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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.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Innocent until proven guilty, huh?
Alright, just gotta prove that the money is clean. You need to hire a lawyer to do that.
What are you gonna pay that lawyer with after all your money just got seized?
Oh, and better do it fast - rent is due soon.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Have these civil forfeiture laws been challenged on 4th amendment grounds? Isn't this the textbook definition of unreasonable seizure?
>implying it isn't
Circumcision is child abuse.
And the police unions wring their hands talking about how nobody trusts police anymore
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?
Article says pre-paid cards. Says nothing at all about bank accounts. Which would be a whole new level of thing.
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.
I thought that was something that only happened in stories about Ye Olden Days (like Robin Hood) but this is literally highway robbery!
As though I needed another reason to *not* visit Oklahoma. It's now officially the Alabama of the South.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This just proves how far law enforcement thinks that can go to tread over the rights and civil liberties of citizens in their pursuit of 'catching the bad guys'. This will not end but it has to. If a patrol officer has the authority to seize your bank accounts based on suspicion, whats to say they can't seize any and all assets based on nothing more than a "gut feeling". There is no requirement of proof on the officers part. Justice has deteriorated in the US. Crime has dropped to all-time lows, yet the headlines scream that there are rampant criminals stealing and profiting from drugs, terrorism, arms, whatever fits the headline of fear mongering. It is not right.
When will the citizenry of the US wake up and take back the power that has been slowly bled away form them over the last 50 years?
Don't get me wrong, I want the cops to get the bad guys. But do it right, not slimy, not by taking away the rights of free people.
Is this real?
No.
The source article says specifically it lets them take the funds off of a pre-paid card. It says nothing about bank accounts, credit cards, etc.
John Oliver addressed civil forfeiture a few years ago.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"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.
Besides the absurdity of having to prove that you own your own possessions, there is the problem that many police forces simply declare it as "part of drug proceeds" and it is nearly impossible to get back.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
It was thrown out with the bathwater for the war on drugs.
The perception was that drug dealers were living high off of their ill-gotten gains: owning houses, boats, off-road trucks... and flaunting their wealth in the community.
We didn't have enough evidence to charge them with drug-related crimes, so we invented civil asset forfeiture to compensate: if you even *looked* like you could be a drug dealer, you could have your assets confiscated and sold.
And the proceeds can go directly to the police department to further their anti-drug campaign. Under this new law, drug crime became a self-correcting problem as the proceeds went to fund ever-more expanded police operations. ...except that it didn't. Drug use is as high as it ever was, police can confiscate anything you own on a whim, and the action is not tied to evidence or charges, and neither the police nor the prosecutors can be held liable for mistakes and errors.
This was a problem for 20 years, and eventually the US attorney general made a ruling that in general, you can't sieze cash as civil-asset forfeiture.
(But the OP is apparently about state-sponsored seizure, not federal.)
This will to go to the supreme court, will cost about $2 million in wasted effort for some poor schmuck, cost about 10 years wasted time for some poor schmuck, and be overturned. In the meantime, OK state cops get a free pass to steal money from anyone.
And of course, when the government is eventually found doing something illegal, they are told to stop. When a company is found doing something illegal, they pay a small fine and don't admit to any wrongdoing. When a citizen is found doing something illegal, they go to jail.
And when a citizen is wrongly accused, it costs a lifetime of wages and a year or two of life effort just to escape the state's error.
What I don't understand is why more police aren't being shot in this nation. The police are trashing lives on a whim, and some of those trashed lives will have nothing to lose. I haven't had a polite interaction with a cop in 20 years, and most people say that the best policy is to avoid them at all costs. Parents are starting to teach their children not to call the police for help.
The police hurt a lot of people, unnecessarily, and a lot of people are getting desperate.
It surprises me that we're not in full-out revolt.
Is there any way to load a pre-paid card with a huge negative balance? Such that when somebody moves the negative quantity to their account, it actually cleans them out?
Have gnu, will travel.
You are totally innocent. Your stuff, however, is totally guilty. Try to prove otherwise!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
No, no. Remember your right-wing ideology. You have to socially elevate yourself until you're the one taking the money from the plebs. That comes from hard work and grit, son.
The best part of TFA is the last sentence:
"It shows the state is paying ERAD Group Inc., $5,000 for the software and scanners, then 7.7 percent of all the cash forfeited through the courts to the highway patrol"
The great thing here is that ERAD Group Inc. can then give 7.7 percent of their 7.7 percent to "sympathetic" politicians who won't just keep the ball rolling, but will keep that system expanding. The highway patrol wins, ERAD Group Inc. wins, the politicians win, everybody wins! Great job, Oklahoma...the envy of the Great Plains.
Is this real?
For some time police have had the power to steal cash from people if they 'suspect' that it might derive from some criminal activity, even if the suspect is not charged. If you are charged you are actually better off, because although the cash and other assets you have on you can be frozen as evidence, they can't be forfeited unless you are found guilty at trial.
What this article references is Oklahoma testing a new electronic device, called ERAD, which can detect money hidden on prepaid cash cards in your possession. Any such funds detected can be stolen on the same pretext as your cash.
"The source article says specifically it lets them take the funds off of a pre-paid card. It says nothing about bank accounts, credit cards, etc."
ERAD does not transfer money from banks, but the cops can use it to scan your ATM card referncing a bank account. That means that if you get caught by Oklahoma cops in a civil forfeiture stop, immediately close any bank accounts represented by cards in your wallet and transfer them somewhere else before the cops get a signoff from some compliant local court on tapping the bank accounts they found.
The admiralty law misconception
... 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
It is no different for a few. About 8% of Americans don't have a bank account. That's not nobody, but it is accurate to say the vast majority of people have a bank account. Thus the distinction matters to most people. If you have a bank account and also use prepaid cards, then this is a distinction that could be very important. Only for the people who do not have bank accounts is there no difference.
Also it matters in terms of the law and who they are fighting with. Try to take money from a bank account without a warrant and it runs afoul of a number of banking laws, not to mention you are picking a fight with the banks.
Because of both things, you'd get a TON more pushback since it would affect a lot more people and since there are some heavy hitters (banks) involved. As it stands, it is the sort of thing that only preys on some people who are not as likely to push back, most most it will have little to no effect on.
There's a reason it is being done as it is, it IS a distinction that matters legally and practically.
No joke. That actually happens.
And ERAD gets 7.7% of all seizures.
Where's Timothy McVeigh when you need him?
You seem to have a strange image of the spanish inquisition.
The spanish Inquisition in fact created many of those assumptions we still have today, chiefly the "innocent until proven guilty".
Also, safe for a few very unfortunate years, the doctrin was that witchcraft did not exist: The one accusing someone else would be in trouble, not the "witch" herself.
True, they conducted IIRC 45000 trials, out of whch 35 people were found guilty of witchcraft and killed. Assuming that these were all innocents that would still be a much better false-positive score than today's American justice system which has a suspected false positive score of around 20%.
In truth the inquisition was mostly looking for heresy and heretics, as long as you went to church every sunday and agreed with the teachings they tended to not care or look at whatever you did at night in the woods.
What you are thinking of when you mention those kinds of crooked tactics are probably the secular courts of that time. Yes those were bad and rife with corruption.
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 *
It's not about bank-card, but prepaid card, there is no PIN on these one
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking