It’s time to end policing for profit in Arizona

[Confederate Kahanist]

http://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4725




Goldwater Institute Daily Email
May 12, 2010

In Arizona, police can seize your property, sell it, and keep the money to fund their own budgets without so much as charging you with a crime. Under civil forfeiture laws, police and prosecutors can even seize your property after you’ve been found not guilty of a crime. The Arizona Daily Star reported that a Picture Rocks woman who was acquitted of animal cruelty and dog fighting charges in November 2008 was recently ordered to hand over the property where she raised the dogs.

Prosecutors need merely to show by a preponderance of the evidence the property was connected to criminal activity rather than by the criminal standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” By giving law enforcement the ability to keep money and property that has been seized, Arizona’s laws encourage policing for profit, not for justice.

According to a new national report, “Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture," Arizona has some of the nation’s worst civil forfeiture laws, earning a grade of D-. Arizona’s grade should come as no surprise; a 2004 Goldwater Institute report came to the same conclusion, but the Legislature has taken no significant action to curb forfeiture abuse.

To protect Arizonans’ property rights, lawmakers should:

• Require police and prosecutors to get a criminal conviction before taking someone’s property.
• Remove the profit incentive for police by placing forfeiture money into the state general fund or another neutral fund.
• Forbid state and local agencies from participating in a practice called “equitable sharing,” by which state and local police turn property over to federal agents for seizure and then everyone splits the proceeds.

People shouldn’t lose their property without being convicted of a crime and law enforcement shouldn’t be able to profit from other people’s property.

[eliezer]

wow, can't people sue to get their property back? maybe its good idea to organize a group of lawyers who will go after police in court to get property back, and for punitive damages? and not just for this issue

[MassuhDGoodName]

FYI:

This is FEDERAL LAW, covering the entire U.S.A. -- not only Arizona.

This article seems to state that Arizona State Law allows for property to be charged with a crime, seized, and sold for the profit of law enforcement and government.

In fact, the possibility that AZ has its own additional state law notwithstanding, this has been FEDERAL law everywhere in the U.S.A. for the past fifteen years or longer.

You don't have to be found guilty -- only charged.

Once you are arrested, the government has the right to seize ALL of your property and never give it back.

They say that if you are found innocent you can APPLY through the proper channels to get it back, but I have never yet heard of anyone getting back anything.

If you're even able to maneuver through the mountains of forms of paperwork which would have to be filled out and filed, the process of reimbursement would take at least five to ten years to be processed.

It's the world's "best known secret" that judges routinely expect and receive "under the table" payments in cash stolen from innocent citizens, in exchange for always siding with the arresting officers in a trial.

By the way, it is a criminal offense to carry cash on your person or deposit cash into your bank account if it is over a certain (small) amount.

If you are stopped, searched, and found in possession of several thousand dollars cash, you are likely to be arrested, charged with suspicion of drug trafficking and money laundering, your money and all your property at home seized and stolen by the State and Law Enforcement Officers.

If you, for example, buy an airline ticket to Europe or Israel and pay for it with cash (all legal and your money), you are immediately under Federal investigation for both international terrorism as well as money laundering.

And you guys actually believed that The Patriot Act was "patriotic"?

It rendered the Constitution completely NULL & VOID.

I can just hear the "conservative Republicans" on board ready to attack me as being "unpatriotic", claiming I have no idea what I am talking about.

In fact, I DO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

By the way, it's people like R. Humphries and other phonies and frauds who call for new Federal income tax programs like "the fair tax" without first formally amending the Constitution of the United States of America, who are the very reason we now are living in a monkey dictatorship banana republic with Hussein O. as the Kingfish.

With few exceptions, "Conservative Republicans" are for conserving Internationalism and Marxism and that's about all.

Now I am prepared for the attacks of "the illiterati".

p.s. -- It's going to take a lot of "taking" to "take back America".