Dave Hodges

September 29, 2013

The Common Sense Show

In part one of this series, I documented how the banks are positioning for an economic crash by securing as many hard assets as possible. Whether it be your home that is stolen through MERS fraud, or your secure brokerage account which is stolen by John Corzine and MF Global, or if it is an unjust court ruling which allows the banks the legal right to steal your bank deposits, nobody’s private property is safe from confiscation

Policing for Fun and Profit

The practice discussed in this article is called civil asset forfeiture is often referred to as “policing for profit”, and it involves every aspect of law enforcement from the local police to federal authorities. Civil asset forfeiture laws permit the authorities the legal right to actually steal your private assets. No, these laws are not the RICO laws in which convicted drug dealers and money launderers forfeit their private property which was obtained in the commission of organized criminal activity. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement the “legal right” to steal your assets even when you have not been convicted or even when you have not been accused of a crime. The practice makes potential thugs and thieves out of every law enforcement official who dons a badge.

No judge will ever rule that this practice is unconstitutional, which it clearly is, because the judge gets to go to conferences (i.e. vacations), can eat at for free at expensive restaurants, drive a county vehicle for free, attend football games for free and generally enjoy the perks that any common thief gets to enjoy as a result of sharing in the spoils of this unconstitutional activity.

In many jurisdictions, the money has been used to fund the re-election campaign of a local District Attorney. In Georgia, civil asset forfeiture money was used to purchase expensive football tickets for local officials. The money can also be used to pay for salaries, elaborate and expensive equipment and other perks not necessarily related to law enforcement.

The practice of civil asset forfeiture has corrupted our entire legal process and this practice is best summarized in the following the video.

When salaries and perks are on the line, rogue cops have a strong incentive to increase the seizures, as evidenced by an increase in the regularity and size of such seizures in recent years. Asset forfeiture practices often go hand-in-hand with racial profiling and according to the ACLU can seriously impact low-income African-American or Hispanic people in which local police can exercise their law enforcement discretion and decide who “looks suspicious” and for whom the arduous and expensive process of trying to get one’s property back is an expensive challenge.

Victimizing Minorities for Fun and Profit

Beginning in 2006, the police in Tenaha, Texas would randomly stop, search, and would steal private property from Blacks and Hispanics traveling through the town even though there was no suspicion of criminal activity.

The Sheriff of Nottingham lives here.

Typically, the police shakedown would consist of threatening travelers that if they did not turn over their cash and other identified valuables, they would be arrested on money laundering charges and have their children taken by Child Protective Services. If they turned over the cash, they would be let go. Most people would simply turn over their money. Some people actually tried to recover their money, but found they needed to hire lawyers and prove their innocence in front a judge who was profiting from the seizures, a process that was too expensive and not practical for many.

Several individuals affected by this practice joined a class-action lawsuit against Tenaha and several city and county officials, challenging these illegal stops and seizures. The ACLU joined the case, Morrow v. City of Teneha, et al., in July 2012. In August 2012, the ACLU settled a class action suit against officials in Tenaha and Shelby Counties .

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