Personal Liberty Poll Exercise your right to vote.

Armed gangs are now roaming the streets in the Dutch city of Rotterdam accosting teens and confiscating expensive clothing and jewelry. Problem is, victims of this theft cannot call police. The thieves are the police.

This rampant and officially-sanction theft of property by armed and uniformed officers is part of a “pilot program” that targets young people wearing clothing and jewelry police officers assume the youths cannot afford. Rotterdam police chief Frank Paauw told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, “They are often young guests who consider themselves untouchable. We’re going to undress them on the street. We regularly take a Rolex from a suspect. Clothes rarely. And that is especially a status symbol for young people. Some young people now walk with jackets of €1800. They do not have any income, so the question is how they get there.”

Paauw went on to explain, his “undermines the rule of law” which sends “a completely false signal to local residents;” not talking about the “rule of law” being undermined by the police and lack of due process, but the notion that kids are wearing clothes someone thinks they can’t afford.

The Independent tells us “The scheme comes after a previous pilot which looked at the expensive cars suspected criminals drove despite not having an income.” And what a scheme it is.

Curiously, local critics of the policy aren’t concerned about the potential for abusive theft by police and the lack of due process. Their concern is “a slippery slope towards ‘racial profiling.’”

City ombudsman Anne Mieke Zwaneveld told AD: “We realised that [they] do not want to create the appearance that there is ethnic profiling but the chances of this happening are very large.”

It’s a good thing we in America have the 4th Amendment that protects us against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and the 5th Amendment that guarantees us “due process.”

But wait. The program sounds a lot like what American law enforcement does when it comes across someone carrying more cash than the LEO (legally entitled to oppress) believes is proper. The LEO just takes it under the lofty-sounding process of asset forfeiture. But they’re not nearly so brazen about it as to publicly announce it as official policy.

That sort of behavior, by the way, is officially sanctioned all the way to the top of the U.S. system of just(us) by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who supports it – he says – in the name of fighting the “War on Drugs.”

The State can create all manner of reasons for abusing its people.