.
The line of conviction is not a line of criminality, just a line of "can afford good lawyers". The vast majority of black prisoners are convicted of non-violent offenses, mostly marijuana posession. White people are arrested for the same crime just as often, but convicted far less frequently.
And that's without considering the fact that EVERY wall street banker belongs in jail for life and not one of them actually went.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Tell that to the Dutch. The siege of Amsterdam alone killed thousands by starvation over an 80-year period - the Inquisition was at least as much a military power as a policing power and should be equally blames for the crimes of their navy. The very concept of "heresy" being a crime flies in the face of any concept of justice. Now only an idiot would claim the protestants were any BETTER. John Calvin executed his best friend for heresy and protestants in Iceland had habit of invading monasteries and forcing priests and nuns to copulate at gunpoint. Which wouldn't even save their lives, it would just get them a quick death rather than a slow torture death.
But to suggest that the inquisition was some precursor of modern justice is flagrantly ignorant. There are actual precursors of modern concepts of justice like innocent-until-proven-guilty out there. The Magna Carta for example. But none of them came from a church. They came, mostly, from philosophers - a group of people who have, throughout history, been more likely to be accused of heresy than support the church. Especially that faction known as "natural philosophers" (the precursors of science) - such as Copernicus or Spinoza for example but to no lesser extent the philosophers who thought about politics, statecraft and power - after all, any time they said something sensible it was a threat to the power-relationship (read: circle-jerk) between nobility and religion. Examples here would be philosophers like John Locke.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *