[HN Gopher] Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an a...
___________________________________________________________________
Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal
court rules
Author : throwup238
Score : 788 points
Date : 2024-08-18 16:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reason.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reason.com)
| fergbrain wrote:
| I wonder if this ruling could also force the courts to start
| addressing unconstitutional civil forfeiture
| threatofrain wrote:
| I wonder if judicial solutions can ever be adequate as police
| can simply say that an investigation is ongoing for years. And
| determining whether ongoing possession of seized property is
| legitimate involves disclosing investigation details.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I mean, the US is the only first world country that I know of
| where this is an issue, clearly there are ways to address
| this, no?
| ryandrake wrote:
| 'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This
| Regularly Happens
| tocs3 wrote:
| For reference:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37684624
| debacle wrote:
| The problem is it eventually becomes government civil lawfare
| against citizens. Taxpayer foot the bill to screw other
| taxpayers.
| frankharv wrote:
| I saw a local piece about Power Company taking land from
| black owned Funeral Home for onshore windfarm transmission
| towers.
|
| I thought to myself why would one business be able to seize
| anothers property?
|
| How does a private company deserve Eminent Domain powers?
|
| Is a Funeral Home not a Public Good too?
|
| Why would we allow emminent domain for a monolopy company.
|
| https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/local/mycity/virgini
| a...
| debacle wrote:
| Corruption is pretty much always the answer.
| frankharv wrote:
| Indeed. Between FERC and State bodies you don't stand a
| chance to win.
|
| They were offering the Funeral Home $20K for 'air
| rights'. No poles. Seems cheap if you feel you will need
| to shutdown the business.
|
| https://landownerattorneys.com/can-private-companies-use-
| emi...
| duskwuff wrote:
| Claiming that the owners will "need to shutdown the
| business" because there are now power lines running above
| it seems a bit hyperbolic.
| opo wrote:
| The most famous example of this kind of use of eminent
| domain was the Kelo case which went to the Supreme Court.
| By 5-4 the court rules it was permissible to use eminent
| domain to get the land to build a campus for Pfizer. (The
| majority was Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and
| Breyer.)
|
| As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote "The specter of
| condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to
| prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-
| Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with
| a factory."
|
| After all of this, the land didn't get built into a
| corporate campus:
|
| >...For nearly 20 years since the ruling, the entire Fort
| Trumbull neighborhood remained a vacant lot after being
| bulldozed by the city; a neighborhood once teeming with
| families who resided there for generations was home only
| to weeds and feral cats. The economic development the
| city promised the U.S. Supreme Court would materialize--
| if only the government could get its hands on the land--
| never materialized, even after spending more than $80
| million in taxpayer money.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
| https://ij.org/case/kelo/
| tshaddox wrote:
| How is that different than, say, indefinite detention? It's
| obviously not implemented perfectly, but habeas corpus is
| uncontroversial at least in principle. I don't see anything
| mechanistically unique about property seizure that would make
| this tricky to solve.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> I don't see anything mechanistically unique about
| property seizure that would make this tricky to solve._
|
| One of the mechanics at play is suing the property itself,
| which can't defend itself for rather obvious reasons. That
| side steps any property rights with jurisdiction _in rem_ :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._%24124,700
| _...
|
| IANAL but it's as stupid as it sounds and it's been
| controversial (i.e. United States v. Approximately 64,695
| Pounds of Shark Fins)
| zdw wrote:
| There was a proposal back in the discussion of extending
| copyright to be "forever minus one day" by the maximalist
| camp which included Sonny Bono, so there are hacks around
| "indefinitely".
| undersuit wrote:
| Hmm, does my money have the right to a speedy and public
| trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein
| the crime shall have been committed?
|
| (6th Amendment)
| GavinMcG wrote:
| The Supreme Court has said it isn't unconstitutional as a
| general matter, so a lower court's ruling won't force that to
| change. And because the practice is a holdover from English law
| and isn't understood (as a historical matter) to be something
| the constitution was meant to alter, there isn't much basis for
| thinking the Supreme Court would reverse its earlier decisions.
| alistairSH wrote:
| How do they align that reasoning with the 4th? Particularly
| the conservative wing of the bench, as they seem most likely
| to be literalists (when it suits, at least).
| tocs3 wrote:
| I don;t think they are trying very hard. They make the
| claim that the property is involved in a crime (not the
| owner) and the property does not have rights.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture
| rolph wrote:
| property is also not a person.
| einpoklum wrote:
| And that's why the police always seizes the property of
| banks and investment firms when there is suspicion of
| their involvement in financial crimes.
|
| ...
|
| Oh, wait, did I say "police seizes"?
|
| I meant of course "government replenishes guarantees and
| underwrites".
| GavinMcG wrote:
| The conservatives tend to be literalists when interpreting
| statutes and regulations. There are judicial philosophy
| reasons for that, but also, statutes and regulations can be
| changed in response to court rulings. That said, the
| conservatives tend to be literalists from the perspective
| of the legislature or regulator at the time the law was
| enacted, though all the justices (conservative and liberal)
| recognize that it's a fiction to say Congress has a single
| point of view.
|
| When it comes to interpreting the constitution,
| conservatives likewise tend to be focused on the point of
| view at enactment. But it's even more of a fiction to say
| that the states had a single point of view, and in any
| case, the text of the constitution often isn't precise in
| the way contemporary statutes are. So the conservatives are
| guided more strongly by the historical evidence about what
| the sovereign states would have "understood" themselves to
| be giving up, in replacing the Articles of Confederation
| with a central federal government.
|
| Given that, they interpret the Fourth Amendment by
| reference to the historical evidence of what phenomena it
| was responding to. And as a historical matter, the aim of
| the amendment was to require warrants, not to narrow the
| scope of what could be searched or seized. So where there's
| probable cause that a crime has been committed, a warrant
| may issue, and it can be directed at the property that
| "committed" the crime, since that was a known practice in
| English law at the time.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Are these warrants issued retroactively? Some of the most
| egregious cases of civil forfeiture seem to be literal
| cash grabs on the side of the road.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > That said, the conservatives tend to be literalists
| from the perspective of the legislature or regulator at
| the time the law was enacted
|
| I find it ironic that they view the Constitution as "at
| the time the law was enacted" and continue to rule on
| literalism that way, even though those same people
| explicitly specified that laws and the Constitution
| should be reviewed, revised, and otherwise be interpreted
| as appropriate for that time, not the time of writing.
|
| There's never really an explanation as to why "we have to
| treat these things like infallible perfect works" when
| they're not, and even their authors told us they're not.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > There's never really an explanation as to why "we have
| to treat these things like infallible perfect works" when
| they're not, and even their authors told us they're not.
|
| They are not, though. The constitution can be changed and
| has been changed many times in the past. I assume they
| think (or justify their decisions by saying that at
| least) that it's not their job to pass legislation or
| enact constitutional amendments without any input from
| the states/congress which seems like a reasonable
| viewpoint.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| > "we have to treat these things like infallible perfect
| works"
|
| They don't treat the law as perfect, they just believe
| they don't have the leeway to reinterpret the law as they
| want in contradiction of the text. The law doesn't work
| if justices can read between the lines to get what they
| want.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Without arguing for or against firearms control, would
| you argue that the definition of a "well-regulated
| militia" has changed in the last 240 years?
|
| SCOTUS certainly hasn't interpreted it "as written", but
| has been happy to "evolve" it.
| rolph wrote:
| the whole point of the people bearing arms, is to enable
| the people to regulate the activities of a militia
| directed by a tyrant, example being rebellion against the
| occupying redcoats, the commision of the war of
| independance, and succesion of the republic.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > would you argue that the definition of a "well-
| regulated militia" has changed in the last 240 years
|
| That's a good question. And the answer is yes.
|
| At the time it was written, that phrase would roughly
| mean well-organized, well-armed, well-disciplined. Not
| regulated in the way we use the term today, to refer to
| something governed by regulations.
| mistercheph wrote:
| The prefatory clause of the 2nd amendment does not
| require a well-regulated militia to be in existence in
| order for the right to be protected, it expresses the
| motivation and then declares the right uninfringeable:
|
| "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
| security of a free State, the right of the people to keep
| and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
|
| Maybe you'd be happier if it said:
|
| "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms while they
| are members of a well-regulated militia shall not be
| infringed."
|
| I am sympathetic to both sides of the jurispredential
| pragmatism/literalism question, but don't get your eggs
| twisted about what the 2nd amendment says, as only the
| most alien of consciousnesses could find ambiguity in its
| terse declaration.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not
| be infringed because a well regulated Militia is
| necessary to the security of the free State.
|
| So maybe we need the well regulated Militia, because that
| seems absent, though the Constitution says it is
| necessary.
| mr_toad wrote:
| The US already has an organised militia, it's called (in
| honour of a Frenchman) the National Guard.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Act_of_1903
| CPLX wrote:
| > That said, the conservatives tend to be literalists
| from the perspective of the legislature or regulator at
| the time the law was enacted
|
| There's absolutely no objective basis for this statement
| whatsoever.
|
| The Supreme Court is a political body and always has
| been. The current rhetorical fiction that it's some other
| thing is really a relic of the post-war era that became
| cemented because it has been a helpful fiction for both
| sides at various points.
|
| The sooner we retire the nonsense idea that the court is
| doing anything other than make politically calculated
| decisions the better off we will all be.
|
| Supreme Court justices make decisions the same way every
| other political actor in our system does. Because they
| want to, because they can get away with it, and because
| their constituencies and supporters demand and
| incentivize it.
| SllX wrote:
| https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/09/supreme-court-issues-
| fl...
|
| Reason has a good analysis. This recent case was about
| preliminary hearings in civil asset forfeiture cases in
| which it was ruled 6-3 that preliminary hearings weren't
| required in such cases, but if you read into Gorsuch's
| concurring opinion, it looks a lot like he believes civil
| asset forfeiture is over applied and shouldn't be used
| outside of exigent circumstances like those covered under
| admiralty, customs and revenue law where a ship might leave
| American jurisdiction before a proper hearing could be held
| on the asset.
|
| So... with the right case brought before them, the current
| SCOTUS bench might be ready to gut civil asset forfeiture
| like a trout.
| edub wrote:
| This seems like a strong candidate for a Constitutional
| amendment. Twelve amendments were ratified in the 20th
| century--about once a decade since the end of the Civil War.
| However, if you exclude the 27th Amendment[1], we haven't
| ratified an amendment in 53 years. My favorite type of
| amendment is one that extends rights to people, and in this
| case, also to their property.
|
| [1] The 27th Amendment took a different path compared to the
| other 16 amendments ratified since the Bill of Rights. It was
| originally proposed as part of the first 12 amendments but
| took 202 years to be ratified. This was largely due to the
| efforts of a University of Texas student in the 1980s, who,
| motivated by a C grade on a paper, embarked on a mission to
| see it finally adopted.
| hinkley wrote:
| But we didn't treat it this way until Ron and Nancy's War on
| Drugs.
|
| So while this might be a very old bug in the Rule of Law, it
| got much worse during the 20th Century.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I spent hundreds of hours hanging out in forfeiture court, it's
| wild. The court I was in eventually got a new judge and she
| took the two DAs aside and said to them "This bullshit you have
| going here, the 90% of cases you win because people don't even
| know how to fill out the paperwork. That ends today. That will
| not fly in my courtroom."
|
| I remember that same day a dad came in. The State had his new
| $60K SUV they were trying to sell. His son had swiped the keys,
| taken it, got caught drunk-driving. The DAs were like "well,
| tough shit, it's the law" and that judge said "Did this man
| know his son took the car? Does he have valid insurance? Give
| this man his damned car back. And I want you to pay all his
| towing and storage fees too." "His towing fee too?" "Yes" "We
| don't even know how to refund that, the city has that money."
| "Well, you have an hour to find out. See you in an hour." LOL
|
| If you are ever caught up in a civil forfeiture, make sure to
| stay on top of the paperwork. Most people lose their stuff by
| not doing the very simple paperwork. If you get to the first
| court hearing the State often gives up if it's not much value.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Was she promptly removed from the courtroom? We certainly
| can't have a judge that won't kowtow to system on the bench!!
| montroser wrote:
| The standard for arrest, probable cause, is far too weak to be
| any basis for indefinitely seizing property. A precedent ruling
| on this by the Supreme Court would be welcome, but it's hard to
| say which way it would go, given the current makeup of the court.
| shwaj wrote:
| Which half of the court would be likely to rule which way?
| gostsamo wrote:
| Does "tough on crime" answer your question?
| debacle wrote:
| No, because the tough on crime people are more libertarian
| as well.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Who do you think is just "tough on crime"?
|
| Ideologically, Justice Thomas obviously is the most opposed
| to asset forfeiture. Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, and Gorsuch
| are all opposed to it too. I suppose that leaves Roberts,
| Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson as the tough on crime
| crowd?
| jahewson wrote:
| There's no "half". While the current court has a conservative
| majority the rulings only fall sharply along those lines
| around 10% of the time
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/02/supreme-
| co...
| sowbug wrote:
| I would expect public votes -- Congress, Supreme Court,
| etc. -- to frequently cluster around 50%-plus-one. The
| internal lobbying and horse trading can stop after the
| winning viewpoint has its majority of votes, so the
| minority viewpoint voters go on record with their original
| viewpoint.
| qingcharles wrote:
| With an issue like this? Roll the dice, honestly.
|
| I lose track of whether the conservative members of the court
| are pro-constitution, pro-defendant or pro-police in criminal
| justice issues like this.
|
| Over the last decade (realizing the court has changed a lot)
| they've made some pretty decent pro-rights decisions in
| criminal cases where people thought they would be pro-police.
|
| Their recent decisions are garbage fires, though.
| chaboud wrote:
| The simplest way to figure out the current court is to
| apply a "Republican Party" filter before any judgment is
| applied. Texas arguing against adhering to treaties? Texas
| wins. New York trying to give air passengers the right to
| not sit in a hot-boxed airplane for eight hours? Sorry
| blue-staters.
|
| The court tends to attempt to narrow the scope of these
| party-first decisions, but it's clear that they're playing
| for party above country or sanity.
|
| After that, the court is a mush-mash of deeply thoughtless
| polarized opinions, resulting in the senseless goat rodeo
| we presently have, but it's much easier to figure out who
| will tilt which way after you apply the party filter.
| hiatus wrote:
| > New York trying to give air passengers the right to not
| sit in a hot-boxed airplane for eight hours?
|
| Aside but which case was this?
| snsr wrote:
| Not sure that would matter; the Roberts court has shown it only
| respects precedent when it suits the personal perspectives of
| the justices.
| Brett_Riverboat wrote:
| Good luck enforcing it.
| olliej wrote:
| While this is nice, it seems to only be addressing "I was
| arrested and the police seized my stuff".
|
| E.g it does nothing to stop "the police stopped me, stole my
| stuff, and then sent me on my way". E.g the case where there is
| not even the accusation of a crime has even less restrictions
| than when you are accused of a crime.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Certainly my anecdata from spending time with a lot of
| detainees in Chicago is that it was impressively common for the
| police to find something incriminating on you, and also find
| some cash, and just take everything and send you on your way.
|
| The last couple of years has made the police a lot more honest
| due to prevalence of bodycams.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it
| fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be
| held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as
| indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that
| would be a useful ruling.
|
| A hard time cap is essential because one's life too has a cap.
| The amount of time for which one can go without earning a
| livelihood also has a cap. Imagine if prison sentences didn't
| have a time cap.
|
| This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very
| often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps
| attorneys and judges very rich, and the police abusive, to the
| detriment of the individual. In a sensible world, the laws would
| all be rewritten for clarity and consistency, starting with the
| Constitution.
| iwontberude wrote:
| It's not useless because indefinite means never. At least this
| will require police departments to define the time and
| therefore make it less likely the stuff walks off, which will
| encourage keeping it for shorter periods of time.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| How about thirty years (but only if the person is still
| alive)? It's not indefinite, and it complies with the ruling.
| tempest_ wrote:
| How about 300 years? anyone with half a brain can see the
| problem with that ruling.
|
| Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to
| nothing and as a layman that feels like a feature not a
| bug.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to
| nothing
|
| I wouldn't be so sure. Cops have implicit prosecutorial
| attorneys too that have a lot more experience with such
| cases than do defense attorneys.
|
| There is no substitute for clarity in law. All else opens
| the door to exploitation and selective application, both
| of which are a mockery of justice.
| iwontberude wrote:
| That means they have to be able to hold onto the property
| for 300 years and be able to verifiably return it to the
| estate beneficiaries. That costs a lot of money, better
| to just hold onto things for a short period of time while
| they are relevant and not steal them or throw them away.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that
| ruling.
|
| If the definition of the word "reasonable" was left in
| the other half then sure.
|
| It's the job that of the court to define what is
| "reasonable" on a case by case basis and establish a
| precedent. They can't start coming up with laws
| themselves that clearly establish universal and specific
| limits.
| alpinisme wrote:
| It would not comply the with ruling unless they could
| provide "reasonable" grounds for holding it that long, and
| any precisely specified length of time would probably run
| afoul of the ruling, since that would by definition be
| specifying the length of time the police could hold it
| _without_ reason (they could well give it back because they
| have no continued use for it, but they choose to withhold
| it arbitrarily because they can, since the deadline for
| return hasn't arrived)
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Indefinite does not mean never; that's what infinite means.
| An indefinite amount of time means not a definitive amount of
| time; i.e. "we don't know how long".
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It is almost useless because (1) it does not specify a term
| that should be zero by default and (2) it still requires
| another court to decide what "reasonable" means in each case,
| with the time and cost associated with boing to court.
|
| A good ruling would be "by default zero time is allowed, ask
| a judge for exceptions when justified". If you release the
| person, release all their possessions at the same time. Need
| an exception? Make it the burden on police to convince a
| judge this is justified, not let it to the police to
| arbitrarily do whatever they want - like 14 months, now
| reduced to what, 13.9? (exaggeration for a good purpose).
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough
| agreement on something, but I take your point.
|
| My personal "fun idea" is that laws should have two parts, an
| "intent" part and an "implementation" part and if a court
| decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish
| the intent it should be struck down.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement
|
| It is unfortunate that our representatives are as such, that
| they don't strive for clarity, but I understand. To me, the
| lack of clarity is an "invalid state" that has no place in
| the rulebook.
|
| > if a court decides at some future time that the law fails
| to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.
|
| This would be very welcome, but it should require repeated
| testings in fibonacci years, not merely once. This means at
| 1, 2, 3, 5, ... years after the law was passed or updated.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Old laws are among the most likely to have deviated from
| their intended functionality. In my imaginary system,
| though, someone would have to raise the case to the courts,
| so it wouldn't be just happening all the time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an
| "implementation"
|
| That's a common opinion between lawyers, the opposite opinion
| is that since the law was created by a large group of people,
| it can never have a clear intent. There are judges that
| assign to both of those.
|
| Anyway, IMO there's fundamentally inhumane and evil
| consequence to the idea that laws don't have intent. Even if
| it's objectively true. The entire dichotomy is broken.
| BartjeD wrote:
| Normally during the legislative process a record is kept
| about deliberations leading up to the proposals for texts,
| and amendments etc..
|
| In a 'normal' European democracy judges and lawyers use
| these deliberations to argue what the intent of the
| legislative branch was, when it created the law. And to
| interpret it in that light.
|
| I'd be surprised if there was no equivalent in the USA. I
| suppose therein lies the root of the Scalia doctrine
| though, which is too strictly 'originalist' for my taste.
| But in this instance I'd wager the rules of seizure were
| given a lot of legislative attention, similar as Habeas
| Corpus, because illegal seizure is an obvious tool of
| tyrants. It was often used by Roman Emperors and medieval
| Kings.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Civil Law systems will prioritize being clear and precise
| in the language of the laws. Where a law allows
| interpretation, it will likely literally state that.
|
| There are clear limits to how to interpret laws and most
| of the case law comes from which provision is applicable
| to a particular case. There's often no need to resort to
| "deliberations" part to interpret the law for a judge,
| just find the law that most precisely applies in a
| particular situation and there's no law that is in
| conflict.
|
| Basically in a Civil Law system if the law states that
| you're not allowed to drive while drunk, that doesn't
| extend to being high. Unlike Common Law systems, where a
| judge could accept that drunk and stoned are close enough
| for both to be banned. (this is a hyperbolized example,
| not exactly how it would work)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Even in a Civil Law system, there still exist fundamental
| principles (like the one from the GP that would disallow
| US-style property seizing), badly written, and
| conflicting laws that judges have plenty of space to
| interpret.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| There's a major difference you missed - in a Civil Law
| system the judge has significantly less leeway to
| interpret the laws and commonly will refer to a superior
| (up to the constitutional court level) court to get
| clarification.
| c22 wrote:
| Laws already attempt to encode intent through technical word
| choices, scoped definitions, and careful construction. Judges
| and lawyers attempt to discern the intent by careful reading
| and logical deconstruction.
|
| When the lawmakers and judicial interpreters are good at
| their jobs this works great. Good lawmakers draft good laws
| that are clear in their intent. Good courts make good
| decisions by applying reasonable interpretations of the law.
|
| Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers
| take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable
| intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly.
|
| How does encapsulating the "intent" into its own section of
| the law fix the problem? Bad lawmakers will still write vague
| intent sections as well as poorly defined implementations.
| Bad lawyers will abuse the vague intent sections to argue for
| exceptions and novel interpretations of the implementation
| section. Bad judges will let this fly and warp the system
| further through bad precedent.
| jfengel wrote:
| You kinda do get a separate intent section. It begins with
| a string of "whereas".
|
| As with code, adding more words rarely makes it clearer. In
| fact it usually introduces more discrepancies.
| jowea wrote:
| Interestingly some places give legal effect to those
| preambles it seems
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preamble#Legal_effect
| vkou wrote:
| I'll point out that bad judging can _always_ move the
| goalposts of what 'well-written intent' is.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers
| take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable
| intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly."
|
| _Good_ lawyers and _good_ judges allow bad laws to be
| taken advantage of. If the law says it, it should be
| allowed (for leniency to the accused) or the law should be
| invalidated due to a lack of strict construction.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Good lawyers and good judges allow bad laws to be taken
| advantage of. If the law says it, it should be allowed
| (for leniency to the accused) or the law should be
| invalidated due to a lack of strict construction.
|
| A mom hears a loud noise coming from her kid's room and
| she goes up to find her kid is jumping on the bed and the
| mom comes in and says "Stop jumping on your bed!", so he
| does. Five minutes later, she hears the same noise, and
| comes in and the kid is jumping on the bed again, and
| tells the kid "I told you to stop jumping on your bed!"
| and the kid says "I'm not jumping, I'm hopping!" and
| starts to argue about the difference between jumping and
| hopping, and mom says "Just stop hopping on your bed!"
| and goes back to the living room.
|
| Almost immediately, she hears it again, this time the kid
| is sitting, but bouncing up and down, declaring that he's
| not jumping or hopping, but bouncing. Again, the mom
| tells him to stop it.
|
| A few minutes later, she hears jumping again, only this
| time, it's on HER bed. Finally, the mom says "Do not
| jump, hop, bounce, spring, leap, or otherwise propel
| yourself upwards from any bed, couch, chair, or any other
| furniture."
|
| --
|
| I disagree entirely with your opinion.
|
| It is often that intent is crystal clear, but a lawyer is
| able to weasel their way into convincing a jury that
| there's a slight ambiguity in the law.
|
| The problem of course, is that then lawmakers have to
| write incredibly verbose and difficult to understand
| legalese in order to ensure there are no loopholes. Of
| course, in the spelling out of the law, it's easy to
| accidentally create a loophole.
|
| A rule that states "No jumping on the bed" is clear of
| intent. Mom shouldn't have to include many near-synonyms
| of "jumping" and specify that it means ALL beds.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "It is often that intent is crystal clear, but a lawyer
| is able to weasel their way into convincing a jury that
| there's a slight ambiguity in the law."
|
| This isn't true. Matters of law and how to interpret the
| law are determined by the judge and provided in the jury
| instructions.
|
| "A rule that states "No jumping on the bed" is clear of
| intent. Mom shouldn't have to include many near-synonyms
| of "jumping" and specify that it means ALL beds."
|
| This example isn't anything like what I'm talking about.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Mom doesn't have a monopoly on violence.
| ruined wrote:
| this intent/implementation duality was codified by the
| chevron precedent that was just overturned by the supreme
| court.
|
| the legislature was responsible for establishing intent, and
| the executive was responsible for implementation, and the
| judiciary branch was responsible for resolving disputes.
|
| but the supreme court ruled that the legislative intent has
| been too vague, and the executive has been too whimsical with
| implementation. so the legislature must be more specific, or
| leave it to the judiciary to establish details.
| torstenvl wrote:
| That is false. Please don't spread misinformation. Chevron
| had nothing to do with how legislatures write laws.
|
| The prevalence of extreme propaganda on this site is
| getting really tiresome.
|
| It is an objective, inarguable fact that neither _Chevron_
| nor _Loper_ had anything at all to do with the ability of
| Congress or state legislatures to distinguish between
| intent and implementation.
| ruined wrote:
| can you provide a correct interpretation of the ruling?
| nickff wrote:
| Not parent, but Chevron was about deference to agencies,
| not about whether courts should adhere to legislative
| intent. The original Chevron ruling was written by a
| well-known originalist, who usually didn't abide by
| legislative intent.
| ruined wrote:
| sure, but agency interpretation is only possible within
| the vagaries of the legislation. that's 100% synonymous
| with intention/implementation.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Here you go: https://www.justice.gov/d9/osg/briefs/1983/0
| 1/01/sg830081.tx...
|
| You can read all 7,000 words, then you will better
| understand the "correct interpretation".
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| The intent / implementation duality isn't related to
| _Chevron_ or _Loper Bright_. That is entirely about how to
| interpret the implementation: to what degree, when
| considering alternate interpretations, do we weight the
| agency 's own interpretation?
|
| The intent / implementation discussion comes up when
| considering statutes like this:
|
| _In order to maintain our beautiful forests and meadows,
| the city of Little Island hereby declares these acts
| governing the pollution of water: ... <enumeration of
| acts>..._
|
| Now many years pass and all the forests are cut down and
| the meadows are gravel lots, buildings, &c. Is the statute
| no longer operative? Generally, the way laws are
| interpreted, the courts would say it is still operative.
| The alternative would make the interpretation of law quite
| inconsistent, because it means we are asking courts to
| judge many things that are not really matters of law.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| That is how European Union directives and regulations are
| written, as it happens. The 'recitals' outline the general
| aims of the legislation, acting as a sort of preamble.
|
| > The recitals are legally non-binding. However, the recitals
| can be relevant. Courts often use the recitals to interpret a
| particular - legally binding - provision of EU legislation,
| especially if multiple interpretations of a certain provision
| are possible.
|
| From https://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/p/how-to-read-eu-
| legislat...
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| The recitals are non-binding, but nathan_compton's proposal
| is that the intent portion would be binding.
| jdasdf wrote:
| >Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough
| agreement on something, but I take your point.
|
| Seems to me that a vague law is simply an invalid law. The
| rule of law requires the clear knowledge of what exactly is
| illegal, if that isn't clear then its simply a prospective
| law that doesn't meet the basic requires to be law.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There is no such thing as a law that isn't vague to a
| degree, because laws are expressed in words and concepts,
| and those are vague by their nature. Laws can, of course,
| be vague to a lesser or greater degree. We definitely don't
| want poetry-level vague laws, but we also don't want to (or
| can't) have laws expressed in code or as mathematical
| proofs, because this level of clarity is just
| computationally intractable wrt. anything relating to real
| world and real people. At this point, the practical optimum
| seems to be laws that mostly obvious in vast majority of
| scenarios, and leaving it to judges to opine on corner
| cases on an individual basis.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is classic HN. "Apply API-style thinking to the Real
| World."
|
| What is reasonable cause for police officer to search
| someone? Mind you: This single point alone has hundreds of
| interpretations around the world, across all cultures.
| Within a single country / culture, there could be many
| interpretations.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| It is much more difficult to establish standards of intent
| interpretation than it is to establish standards of statutory
| interpretation. One could imagine a law written as follows:
|
| _In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream,
| puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins, the health
| department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers
| in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments. The
| minimum temperature shall not be greater than -18C._
|
| There are some gaps that a court needs to fill in order to
| apply this statute:
|
| - The health department and the area of effect are not
| specified but these can be assumed to be the health
| department and area connected to whatever legislature passed
| the statute. If there is no health department that is the
| obvious one -- if, for example, it was passed by a city
| legislature and the city has no health department -- this
| could introduce some difficulty.
|
| - The use of "minimum" and "shall not be greater" together in
| this statute are confused and confusing but since it pertains
| to freezers, the court can infer that freezers must be set to
| temperatures of -18C or below (-19C, &c).
|
| However, sorting out the true intent presents insoluble
| problems that would lead to inconsistent interpretation of
| the law. Perhaps an establishment only has frozen fish. Does
| this law apply to them? Generally, the rule is that clear
| intent clauses -- "In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment
| of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins..."
| -- are ignored in statutory interpretation. The operative
| part of the statute is that "...the health department shall
| regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery
| stores, restaurants and other establishments." and that the
| temperature established by the health department must be -18C
| or below.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| No standard ways of interpretation will make up for a
| poorly-written statute - and, with all due respect, that's
| what your hypothetical example is. In liberal democracies,
| we expect our representatives to pass only laws that have
| low ambiguity, and sometimes require third-party review to
| ensure this.
|
| Why would any legislature pass a law delegating
| responsibility to a non-existent agency? How could this
| legislature pass a law with clearly contradictory
| stipulations regarding temperature? Then, finally, for what
| reason would intent clauses be written if they were then be
| entirely ignored?
|
| In conclusion, I think that your hypothetical system of
| government has greater problems than any inherent
| difficulty in expressing legal intent that may exist.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > In liberal democracies, we expect our representatives
| to pass only laws that have low ambiguity
|
| Do we really?
|
| UK law is full considerations like what would a
| 'reasonable' person do.
|
| Also full of terms that are ambiguous - loitering for
| example.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Jeez, no kidding. Think about criminal sentencing
| guidelines. Not all circumstances are the same.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| UK, just like the US, legal system is a Common Law
| system.
|
| They are bound by history, with all of the caveats that
| come from that system.
|
| Most of liberal democracies use Civil Law system, where
| it's a lot more prescriptive in the laws themselves.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| If the facts change, I change my mind; but I don't think
| you're being realistic, here. Judges sometimes have to
| interpret poorly-written statutes. Legal drafting has
| improved a lot over the last hundred and fifty years or
| so; but that has been a gradual process.
|
| Some countries have what are effectively brand new
| political and legal systems; but countries with
| comparatively long histories of stable governance
| generally have comparatively old laws that must be
| interpreted.
|
| You ask three questions in the foregoing:
|
| - Why would any legislature pass a law delegating
| responsibility to a non-existent agency?
|
| If the city does not have a health department, it may be
| that the county does, or the state does, and they meant
| to delegate to them.
|
| - How could this legislature pass a law with clearly
| contradictory stipulations regarding temperature?
|
| The stipulations make use of a common, unfortunate
| misphrasing; that doesn't mean they are actually
| contradictory.
|
| - Then, finally, for what reason would intent clauses be
| written if they were then be entirely ignored?
|
| Intent clauses are generally considered non-binding, in
| legal systems all over the world. Another commenter has
| pointed out that this is the case not only in the Anglo-
| American system but also in the EU system:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41284984
|
| That doesn't mean intent clauses serve no purpose. It
| just means they don't serve the purpose of providing a
| specific, actionable rule.
| collingreen wrote:
| I love this and think about the same. Similarly, in a work
| setting, I used to decree that any subsequent decrees (eg:
| tooling, commit/lint rules, languages) must come with the
| intent, the desired results, and the expected costs. This
| made it much less political to suggest changes to our process
| while simultaneously eliminating some of the low effort
| "let's use <framework-of-the-week>" statements. I also want
| to believe it made it so ideas could come from anyone, not
| just people with titles or social capital, although I don't
| have any hard proof of that.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| As the article reports, the ruling actually states that the
| amount of time must be reasonable. Any gross or blatant
| violation would be picked up by any lawyer or judge.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Let's invent a new programming language that tells its users
| that the amount of time for which they hold memory should be
| "reasonable", without getting into specifics. This means the
| language can reclaim memory whenever it deems a violation has
| occurred. How well do you think would that work for the
| program? Not very well.
| lolinder wrote:
| As much as programmers like to draw analogies between law
| and code, they don't really work the same way at all.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > they don't really work the same way
|
| Why not? It would seem that you're just used to a state
| of exploitation and selective application, both of which
| are a mockery of justice. Sometimes it helps to see
| things from an outsider's perspective.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not commenting on the way things should be, I'm
| commenting on the way things are.
|
| And if you're saying that this ruling is bad because it
| doesn't work well in an idealized model of the law as you
| think it should be... that's an interesting observation,
| but you can hardly fault the judge for crafting a ruling
| that works in the context of the actual legal system.
| SllX wrote:
| Because laws are executed by people, not computers.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Why yes?
| tocs3 wrote:
| There are times that parts of a law should be vague to
| allow those evolved to make intelligent decisions. They
| should be specific enough to come to a resolution quickly
| if needed.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| This opens the door to routine injustices whereby those
| who can afford expensive attorneys get a sweet deal, and
| everyone else gets stabbed in the name of justice.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Courts tend to follow precident, indeed precident is
| nearly the same as law. It's not really the case that an
| expensive attorney can argue his way around the well-
| established interpretations of the meaning of the
| constitution and other laws. Maybe, in the case of
| something novel, or for a question that has never come up
| before. It's not at all routine.
| autoexec wrote:
| that sounds like what we have right now.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, the constitution itself only prohibits
| "unreasonable" searches and seizures, and only states
| that "probable cause" is required for a warrant. These
| terms are undefined, and left to the courts to interpret.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The definitions are well defined in theory. How they get
| applied to specific cases and how they have been
| perverted over time is the real problem.
|
| Take warrants and probable cause. It's supposed to be
| that by a preponderance of the evidence that the crime
| has been committed. The quality of many warrants today
| seem to completely miss this to the point that many of
| the descriptions fail to even claim that the elements of
| the offense have been satisfied. Then we have such a lazy
| system that warrants foe summary offenses don't even have
| to be for the correct crime - all that needs to be
| claimed is that any crime has been committed. That's how
| it goes when the system is too lazy to give each issue
| the correct level of attention to protect your basic
| rights.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Isn't that what garbage collection essentially is?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Garbage collection doesn't impose a subjective reasonable
| vs unreasonable time limit for holding memory. It checks
| if the memory is still in use or not. Garbage collection
| is never subjective; it is entirely objective and without
| ambiguity or bias with regard to the guarantees it
| offers.
| eesmith wrote:
| Earlier you wrote "Let's invent a new programming
| language that tells its users that the amount of time for
| which they hold memory should be "reasonable", without
| getting into specifics."
|
| This is essentially what Python-the-language does. It
| does not require reference counting, or mark-sweep, or
| any garbage collection at all. The language specification
| says at https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.htm
| l#objects-v... :
|
| "Objects are never explicitly destroyed; however, when
| they become unreachable they may be garbage-collected. An
| implementation is allowed to postpone garbage collection
| or omit it altogether -- it is a matter of implementation
| quality how garbage collection is implemented, as long as
| no objects are collected that are still reachable."
|
| That subjective language specification is quite different
| than its objective implementation in a Python
| implementation, which appear to be what you refer to now.
| nox101 wrote:
| I'm not sure of your definition of objective here. If you
| mean a specific implementation and exact version of a
| specific language does one objective thing that might be
| true.
|
| But, different implementations of the same language and
| different versions of those implementations can all do
| different things. GC rarely says exactly when something
| will be collected. Only that it will eventually.
|
| Example: https://jsfiddle.net/8cej4tpk/2/
|
| Firefox GCs after about 8 seconds, Safari GCs
| immmediately, Chrome never (probably not until there's
| pressure). And, you'll find different behavior if you go
| check different versions of those browsers.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Apologies, but the point was that a GC will never
| unjustly take your memory from you without a well-defined
| rule. It may delay in taking it away, but if it does, it
| will be very clear why it did.
| kbolino wrote:
| This claim is false for a lot of modern language runtimes
| which use tracing garbage collection, like the CLR
| (C#/VB), JVM (Java/Kotlin/Scala/etc), Go, BEAM
| (Erlang/Elixer), etc.
|
| There are no hard promises about when or even whether GC
| will reclaim a particular piece of garbage, precisely to
| enable optimizations and necessary compromises.
| Application availability is often more important than
| immediately collecting every possible piece of garbage.
| The use of tagging, generations, arenas, etc. all allow
| the GC to use heuristics and apply different collection
| regimes to different pieces of garbage.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Apologies, but I meant it terms of the guarantees that a
| GC offers. Yes, the GC can delay, but it will never over-
| eagerly reclaim beyond its advertised guarantee. It will
| always err on the side of not reclaiming.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| So exactly the same as saying that you will get your
| money back at some undefined point in the future whenever
| the police agency you're dealing it will find it
| convenient?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| No, rather that your money (memory) will never be taken
| away from you (your application) by the police/system
| (runtime/OS) without an objective rule.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| So police is the VM/programming language and you're the
| program? Person writing the program? Or is it the other
| way around?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like the analogy just didn't work.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| I know you think you're being facetious, but you've just
| described how modern operating systems work.
|
| They give programs a reasonable amount of memory, without
| getting into specifics about the limits. And they reclaim
| memory as necessary based on the demands of the OS and
| other programs. See, for example, browser memory usage vs
| video game usage.
|
| It turns out that in practice "reasonable" works quite well
| as long as you are reasonable about it.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Presumably much better than a language which would free all
| memory after 46 minutes in all cases regardless if that
| makes sense in the given context.
|
| Also not sure why people like coming with analogies so
| much, they very rarely are useful or make anything clearer.
| xelamonster wrote:
| I dunno, I think it's generally quite useful to identify
| relations between similar concepts. Not always easy to
| find one that fits perfectly but usually it just needs a
| bit of a tweak.
|
| Like in this case, the situation you describe is exactly
| what a garbage collected language does, the key is that
| they let you mark what memory is still in use with a
| reference. Similarly in this case, there should be an
| explicitly defined time with a rule that if police want
| to hold something longer, they need to actively justify
| why and what the expected timeline is for the return
| without the owner needing to take them to court over it.
| Not perfect, but neither is garbage collection, and to me
| sounds much improved from what we've got.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| I'm still not sure if GC is the police (i.e. returning
| the money/memory at an arbitrary undefined point in the
| future) or me trying to take it back.
|
| The topic at hand is pretty straightforward and easy to
| understand, not sure what's the point of trying to
| explain it using significantly more complex concepts
| besides making it more confusing and harder to understand
| for no reason.. (I mean I find it hard to believe that
| any person who understands how GC works would find the
| analogy in anyway useful).
|
| > Not always easy to find one that fits perfectly but
| usually it just needs a bit of a tweak.
|
| On a very superficial level sure. But then that mechanism
| starts coming apart at the seems if you start talking
| about the details.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's not perfect, but forcing police to define the time that
| something will be taken does go a long way to shining a light
| into their intentions and make it easier to prove that they're
| being unreasonable. "Local police department claims right to
| hold things for 30 years without a warrant" is a much better
| headline that would draw a lot more scrutiny from local voters
| and councils than just "the police won't tell me when I'll get
| my stuff back".
| njovin wrote:
| I wouldn't call it useless, the decision is pretty clear on
| when property can be held:
|
| > If the rationales that justified the initial retention of the
| plaintiffs' effects dissipated, and if no new justification for
| retaining the effects arose, then the Fourth Amendment obliged
| the MPD to return the plaintiffs' effects.
|
| ...and even addresses acceptable reasons for delay:
|
| > we do not suggest that it must always return the property
| instantaneously. Matching a person with his effects can be
| difficult, as can the logistics of storage and inventory.
|
| The court's opinion is basically that once the criminal
| complaint is resolved and the investigation is terminated, the
| gov't has no reason to hold the property and it must be
| returned. If it takes them a few days or weeks to get the stuff
| out of inventory and coordinate the return that's fine, but
| they can't continue holding it just because they feel like it.
| Yoofie wrote:
| This is easily bypassed and/or worked around. What is to
| prevent an indefinite investigation? The FBI D.B Cooper case
| was open for decades, for example.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| They same thing that would prevent anything else they do,
| being taken to court. It's the only thing they fear.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Well if db cooper wants to come claim his property...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| A court can't set hard limits. It's up to a legislative body to
| enact clearly defined laws.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| A court can set a more relaxed upper bound at say 60 days. A
| legislative body can then come in and set a tighter bound at
| say 30 days, or at any value that doesn't exceed 60 days. In
| this way, a court can indeed set a hard limit. How is
| rational decision making supposed to work without numbers?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| But what happens when the property is something that cant
| be reasonably returned in 30 or 60 days? Maybe it's a
| cruise ship that got seized and needs to be be made sea
| worthy before being transported? Hard numbers don't allow
| for edge cases, the vagueness is a feature not a bug.
| xnyan wrote:
| Edge cases can be addressed by allowing for law
| enforcement to appeal to a judge for an extension. The
| burden of proof should be on the the party that has taken
| your stuff, not on the person who's stuff has been taken.
|
| >vagueness is a feature not a bug.
|
| A feature for who? Where's the evedence that law
| enforcement being able to keep your stuff indefinitely
| benefits the public? The default must be that your stuff
| belongs to you, unless the police can convince a judge
| that in this specific case there's a good reason not to
| do so.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| The vagueness is a feature for law enforcement but a bug
| for the individual. Real life doesn't not have time caps.
| How many days can a person go without food, without a
| livelihood, without his property that supports his
| existence? There are time caps for each of these things.
|
| Imagine if prison sentences didn't define the duration of
| the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep
| extending the duration beyond a defined limit.
| zuminator wrote:
| What standard does a court use to set a more relaxed upper
| bound? What's it relaxed in comparison to, if there was no
| previous more-rigid bound to begin with? And if the court
| did set some very permissive high bound, it could be so
| porous as to be worthless. And what's worse, the
| legislature might have little incentive to bother improving
| it. Plus, arbitrary rulings can get arbitrarily overturned.
|
| That's what happened with Roe v Wade. Instead of the
| legislature enacting a rule, the court did. Then Congress
| became complacent and failed to "harden" the Supreme
| Court's ruling. Then when the winds of justice changed,
| Dobbs came into effect. But had the legislature passed a
| law codifying a Roe-equivalent standard, the chances of
| there ever being enough of a majority in both Houses to
| overturn it plus a president willing to sign a new bill
| into law would've been minuscule.
|
| In short, the less our lives are governed by some random
| court imposing national standards upon us that were pulled
| out of the court's honorable ass, the better off we are in
| the long run.
| paddy_m wrote:
| I once heard of a behavioral economics paper that said you can
| reliably predict a judge's ruling on a legal or ethics matter
| based on what is best for the legal profession.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This is why judicial records are so secret that you can't
| even subpoena exculpatory evidence from them. They want to
| protect the image of the judicial system. So old fashioned.
| In today's world, you build trust with transparency...
| assuming your organization isn't rotten...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I challenge this kind of thinking. Why haven't other highly
| developed democracies decayed in the same way? Wouldn't all
| judges, everywhere, behave in the same way?
| giantg2 wrote:
| What actions do you have in mind? Where are those actions
| happening or not? How do you think the decay of democracy
| is tied to judicial secrecy/immunity?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It would not be up to the police to define but a court.
|
| And that's why times aren't given. Legal precedent can adapt to
| time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a
| hard number can.
|
| Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep
| an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They
| wouldn't have a hard number at first, but the system that
| results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator
| just said "45 days".
| OutOfHere wrote:
| That's all very convenient for the police, but not at all for
| the individual. Real life of an individual does have hard
| time caps, for the duration of their expected life, for how
| many days they can go without food, without a livelihood,
| etc. When the police seizes property, they affect these
| things for an individual. There are time caps to each of
| these things for the individual.
|
| Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of
| the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the
| individual for as long as the prison wants.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Well, I agree, but it is a significant improvement over the
| current status of indefinite asset seizure being
| essentially the law of the land everywhere.
|
| Some amount of asset seizure is legitimate. Cops do need to
| hold evidence, for instance. Money seized from drug dealers
| can't be given back to them while they await trial. Etc.
|
| You couldn't really effectively put a 90 day cap (or any
| hard number) on asset retention without either having it be
| too short or too long in many cases. It's not a court's job
| (and shouldn't be) to do so, it's a court's job to rule
| that a seizure that happened was or was not
| unconstitutional.
|
| It is my hope (and has been for a long time) that the
| Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, but they rarely
| would do anything even remotely like setting a hard limit.
| They'll leave that to states and lower courts to determine
| what makes sense and then possibly hear future challenges
| as necessary.
|
| This is an example, I think, of the system working well to
| correct an issue. It does seem to me inline with the
| intention of the amendment to consider indefinite asset
| seizure unconstitutional, but I'm not a constitutional
| lawyer or a Supreme Court Justice so we'll see. They're
| likely to grant certiorari here.
| exabrial wrote:
| Baby steps though, progress not perfection. None of your points
| are invalid
| lokar wrote:
| IANAL, but I don't think they are supposed to. They decide the
| case in front of them: 14 months is too long. And give some
| insight as to why and what the might be in other cases, but
| that's not authoritative.
|
| We will have to wait for more cases to refine the time limit
| and other factors that impact it.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > We will have to wait
|
| I seem to remember something about "justice delayed".
|
| Sure these things are complicated. But coming to a just
| conclusion sooner rather than later should also be a goal,
| not just dotting Is and crossing Ts. Of course for law
| specialists such as lawyers and judges minutiae seem
| important. But to me it seems the overall goal of the entire
| concept has been forgotten. Or maybe is ignored on purpose.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| More like "this is how you creep in justice". You set a
| date and politicians will spend months determining what's
| too long/too short. Or in this case, the judges may not get
| a unanimous ruling as easily. The article mentions that
| this is a DC appeals court that establishes this, and
| several other circuits have rules otherwise.
|
| The fastest way is leaving it vague, waiting for some court
| case to set precedent on what is "too long" and use that as
| a reference for future court cases. Or in this case, it may
| in fact go to the supreme court who will be able to
| determine a more concrete time (or just throw it all away
| and doom us all).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Given the prior majority of appeals courts deciding the
| other way, it seems like something of a waste of time to
| figure out a time period.
|
| Better to say "you can't hold it for an unreasonable
| period, and 14 months was unreasonable"
|
| It will have to be resolved at the Supreme Court level
| anyway, given the US Court of Appeals split.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I hope that you aren't expecting a court with a rampant
| Clarence Thomas to care about anything pertaining to your
| rights vis-a-vis the police.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 1 / 9
| autoexec wrote:
| > The fastest way is leaving it vague, waiting for some
| court case to set precedent on what is "too long" and use
| that as a reference for future court cases.
|
| We're stuck with the courts because congress doesn't do
| their job, but leaving this to the courts to decide on a
| case by case basis could mean that only people who can
| afford to pay the lawyers and court fees and take the
| time off for a lengthy court battle against the police
| can expect to have their rights respected. Ideally, we'd
| have claws with specific limits that would then be used
| to set department policy. That way it'd be clear to
| everyone what the expectation is and when a violation
| occurred.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A functioning congress could make laws regulating this.
|
| But as things are, we have wait for some random court case to
| bubble up.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Congress has no reason to care. They certainly aren't
| subjected to any of the shady tactics. Most of their
| constituents aren't either. Just the edge cases, but nobody
| cares unless they find themselves in it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be
| a useful ruling_
|
| How confident are you this has no good exceptions? That's why a
| reasonableness standard exists. To permit edge cases.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Exemptions for edge cases would benefit only the government.
| Moreover, the exemptions would take away the individual's
| rights even more, which is exactly what the citizenry need to
| guard against.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Imagine if prison sentences didn 't have a time cap._
|
| For many serious crimes, they don't.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment
| nimbius wrote:
| I once had the cops seize $800 in cash I had on me to pay for
| motorcycle service (15% discount with cash) and hold it for 3
| months.
|
| Eventually I got a letter saying I had to show up and prove I
| wasnt going to do drugs with it. So I showed up with my
| invoice.
|
| Then I was told I had to submit fingerprints and sign a letter
| promising I wasnt going to do drugs and I refused.
|
| Finally a month later they sent me a letter saying I had
| forfeited the money and I showed up again (took a day off work)
| and they said I had to go to court. So I went to court, and the
| judge spent ten minutes telling the cops that didnt show up I
| had to get my money back.
|
| Next month after that I got a call saying I had property to
| pick up and that I'd be fined daily if I didnt. So I got the
| money back.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Pretty common. This sort of mistrust is one reason people
| oppose red flag laws that require seizure (before even being
| tried, and without the protections of the criminal system).
|
| On a side note, how did they find the money? Or was this an
| expensive lesson in why not to consent to a search?
| sneak wrote:
| If you don't consent to searches, cops that want to search
| you will either simply search you illegally anyway, or call
| out dogs that are trained to alert whenever the cops want
| them to. There's a reason that K-9 units are called
| "probable cause on four legs".
| EasyMark wrote:
| Not true, I have refused a "look over"of my car for two
| traffic stops, both cops threatened canine cops and I
| told them go ahead. One radioed in "not available", The
| other one went back to his car and wrote me a ticket and
| told me I was lucky he got another call while he was
| filling out the ticket. I'm sure they sometimes do "do it
| anyway" but it isn't a sure thing.
| bluGill wrote:
| Canines need to be well trained, if it goes to court the
| need to prove the dogs won't point if there are no drugs
| (or whatever the dog looks for) so if there isn't good
| reason to suspect you they won't bother (depending on how
| far away a dog is) they are just threatening as if you
| are guilty you may give up.
|
| There are also rules about how long they can detain you
| while waiting. See a lawyer (the rules may not be good
| but you can get off in court if they are 'too long')
| sneak wrote:
| No, in practice they do not need to prove that.
|
| The presumption of innocence is mostly a fiction.
| giantg2 wrote:
| They do need to prove it. It's just that they treat it
| like a radar gun - they take the last certification
| testing as the proof. It's very rare to get to re-examine
| them.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| It's impossible for a test to prove that a canine ONLY
| alerts to contraband. It doesn't matter how many
| controlled tests it has passed, dogs could nevertheless
| be responding to conscious or unconscious signals from an
| officer who is already expecting to find drugs.
| papercrane wrote:
| Ever since Rodriguez v. United States the police cannot
| make you wait for the K9. It's considered an unlawful
| detainment if they extend the traffic stop, without
| reasonable suspicion of another crime, beyond the time it
| takes to deal with the original reason they pulled you
| over.
| pc86 wrote:
| This is generally accepted to be about 20 minutes but
| that's not a hard and fast rule and multiple things can
| extend that time.
|
| Basically they need to continue writing your citation for
| speed or a brake light or whatever, at a reasonable
| speed. If you ever see dash/body cam footage where this
| is relevant, cops have had charges dismissed because they
| fill out the entire citation but don't sign it in about
| 10 minutes, then spend 45 minutes questioning everyone in
| the car and trying to get probable cause for a search.
| This is part of why they'll do a lot of the fishing at
| the beginning before they start the citation process, as
| that's seen as more "reasonable" than doing it at the
| end. This is also why it's so important to only give the
| info you're required to and not to answer any other
| questions. It increases the odds you'll get that first
| ticket but it cuts off their ability to extend the stop.
| liquidgecka wrote:
| If they try make sure you assert that you do not consent
| to searches, and would like to be on your way.. Then when
| they try to hold you ask them if the detention is inline
| with `Rodriguez v. United States` which specifically
| forbids cops from delaying a driver so that they can get
| dogs to the scene.
| klyrs wrote:
| Does it forbid the tactic in a way that results in
| negative consequences for the perpetrating officers?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Your right has been confirmed in that case. It then has
| the basis for a civil rights case.
| klyrs wrote:
| But Rodriguez is way past the qualified immunity
| deadline. What incentives the cop not to do this?
| giantg2 wrote:
| How so?
| godelski wrote:
| This sounds nice until a cop throws you against a car
| anyways. You're right to give the advice because this is
| what should happen but that's not the reality because the
| whole premise is based on what already should not be
| happening. You'd only need that line against a cop
| abusing their power. They're almost always going to
| continue abusing their power
| giantg2 wrote:
| Many cops just try to trick you or are ignorant.
| Providing this info and asking for a supervisor is the
| best basis for any potential future legal recourse
| (especially if recording). Of course none of that matters
| in the moment, but it can make a big difference in
| getting that $800 back or not having it seized in the
| first place.
| godelski wrote:
| Well in my experience (given in another comment) this is
| not the case. With a judge, sure, but a cop no. (Fwiw,
| I'm white)
|
| It's worth a shot, yes, but it's also unlikely to change
| the tables. Because again, the only time you would need
| to utilize such information is when you're encountering a
| cop who is actively abusing their power. My point is that
| in such situations, the information has a chance to de-
| escalate, be neutral, or escalate the situation.
|
| It's hard to tell on the Internet what the intent is
| because well intended seemingly good advice can also be
| noise. I'm just trying to convey that the picture isn't
| black and white. I mean if things happened they way they
| should, we wouldn't need to call a supervisor or remind a
| cop of the law, right?
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Because again, the only time you would need to utilize
| such information is when you're encountering a cop who is
| actively abusing their power."
|
| Again, this is not true. There are other situations where
| this info can be beneficial (ignorant cops or deceptive
| but not corrupt cops).
| zmgsabst wrote:
| My experience aligns with your advice:
|
| Most police officers will bully you within the extent of
| their authority and try to deceive you into complying
| beyond their authority, but will not physically break the
| law.
|
| With those police, being polite but firm is a good
| strategy.
|
| - - - - -
|
| Example: you're in the parking lot of a business after
| hours, sitting there with a backpack; two officers in a
| cruiser park and get out to find out what you're doing.
|
| 1. Well -- legal or not, they're going to detain you for
| a moment until they decide how to proceed
|
| 2. and they'll pretend the only way to make that stop is
| let them search your bag to "prove you didn't steal
| anything"
|
| 3. but if you politely repeat that you're not consenting
| to any searches and would like to leave, they'll let you
| go because at best they have probable cause for
| trespassing.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Most police officers will bully you within the extent
| of their authority and try to deceive you into complying
| beyond their authority, but will not physically break the
| law.
|
| "most" is probably correct, but of course cops that don't
| break the law don't make the news because it's
| uninteresting.
|
| I think the real problem we have is the cops that _DO_
| break the law and violate your rights and _absolutely
| nothing happens_.
|
| A cop that searches your bag without probable cause or
| consent needs immediate retraining on the first offense,
| and needs to be fired on the second offense. If the cop
| gets fired and then gets hired as a cop somewhere else
| and commits the same offense, they need to be permanently
| banned from being a cop.
| godelski wrote:
| > ignorant cops
|
| This is an important, but orthogonal topic.
|
| We are talking about something fairly basic, so if our
| standards of policing are that it is excusable that a cop
| does not understand... the 4th amendment... then I'm not
| sure it is worth distinguishing from abuse. As such level
| of incompetence would necessitate willfulness.
| > deceptive
|
| I fail to understand how you are distinguishing an
| antagonistic cop who understands you are not breaking the
| law and is actively trying to trick you into (or trick
| you into revealing that you are despite no meaningful
| evidence that a crime is taking place) is different from
| one that is abusing their authority. I'd go so far as to
| say that this is a literal act of that.
|
| Look, I am happy you are willing to give the benefit of
| the doubt. We need people to provide such perspectives.
| In all honesty, I do appreciate your comment and that you
| are pushing back, but I think you'll need to take a
| significantly different route if you are to sway me. I
| think continuing down this train of reasoning will fail
| to persuade those with similar views. This does not mean
| there isn't an argument that would, just not this one.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "As such level of incompetence would necessitate
| willfulness."
|
| It does not. You really should engage in a genuine
| debate.
|
| Deception and abuse are not the same thing. It's
| perfectly legal for a cop to say "I'm searching your car,
| ok?". If you say "ok", you just consented. This is
| completely different that someone making up probable
| cause.
|
| "Look, I am happy you are willing to give the benefit of
| the doubt."
|
| No, I'm not. There are many situations and benefit of the
| doubt can only be applied to a few. It's simply incorrect
| from a logical perspective to frame the things you have
| as always being willful and corrupt. If you've had any
| experience with the law you will find that incompetence
| is rampant, but not usually willful. I understand that
| you may not be open minded, as evidenced in your hardline
| and unsupported generalized statements, but it's
| important for others to see these flaws.
| godelski wrote:
| > It does not.
|
| There is a level of incompetence one can be at their job
| in which it is clear that they do not seek to do their
| job well. > You really should engage in a
| genuine debate.
|
| You should respond to the things I say, not the things
| you wish me to say. Disagreement with you does not mean I
| am not being genuine, just as a circle jerk is not a
| genuine debate. > It's perfectly legal
| for a cop to say "I'm searching your car, ok?".
|
| To again reference the level of incompetence...
| > The Fourth Amendment requires that before stopping the
| suspect, the police must have a reasonable suspicion that
| a crime has been, is being, or is about to be committed
| by the suspect.[0] > The term "unreasonable" refers
| to any action or result that exceeds a reasonable
| expectation, or refers to anything beyond what would be
| considered "common sense." In criminal cases, the
| prosecutor should explain the evidence so clearly that
| the average person would agree with it; if the logic of
| the prosecution or the certainty based on the given
| evidence could not be accepted by the common public, it
| would be unreasonable. [1]
|
| Even if you disagree with the interpretation, I hope you
| are able to distinguish the difference between "what is
| right" and "what is legal". Because if your argument is
| "it is legal, therefor morally correct" we will never
| agree, just as I will not condone the actions of
| cheaters, and those that manufactured the housing crisis.
|
| In the US, we do have the presumption of innocence.
| Questioning to search without probably cause is, legal or
| not, an abuse of power.
|
| I do wish you think deeply about what the "power" is that
| is being abused. What "authority" mean. Because if your
| argument is "it's legal" then I do not believe you
| understand this and I ask you to think a little deeper.
| Perhaps you're familiar with "malicious compliance?"
| That's enough of a hint.
|
| [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stop_and_frisk
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unreasonable
| giantg2 wrote:
| "There is a level of incompetence one can be at their job
| in which it is clear that they do not seek to do their
| job well."
|
| And you can't apply that to everyone who is doesn't know
| every law.
|
| "You should respond to the things I say, not the things
| you wish me to say."
|
| Check the quotes then. You're making blanket statements
| without any backup.
|
| 'distinguish the difference between "what is right" and
| "what is legal".'
|
| The question is about what is legal. If you know anything
| about the law, then you know it is a combative process.
| In order for the truth to come out it needs to be a fair
| fight between two sides. There is nothing wrong with
| asking to search if already engaged (reasonable
| suspicion). Just as there's nothing wrong with saying
| "no". There's no basis for that being immoral.
| montagg wrote:
| I think the argument for using the line is, there is no
| reason in the moment not to try everything you can, no
| matter where you are, and you adjust based on the
| situation. If you're in a place that doesn't respect the
| rule of law ALL THE TIME, sure, don't. Is the US(I will
| assume you're US-based) that right now? I think your
| answer to that question == whether you feel the tactic is
| viable.
|
| But you're right, we shouldn't be in this place as a
| nation, wondering if police are going to be ethical even
| most of the time.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The main point was that there is a line between being
| cooperative and being tricked or forced into consent for
| a search. The best tactic is to appear cooperative but
| not a pushover. If they are forcing or tricking a search,
| then you need to show that you are complying but "under
| protest". And definitely, this is based on how it is now,
| not where we should be.
| lukan wrote:
| "My point is that in such situations, the information has
| a chance to de-escalate, be neutral, or escalate the
| situation."
|
| Yes, because in intense situations, it matters often much
| more how you say something, than what exactly you are
| saying.
|
| Remember that from the point of view of the cops, you
| might draw a gun at any moment, if they misjudged you.
| They need to feel they are in control of the situation.
|
| So giving a legal correct counter, but in a snarky or
| aggressive voice, might not help.
|
| But calmly reminding them of certain laws and maybe even
| asking them, if they are sure that they could justify
| their actions in a court, might work better than
| resisting and demanding things of armed police officers.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > But calmly reminding them of certain laws and maybe
| even asking them, if they are sure that they could
| justify their actions in a court
|
| This will mostly just come across as patronizing and more
| likely to 'deal with you in court' while your smarmy ass
| sits somewhere.
|
| Some real advice: don't tell a cop how to do their job.
| Answer the damn questions and be assertively "no" if they
| ask you to consent to anything. That's it. If they go
| away, great. If they make your life hell. That sucks, but
| don't do anything to make it worse, like patronizing
| them. Suck it up and deal with it later.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, I do have managed quite well with different police
| so far, even though not with US police. But I am sure
| they react to body language and sound as well. And yes,
| one can also articulate that sentence less escalating, my
| point was mainly that the way someone is said matters a
| lot more.
| lukan wrote:
| Correction: (..the way something is said)
| godelski wrote:
| > Remember that from the point of view of the citizen,
| the cop might draw a gun at any moment, if they misjudged
| you. They need to feel they are in control of the
| situation.
|
| FTFY
|
| The point I'm making with the edit is that the cop is a
| trained professional while the citizen is some random
| bloke.
|
| Not that while the citizen _might_ have a weapon, the
| situation is unambiguous for the officer. They have
| several...
|
| So both people are in the same situation and seeking the
| same thing (at this basic level), right? The question is
| who has the higher obligation, who has to "be the bigger
| man?"
|
| In all other professions, it is generally without dispute
| that the greater burden falls upon the professional. The
| one with training. The one with authority! By nature of
| the interaction the cop has more control than a citizen.
| Power granted by law, a position of authority, and an
| unambiguous armament.
|
| I need you to think carefully about the consequences of
| your argument. How they extend past this specific example
| we have in our heads. You'll need to clarify to what
| extent this is okay.
|
| Authority needs not just be accountable, but accountable
| in proportion to the power we grant them. Do I need to
| quote Uncle Ben!?!?!? Without a doubt, officers have
| substantially more power than the average citizen, thus I
| do not think it is unreasonable to suggest they should be
| held to a higher degree of accountability. I maintain
| this position regardless of the type of authority. In
| many cases, ignorance is not an excuse. With
| professionals, ignorance may not just not be an excuse,
| but an active act of malice (a doctor who does not
| continue their education has actively chosen inaction.
| Their ignorance will not hold up in a court of law. In
| our case, I see no reason ignorance is different from
| malice when the requisite knowledge is commonly taught in
| middle and high school. I am willing to give a pass for
| complex issues, but not stop and frisk)
| wordsarelies wrote:
| Count to five in your head before answering any good
| questions.
|
| They get trained to get you to misspeak, and they ask you
| questions that if you answer them like a normal human you
| give up rights...
| markovs_gun wrote:
| Yeah having rights is great but it's not a lot of help
| when the cops can just beat the shit out of you and
| arrest you for resisting arrest. Maybe you'll get it
| overturned in court but what good does that do if you
| missed work or lost your job over the whole ordeal?
| pc86 wrote:
| If the cop wants to throw you against the car that's
| going to happen and no amount of negotiation or "Am I
| being detained?" is going to prevent that. It's also not
| going to help against the sizable percentage of cops who
| just don't know they can't do something. This isn't for
| either of them, this is for the lower grade abuses of
| power where the cop will make you "wait" 2 hours for a K9
| (but never call them in the first place) to try to get
| you to consent to make things go faster. If they know
| that you're going to be filing complaints and suing them
| they're much more likely to just send you on your way.
| YouTube has literally thousands of these videos which
| induce various levels of rage depending on how egregious
| the cops act.
| dheera wrote:
| > Then when they try to hold you ask them if
|
| In the US if you ask the cops anything you risk getting
| tased or having a knee on your neck.
| alex_lav wrote:
| "Simply tell the cops you're leaving" is a very out of
| touch suggestion to make.
|
| "Simply tell the cops you're leaving because The Law"
| even moreso.
| godelski wrote:
| > If you don't consent to searches, cops that want to
| search you will either simply search you illegally anyway
|
| Over a decade ago (in California) I had met up with some
| friends at a park where we were going to carpool to a
| concert in LA. I had a medical license and my weed was
| locked in my trunk AND we hadn't smoked. Cops pulled up,
| asked what we were doing, we explained, they asked if
| they could search, we said no, they did anyways. One
| friend had his hands in his pockets when the cops rolled
| up and they asked him what he had in there, so he
| naturally pulled them out and the cops threw him against
| a car and searched, saying they thought he was pulling a
| knife on him... I got a ticket, had to show up to court.
| Contested which meant another court date (I was following
| the law. Cop didn't even show up!). I talked with one of
| the clerks because I had a calc midterm that day and he
| pushed me to a afternoon session. Showing up to that the
| judge grilled me about "being late" (I had docs) and I
| yelled at him for wasting my time, the publics time,
| money, and how I was scheduled for this time because I
| had a fucking calculus test so to stop treating me like a
| degenerate. That I followed the letter of the law. 15
| minutes total and charges dismissed. What a shit show...
|
| Another time I was visiting the Golden gate Park. I asked
| a ranger for directions. He said we smelled like weed. I
| told him SF smelled like weed. He asked to search, we
| walked, he grabbed us and my backpack. His evidence to
| give us a ticket was my still sealed bottle from the
| dispensary.
|
| I won't say all cops are bad, but some just want to abuse
| their power. I won't say cops are good, because the ones
| that don't abuse do know the ones that do. And you know
| what they say about "good men" who do nothing...
|
| And people still wonder why I'm critical of authority
| ethagnawl wrote:
| It's very much a spectrum but, in my personal experience,
| _many_ cops are drawn to the job for the wrong reasons,
| like the power or being able to retire after 20 years
| with a pension (varies by municipality but very common in
| the northeast).
|
| It would never happen and I'm not sure it should but I
| often think about what a community based approach might
| look like. For example, a requirement that police live in
| the community they're policing or some sort of
| conscription model.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Wanting to collect a pension is NOT a wrong reason. It is
| a very legitimate reason for any government worker. I'd
| even bet it's inversely correlated with wanting to abuse
| power.
|
| Moreover, the abuse of power looks to develop over time,
| learning it from other abusive cops, and going further.
| It is a cycle of abuse taught from senior to junior. Even
| if the police represent the community or are conscripted,
| they still can learn such abusive behavior.
|
| The solution can be for all teams to be new, to not pass
| bad cultural knowledge from the old team to the new team.
| godelski wrote:
| > a community based approach might look like
|
| The reason I'm a fan of these (albeit they are far from
| perfect[0]) is because it both creates some humanization
| as well as some social accountability.
|
| I think some of the problems are related to the fact that
| parts of society don't scale well (though some do). As
| population grows, so does anonymity. But a powerful tool
| to fight abuse of authority is by decreasing anonymity,
| as this creates a social pressure. There are
| disadvantages to cops being biased towards their
| communities, but I think this is better than the bias of
| indifference. We're dealing with humans, and the
| direction in which we should _error_ should * _always*_
| be on the side of compassion.
|
| [0] Perfection does not exist and will not. So we have to
| be nuanced
| giantg2 wrote:
| Drug dogs only provide probable cause for drug searches.
| They arent suppoaed to extend to other crimes. Just as if
| the dog alerts on private property and a warrant is then
| needed, it only provides probable cause for a drug search
| (or related offense).
|
| On another note, in many states the dogs can't be trained
| on marijuana as it has legal purposes (medicinal or
| recreational). If coming from a state where it is legal,
| it still _shouldn 't_ provide probable cause as the
| sniffable residue could be from previous legal use.
|
| So in my view, the drug dog liability is low (biggest
| threat being planted evidence, but that could happen
| anyways), and being reined in further. Yes, the made-up
| probable cause is more likely. That's why I was
| wondering.
| advael wrote:
| The entire existence of a class of contraband that cops
| can claim to be searching for at any time is a massive
| loophole in the fourth amendment, and as such, the drug
| prohibition wave of the mid-20th century was instrumental
| in turning the US (and for that matter a majority of
| developed countries) into police states
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's the thing - it's not considered a search. That's
| how they get away with it. The sniffing has to happen in
| public (or with a warrant) and is considered in plain
| smell (same as an officer smelling alcohol on your breath
| in a car). Then the dog provides probable cause for the
| real search.
|
| Well, really everything has become heavily criminalized
| in the 20th century. Especially as things that aren't
| outright outlawed are regulated to the extreme. Drugs,
| alcohol, guns, knives, etc. Some things have gotten more
| open, but virtually everything has gotten more
| complicated and easy to get tripped up on technicalities.
| mapt wrote:
| The officer "smelling alcohol on your breath" is
| infamously applied to any situation where the officer
| lacks probable cause. It cannot be verified in a criminal
| case or in litigation, the officer is simply presumed to
| be telling the truth, and if proven to be lying is never,
| ever imprisoned for perjury.
|
| It may as well be "The officer saw you drinking in a
| vision"
| advael wrote:
| In an environment where police officers are effectively
| immune from any consequences of any actions, which
| appears to be almost true - barring widespread media
| coverage and consistent pressure from essentially a
| majority of US adults for multiple months at a time - the
| actual nature of the pretense used to take the officer's
| word for things is pretty immaterial
| mapt wrote:
| Smell is one thing that you can't fix with body cameras
| even in theory.
| advael wrote:
| The theory-practice gap is so wide as to make the
| theoretical maxima essentially fantasy with body cameras
| that are proprietary and owned and operated by the same
| police departments they are supposed to be an
| accountability mechanism for
| giantg2 wrote:
| In theory you could, but that requires something like a
| small scale mass spectrometer to feed recordings into the
| camera log. So in practice, not realistic... yet.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This is only partially true (on several of the
| statements).
|
| The plain smell test has this problem in general. So does
| any witness testimony. In the case of driving, they will
| issue sobriety tests and a blood test. But part of these
| searches is different because of the way driving is
| treated as a privilege and the conditions you agree too
| in requesting a license. These subsequent tests will
| verify the officer's statements. The admissibility of
| evidence from searches based on this sort of "mistake" is
| up to the court to determine if it was in good faith.
|
| As for the lying... there is a difference between lying
| and being mistaken. Very few people in general are
| prosecuted for perjury because it requires proving that
| they willfully provided false testimony. This is very
| evident in the way protection from abuse orders are
| misused in many divorces and the requestor is almost
| never charged. However, police are (in theory) held to a
| higher standard with the use of Giglio/Brady lists. These
| list only need to show that the officer is repeatedly
| unreliable, not actually lying. In practice, these might
| not be very effective because it's up to prosecutors to
| maintain these lists. They only have incentive to add
| officers if they lose too many cases for the prosecution.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| It is still a federal crime to use marijuana, even in
| states where it is legal under state law. Also, if you
| are in a car, they just have to suspect you were driving
| while under the influence of marijuana and it becomes
| probable cause again. But it is unlikely that residue
| alone constitutes sufficient evidence of a crime, because
| they would never bother to investigate someone smoking a
| joint so severely anyway.
|
| I believe you are also wrong about the limited scope of a
| search. If additional crimes are uncovered during a
| legitimate search, they absolutely can charge you with it
| and use the evidence they found. Think about what you're
| saying. If they find pools of blood in your trunk while
| looking for drugs, they will definitely admit that as
| evidence against you and cause to search all your
| property.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Unless they are federal police, they have no authority to
| enforce federal law.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I agree with you in general but police can do a lot of
| things on suspicion of a crime. They may have to let you
| go eventually, but don't overestimate your position. You
| could be tied up for months straightening out issues with
| false accusations.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Police officers in US can enforce a federal law, local
| police officers are just not obligated to.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Do you have evidence of this? They can hold you for
| federal authorities, but they have no jurisdiction to
| write a federal citation or summons.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Only the feds enforce federal crimes, so it's not
| relevant to most traffic stops.
|
| The residue is enough for the dog to alert.
|
| "If additional crimes are uncovered during a legitimate
| search, they absolutely can charge you with it and use
| the evidence they found."
|
| Any examples of that? Usually with warrants they have to
| specify what they are looking for. Probable cause
| searches are supposed to do the same.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I said an example. If you're found with a dead body in
| your trunk for example, that will not be thrown out on a
| technicality, especially if it was found during an
| otherwise legal search. I don't have the case law
| memorized but I've heard lawyers discuss it before. If
| you do some research you will find exceptions to 4th
| amendment protections, such as the ones in this article:
| https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-rights/the-
| fourth-...
|
| Who are these dorks downvoting me so much? Lol
| psd1 wrote:
| > Who are these dorks downvoting me so much? Lol
|
| Instant downvote.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| This is exactly why I don't comment on Reddit, because a
| bunch of jerks who have nothing to say just downvote me.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I meant actual case law examples. If it's a body in plain
| view during the other search, then that falls under the
| plain view exception. If it's somehow concealed in a way
| that they can't tell what it is, then they shouldn't be
| able to use it. Of course judges would use every avenue
| possible to side with the police on an issue of murder
| (assuming it was murder and not just a corpse from some
| other reason).
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Here is one, that was a pain in the ass to find:
| https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/496/128/
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_v._California In
| that one a lawful search turned up unexpected items, and
| those items were permitted.
|
| This one might be interesting too:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._Evans Even an
| error in a warrant might not save you.
|
| You'd just be an idiot to think that your dead body in
| the trunk would be excluded as evidence during any
| search, much less a lawful search. Searches of cars are
| special as well and do not require a warrant, only
| probable cause like "I smelled something" or "The suspect
| was acting erratic/intoxicated" which is your word vs.
| theirs. If you find a case where a murderer was uncovered
| during a lawful search and that evidence was thrown out
| due to it being off topic, please let me know.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "In that one a lawful search turned up unexpected items,
| and those items were permitted."
|
| Yes, that's the plain view exception I mentioned earlier.
|
| "Even an error in a warrant might not save you."
|
| Yeah, depends on the error and the good faith excpetion.
|
| "Searches of cars are special as well and do not require
| a warrant,"
|
| Yes, I mentioned that in other comments. But that
| probable cause is supposed to follow the same standards.
| It's just expedited by cutting out the judge.
|
| That example would be hard to find because anything they
| find could be potentially covered under the independent
| source avenue. But that has to come from a separate
| warrant. Since murders don't have a statute of
| limitations, that's open ended and would almost always
| result in a secondary search even if the first search
| evidence was thrown out.
| spacebacon wrote:
| Algorithmic downvote. Maybe "gag factor". Just guessing.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Is that a thing here? I have felt like I was being
| stalked and/or downvoted systematically by some BS
| algorithm.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Only the feds enforce federal crimes
|
| Real question: Who counts as "the feds"? I assume at
| least the FBI and Secret Service. Are there others? Maybe
| some Postal or Immigration police? How about Department
| of Homeland Security?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not sure what your point is here. Even the feds aren't
| enforcing marijuana laws.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Can you take a domestic flight carrying marijuana? I
| doubt it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Medical marijuana - yes.
|
| Recreational - no, but you also won't get arrested by the
| Feds. TSA will report it to law enforcement. If it's
| legal in that state, nothing will happen orher than
| forfeiture if you plan to fly. Basically the same deal as
| if you left a knife in your bag.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| > Only the feds enforce federal crimes, so it's not
| relevant to most traffic stops.
|
| You're unlikely to be arrested by any federal LEO, as
| there are not many of them. Your local LEO do the arrest
| and then transfer to the relevant agency.
|
| Law enforcement can, and do, cooperate to arrest
| individuals.
|
| Imagine if a suspect could get away from being arrested
| just by crossing into another state.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yes and no. Depends on what you consider an arrest.
| Colloquially, yes, any law enforcement can arrest you for
| any level of offense. Technically, the arrest is made by
| the officer with jurisdiction that you end up being
| transferred into their custody and putting their name on
| the paperwork. The big bottleneck here is that the Feds
| decline to have many people held because they don't have
| enough people to take the transfer. They perfer to let
| the state level law do their work for them (as on many
| topics they're basically the same). In the case we're
| talking about, the Feds generally don't care about
| marijuana in a traffic stop since their policy is to
| basically ignore it in states where it's legal.
| csomar wrote:
| You are misunderstanding the reason to _not_ consent to a
| search. If the police officer can 't justify his search
| in court, the evidence will be dismissed. By consenting,
| you are giving the court free evidence.
|
| NEVER consent to a search. However, never obstruct one
| either.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's also very very important to explicitly say "I do not
| consent to _any_ search or seizure. " They will tell you
| to do things you're not legally required to do, e.g.
| "move over here for me" and if there's no audio recording
| of you refusing to consent, they can (and will) simply
| say in court that they took your choosing to get out of
| the way when you didn't have to as consent. Now you have
| to argue that you didn't consent, which you wouldn't have
| to do if it was clear on camera that you were refusing
| the whole time.
|
| Say it over and over again, any time they ask you to
| move, any time they ask to search again, any time they
| say they're going to pat you down, etc. Be a broken
| record. It's become a meme but this is why you see people
| asking if they're being detained over and over again
| because once the cops say yes that changes the rules
| considerably (in your favor).
| yardie wrote:
| They can also plant evidence, find something left behind
| by a passenger, or any myriad of things. You do not
| consent to the search because if you are arrested I
| guarantee that's the first thing the lawyer will ask. And
| will turn a $10k into a $20k if you allowed it. Because
| even 1 piece of illegally gathered evidence can wreck the
| whole case.
|
| BTW, I've done jury duty and witnessed the DA's case fall
| apart as witnesses and evidence was excluded. It's hard
| to build a strong narrative when whole chapters have to
| be ripped out. Years of evidence went up in smoke because
| they weren't handled correctly.
|
| Anyway, the point is you don't make the cops job easier
| because they certainly don't deserve it.
| pc86 wrote:
| Interesting, typically all the evidentiary hearings
| happen without the jury present - because as much as we
| like to pretend otherwise, once the jury hears something
| it's going to be considered no matter what.
| yardie wrote:
| In my case we had pictures of random people, we assumed
| "accomplices", with no statement. Dates and timestamps
| where there was lots of activity, then nothing for 2-3
| weeks and then lots of activity. We determined in the
| jury room the prosecution was hiding evidence from us
| probably because some of it wasn't legally obtained.
|
| We were 51% certain the guy was guilty but everything
| else left too much doubt.
| fencepost wrote:
| I was on jury duty recently that seemed the epitome of
| "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride," along
| with a terrible job done by the prosecutors. I explicitly
| told the defense attorneys on the way out that they
| didn't win their case, the prosecution lost by doing a
| terrible job with evidence.
|
| Violation of an order of protection case, charged with
| violating a 500 foot OOP by 2 feet. Apparently part of
| the sidewalk at a nearby intersection was 498 feet from
| the house, but they didn't even pop up a map of the area
| just threw a bunch of street names at jurors from all
| over the major metro area.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That seems wild. How do they even know it was 498 feet?
| Usually these things are only enforced if someone makes a
| complaint, and the basis for that complaint is usually
| something very obvious.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If the defense believes the order was in fact violated
| but they see the prosecution doing a terrible job with
| the evidence the worst thing they could do would be to
| clearly communicate anything to you!
| duped wrote:
| I think people have fewer qualms about cops seizing weapons
| than any other kind of property. Taking cash or a car from
| someone is not equivalent to taking their guns.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Property is property
|
| Until they start seizing bank branches under suspicion of
| being used in a crime, this selective scamming won't stop
| duped wrote:
| Ideological opposition to these laws without a frank
| understanding of their intent and impact is arguing in
| bad faith. Property is not all equal and not treated that
| way, for reasons that should be self evident.
|
| Guns are tools to kill people. Red flag laws exist to
| identify people who have them and are likely to use them.
| If a few people get caught up by the net by mistake, the
| societal impact is that we have fewer guns on the streets
| while those people are inconvenienced.
|
| Compare that to seizing people's cars. Sure, cars are
| dangerous, but people need them to travel to/from
| work/school/etc. The impact of seizing a car from someone
| by mistake is they could lose their job, their house if
| they lose income, etc. It's a lot worse than a gun owner
| not having access to their gun for a little bit.
|
| So no, property is _not_ property.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| I'd argue your argument is in bad faith. Guns are tools,
| that can be used to kill people, just like knives, clubs,
| or other weapons. Guns are also tools for ensuring equity
| in a potentially violent world. You don't need to be 6'2
| 250lbs to defend yourself with a gun from a criminal or
| violent government. Its also convenient for you to decide
| that others don't "need" to protect themselves from
| situations that they've deemed necessary.
| duped wrote:
| The overarching point I'm making is that the government
| seizing $2,000 in cash from you is not the same as
| seizing a $2,000 gun from you, because the $2,000 in cash
| isn't a potentially immediate threat to the public. Red
| flag laws are one of the very few pro-active tools for
| law enforcement.
|
| I think any argument around guns that focuses on
| ideological thought experiments like self defense from a
| "violent government" is not worth exploring. Because then
| you're talking about how to organize an armed
| insurrection, not how to reduce mass shootings and
| domestic partner violence.
|
| > Its also convenient for you to decide that others don't
| "need" to protect themselves from situations that they've
| deemed necessary.
|
| And it's convenient for the craziest people in our
| society to have easy access to weapons and ammunition
| because of widespread paranoia about defending yourself
| from those people. Seems like the easy solution is to
| make access to weapons harder!
| giantg2 wrote:
| If they're actually crazy like you claim, then they lose
| their weapons upon an involuntary commitment. That is by
| far the better outcome (assuming peoper due process)
| since they'll get actual help for their problems and not
| just the removal of one of many deadly weapons they can
| use.
| fasa99 wrote:
| What puts me off about the argument is along the lines of
| "and because of such and such, now numerically less guns
| exist in public, and that's -a good thing-"
|
| For me this smacks of California style government i.e.
| "we've made gas and energy so expensive that people use
| less energy, and environmentally that's -a good thing-"
| or "we've made permit regulations so bad nobody is able
| to build anything anymore and environmentally that's -a
| good thing-"
|
| The crux of these things is that if you presume that
| these are basic rights: not having property confiscating,
| building a house without too much red tape, free market
| energy economy - then we have arrived at -a good thing-
| via -an unethical thing- and thus it's a good outcome
| through an unethical means, or "fruit from the poison
| tree" as ethics states.
|
| From a legal perspective, these are trying to avoid a
| completely hypothetical scenario of Peter's hypothetical
| gun hypothetically shooting Paul, or Peter's hypothetical
| +20% pollution hurting the life of Paul, and George got
| jammed up by the law and hates it, but the lawmaker who
| is worried solely about Paul is quite pleased with
| himself about having saved Paul from the hypothetical
| which may or may not have actually happened.
| jachee wrote:
| > Guns are tools, that can be used to kill people, just
| like knives, clubs or other weapons
|
| What _non_ killing-or-practicing-killing use do handguns
| have? Zero.
|
| Surely there must be better ways of "ensuring equity"
| than threat of death.
|
| Also, if you think a handgun is going to protect you
| "from a ... violent government" you should see what
| happens (or really, doesn't happen) when a handgun round
| hits modern tank plate.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "What non killing-or-practicing-killing use do handguns
| have? Zero."
|
| This argument implies that killing is never justified.
| Society in general seems to disagree with that. Killing
| as a last resort to protect yourself is considered
| reasonable.
|
| Also, there are remote areas where it would be much more
| likely for the killing to take place against animals than
| humans. These sorts of scenarios seem to be overlooked
| quite frequently in these arguments.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Idk I feel like it just increases incidences of "I have a
| gun and therefore I win this argument".
|
| I'd lean towards saying that there are many times more
| misuses of a gun than "a good guy with a gun". Wonder if
| there are stats on lawful shootings vs unlawful.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yes, there are a number of stats out there on defensive
| uses of a firearm vs misuse. Every one that I have seen
| shows a net positive on the side of defensive uses. CDC
| has some numbers out there that seem to be respectable if
| you'd like to look at them.
| purpleblue wrote:
| I'm very pro 2nd amendment, but guns are not tools and
| it's a fallacy to say that.
|
| Guns are used to kill something. In hunting they are used
| to kill animals, and otherwise they are used to kill
| other people, or yourself in the case of suicide. You
| don't do anything with a gun except kill or attempt to
| kill something.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Unless you're a professional shooter, such as in the
| Olympics? Some people make a living using a gun that
| never kills anything. Even police rarely fire their
| weapons. They are more often used to foster compliance
| without any injury than to kill.
|
| But yes, in general killing or _potential_ killing is the
| purpose. But this reasoning implies that killing is bad
| even when there are legitimate circumstances.
| purpleblue wrote:
| I think your reasoning is flawed. When you are aiming for
| targets with a gun, there is no utility in that. That's
| like saying a basketball is a tool. Neither guns nor
| basketballs are tools.
|
| Also, I never once implied that killing is bad. For
| example, killing animals for food is not bad. Also,
| killing someone who is trying to kill you is not bad.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in
| performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a
| vocation or profession"
|
| Websters even considers books as tools as they relate to
| scholars. By the definition, they are tools. In the
| context of hunting (and policing, and self defense), they
| absolutely offer utility.
|
| I don't know what you meant to imply or not. But
| colloquially, when those statements are made they usually
| imply a negative view of it. I would bet that more than a
| few readers would have read it with that in mind. What is
| evident based on your prior comment and this one is that
| you do not consider utility to include killing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Your comparison is not correct. There are security
| guards, police, and others who rely on guns for their
| jobs, even more so that the typical person relies on
| their car to get to work (alternate rides are available,
| but being armed may be a requirement). Keep in mind that
| DUI suspects are allowed to drive until their hearing.
| Also, that there are habitual offenders who have already
| lost their license and still kill people with their car
| because their car isn't seized.
|
| The real differentiator here is simply the prejudices the
| speaker holds against one item or the other. For example,
| you conveniently leave out all manner of lawful and
| beneficial uses that the gun owner is inconvenienced
| with, including potential loss of life or victimization
| while unarmed.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| interesting. my "ideological opposition" had nothing to
| do with "guns" or the second amendment, or a government's
| interest in safety
|
| it was purely about assets, their attributes of
| valuation, in-kind transfers based on appraisal value to
| normalize it amongst a cash seizure. commonalities that
| all property shares. in that regard, to the government
| and its constitution, property is property.
|
| I did make a mistake in assuming this article was about
| civil asset forfeiture though, where my observation would
| apply more strongly as the property is charged instead of
| the person. This article is about something in between
| civil and criminal asset forefeiture.
| jajko wrote:
| Why such needless arrogance from cops in a developed country
| like US? They for sure couldn't be following some written
| law, right?
|
| I mean that's not even pretending to 'protect and serve',
| unless we change subject from 'citizens' to 'ourselves'. I
| would expect such stories from say Russia or some parts of
| Africa, not champion of free world.
| sneak wrote:
| Cops in the USA are social tech support. They exist to
| protect the social and economic status quo, and to close
| out trouble tickets that come in over the phone. Protecting
| and serving aren't in the job description, practically or
| even legally.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Ive had a bunch of run ins with cops and, to me, they
| just seem like guys who have a job thats annoying. I
| didn't get a big "classist conspiracy" vibe.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Your head not being on a pike/your continued breathing is
| also part of that 'economic and social status quo'. I
| think we can agree then that 'economic and political
| status quo' is thus a uselessly vague term.
| cypress66 wrote:
| It should be up to the legislators and justice to limit
| cops power, and punish them when appropriate.
| acdha wrote:
| There's a lot of sordid history around the police being
| used to keep certain ethnic groups in line (heavily but not
| just black people - one of the more interesting shifts was
| how Irish immigrants went from being over-policed to
| comprising large fractions of many forces), but then the
| war on drugs really hardened things into a relationship
| more like an occupying military force. That coincided with
| many cops joining white flight to the suburbs, meaning that
| they didn't feel part of the cities where they served as
| had been the case a generation earlier, and the lurid tales
| of how violent & well-armed drug gangs were along with how
| dangerous "super predators" were lead to a lot of quasi-
| military weaponry and tactics becoming routine with quaint
| things like warrants being severely undermined. I say
| quasi-military because I've known multiple combat vets to
| express disbelief at the poor discipline shown by cops
| compared to the rules they had in places like Fallujah.
|
| The other big driver was the concept of qualified immunity
| and civil forfeiture. The modern form of the latter was
| invented during the drug war and formally embraced by the
| Reagan administration as a way to make elevated police
| presence self-funding, and that opened up a lot of room for
| abuse since it created huge conflicts of interest and the
| growth of qualified immunity removed the potential
| counterbalance of personal accountability.
| hammock wrote:
| >people - one of the more interesting shifts was how
| Irish immigrants went from being over-policed to
| comprising large fractions of many forces
|
| Can you tell how this came to be?
| acdha wrote:
| There are a couple of different things coming together
| but the big one is that while they were first considered
| degenerates, criminal, drunks, etc. they weren't denied
| all of the legal status whiteness offered. As states
| removed the property requirements, allowing all white men
| to vote, the large groups of Irish immigrants voted
| cohesively enough to become very influential in a lot of
| cities - helpfully around the same time that booming
| cities needed professional police & fire departments,
| creating a ton of civil servant jobs which did not
| require formal certifications or uncommon skills. Once a
| few people from a tightly-knit community get in more will
| follow, and the Irish tended to be more insular as
| Catholics in a Protestant country.
| Tanoc wrote:
| The persecution of the Irish was a leftover of the
| British's attempted cultural eradication of celtic and
| Catholic identities. British media often portrayed the
| Irish as violent and backwards, and the living conditions
| the British enforced often made the stereotypes seem
| true. After the Eiri Amach of 1798 and Irish Potato
| Famine of 1845 there were two waves of large immigration
| of Irish farmers, fisherman, and sailors to Boston and
| New York. These former farmers, fisherman, and sailors
| were extremely unfamiliar with many of the job types
| available in the heavily industrialized cities and
| struggled to find employment they couldn't form for
| themselves. As a result high levels of unemployment and
| street crime were part of American Irish life in cities
| in the 1850s and 1860s, leading to them being seen as
| troublemakers and being heavily targeted by city
| patrolmen.
|
| By the 1870s a large portion had left through
| Pennsylvania to settle in the Appalachian Mountains, and
| many more were pushing further west to work on the rail
| lines. As they were often paired up with the Chinese and
| German migrant workers they were distrusted and weren't
| easily integrated into heavily English, French, and
| Italian descended communities that settled along the
| developing railroads, continuing the reputation of the
| Irish being supposed troublemakers.
|
| However back in the major east coast cities the Irish who
| stayed were successfully carving out their own districts
| thanks to the enforced isolation from other ethnic
| groups, allowing them to form almost vertical control of
| the political process from individual home to district
| level. To ensure this control wasn't ceded as the cities
| grew and to prevent the return of the abuse of the 1850s,
| rising political institutions like Tammany Hall heavily
| encouraged first and second generation Irish immigrants
| to perform enforcement instead, leading to Irish
| descendants taking positions as everything from police
| officers to prosecutors. By the 1910s this push meant
| that as many as one in five police officers in New York
| and Boston was either an Irishman, the child of an
| Irishman, or the grandchild of an Irishman.
| ashkankiani wrote:
| It's always Reagan. The poison seed of a human being that
| rotted America.
| bluGill wrote:
| They mostly are not, but with 300 million people and free
| press you hear about the exceptions. If you think your
| country doesn't have simialar problems you are not paying
| attention.
| godelski wrote:
| > you are not paying attention.
|
| Or it just isn't being discussed. I'd expect to hear
| fewer of these stories in Russia because they don't have
| a free press and you can be punished for what you say
| online.
|
| I'm sure this is what you mean, but not everyone is going
| to understand what that phrase means.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| It happens enough (20 years ago, at least) that a short-
| term visitor like myself actually saw (but happily didn't
| experience) multiple examples of cops abusing people
| (beatings, mostly). The completely oblivious reaction of
| the crowds around these incidents spoke volumes more; it
| was clear that nobody wanted to attract any attention.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Protect and serve hasn't been a thing for a long time.
| Police have been trained that no one or anything is worth
| dying for.
|
| That's why cops go and hide during mass shootings at
| schools.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Its never been the thing they want you to think it is. It
| was coined by an extremely racist LAPD officer
| autoexec wrote:
| Do you have a source showing that Joseph Dorobek was
| extremely racist? I can't seem to find anything about him
| being racist. I saw one article which said that according
| to Dorobek's granddaughter it was coined by her mother
| who was 17 at the time, and he submitted her idea as part
| of a contest to find a motto
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I recommend not believing everything you read on the
| Internet. In a country with 330 million people, a one-in-a-
| million event happens often enough to be a regular fixture
| in the news. And it gets clicks every time, reliably.
| metadat wrote:
| Utterly ridiculous. I'm sorry that happened to you, how
| infuriating.
| jascination wrote:
| This is hilariously Kafka-esque, what a shitshow
| Fokamul wrote:
| Heh USA biggest police state, in EU there is only one state
| with same level of policing. Germany. Cops there will make
| you strip search even before concert, because of "drugs" lol.
| Glawen wrote:
| Do they have the right? I was stopped by German police many
| times and they asked me to search my car every time, which
| I complied. However one time I was stopped, one policeman
| was speaking to me while I was in my car, and his colleague
| started opening the passenger door and searched without
| asking. That's when I told them to stop and questioned
| their authority to do so. German citizen did not seem to
| question the authority, because when I asked around, they
| didn't know if it was legal or not.
| estebank wrote:
| > German police authorities are authorised to stop
| vehicles throughout the territory of Germany at any time,
| although the police have the general authority to
| scrutinise a vehicle only in order to inspect the
| technical condition of the vehicle. Other vehicle checks
| (e.g. for the purpose of examining the objects being
| transported in automobile vehicle) may be carried out
| only if there is a suspicion that the person is
| perpetrating a crime or threatening safety in some other
| way.
|
| > Unlike the police authorities, the customs authorities
| are, in principle, authorised to stop vehicles only in
| near-border areas, i.e. at a distance of up to 30
| kilometres from the border. However, in a near-border
| area, the customs authorities may also carry out vehicle
| checks without the existence of any suspicion that a
| crime is being perpetrated or that there is a threat to
| safety.
|
| https://www.mvcr.cz/mvcren/article/checks-and-selected-
| proce...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| They took my camera and then when I tried to get it back they
| claimed that nothing like that was in evidence. So I filed a
| police report because the police stole my camera, but I never
| heard back about it.
|
| Glad you eventually got your money.
| wraptile wrote:
| Reading anecdotes about US police is trully terrifying. How
| one of the richest countries in the world be so incompetent
| in this one particular regard. Is there some sort of historic
| review that highlights how it got this way?
| adastra22 wrote:
| This comment is good:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285843
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Police unions in some districts are incredibly strong. New
| York City is famous. That means when you try to charge the
| police, none of the other officers will want to testify
| against bad behaviour. Plus, there is bribery-lite with
| stuff like "Fraternal Order of Police" where you can donate
| money (no idea what they _do_ with it), get a sticker for
| your car and you will be statistically much less likely to
| be pulled over in your car. (Really, I wish I were joking.)
|
| A deeper question: Why don't other highly advanced
| democracies decay in the same way? For example: Why hasn't
| the same happened in Japan or Denmark or Portugal?
| Vinnl wrote:
| > A deeper question: Why don't other highly advanced
| democracies decay in the same way? For example: Why
| hasn't the same happened in Japan or Denmark or Portugal?
|
| My pet theory is that multi-party, coalition-based
| systems help a lot.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You have my vote! Multi-party systems really do seem less
| extreme as an outside observer.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >get a sticker for your car
|
| In some cases, larger donations get you different
| stickers showing your level of 'support'.
| jari_mustonen wrote:
| Don't assume the best of European countries. If and when
| they decay, you won't find out about it. The US is
| different because US people are loud. I submit this
| discussion as proof.
|
| By the way, Japan is always different. As the saying
| goes, they are just like us, only more so. So,
| eventually, they will also decay and when they do, they
| will decay just like us, only more so.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Japan is always different
|
| This is an interesting point. To generalise, I would say
| that Northeast Asia is significantly different
| (culturally and economically) compared to
| EU+USA+CAN+NZ+AU.
|
| Both (South) Korea and Taiwan are considered highly
| developed. They also do not experience this type of
| "democracy decay" (my term). If anything, they are
| expereincing the _opposite_. Personally, I think this is
| due to both are still relatively young as democracies, so
| their democratic institutions, when tested with difficult
| issues, continue to strengthen.
| mapt wrote:
| We were supposed to have an aggressive internal affairs
| department, federal investigations, and federal
| prosecutors to address the possibility of local/state
| police corruption, since the prospect of that corruption
| was raised in the 1970's (or, depending on your
| perspective, the 1900's to 1930's).
|
| The problem is that since the rise of the 1980's white
| conservative 'crime and punishment' voter we don't have
| executive-branch leaders who are willing to regard police
| overreach as a form of police corruption; In the
| bootlicker's mind, everything is an honest mistake as
| long as the police are hurting the right people.
| sterlind wrote:
| my cousin's husband is a cop in Philadelphia. my cousin
| has a "courtesy card", signed by him, declaring that
| she's family. she shows it along with her license when
| she gets pulled over for speeding, and they let her off
| with a warning.
|
| it's a literal get out of jail free card.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Sounds like Russia
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| Can confirm, NYPD has these as well. Between this and the
| ghost cars they drive, the illegal parking, flouting
| traffic laws, use of their law enforcement function as a
| political cudgel to be deployed and withheld on demand
| depending on the prevailing political climate - it is
| hard to see them as anything but an occupying gang.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| > Why hasn't the same happened in Japan or Denmark or
| Portugal?
|
| The purpose of police and their training matters a lot.
| That is not to say that police in other countries are
| saints, they just have a much different role in societies
| in western Europe compared to US.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I think the part you are missing is the sheer scale of
| our public services in the US. Sure it's like that in
| some parts of the country but in other parts it's
| completely different. A quick Google says that the US has
| ~18,000 police departments (by comparison, Germany has 16
| and Japan as 1,250), I'm sure some of them are fantastic
| and others are corrupt hellholes, all depends on where
| you are.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| The police in the U.S. can be awful, but let's not get smug
| about it either. Police in MANY places worldwide and also
| in many European countries are just as bad or worse (if
| sometimes less overtly aggressive) and often you don't even
| have the basic protections of the law that you can use to
| your advantage in court later.
| jeltz wrote:
| Which European countries? Other than maybe France I
| cannot think of any which have big issues with police
| violence.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The US police are terrifying but there is the possibility
| of redress unlike the UK where the justice system does not
| exist.
| jkestner wrote:
| They originated in large part from slave patrols. Enforcing
| a certain social order is in their DNA.
| banannaise wrote:
| > How one of the richest countries in the world be so
| incompetent in this one particular regard.
|
| It's not a bug, it's a feature. Police are largely there to
| reinforce social and economic hierarchies, which the people
| at the top of those hierarchies naturally benefit from.
| ang_cire wrote:
| It's not incompetence, it's intentional. If police can
| mistreat you, it makes you scared to do anything that draws
| attention to yourself.
|
| US police departments grew out of municipal slave catching
| patrols, and union busters. They're closer to prison guards
| than civil servants.
|
| Here's a piece by the NAACP on the ties to slave patrols:
| https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-
| explained/origins-m...
|
| The Slave Patrol Oath from North Carolina is uncanny how it
| echoes modern US policing.
| lazide wrote:
| California and the Federal gov't has a requirement that if
| you're ever accused of domestic violence, you're not allowed
| to be near any firearms unless the accusations have been
| withdrawn or found without basis. (Notably, it is a _very_
| low bar for them to be found as having a basis. The standard
| is literally 'could have possibly happened /occurred', not
| did or beyond a reasonable doubt, etc.)
|
| Practically in California, you're required to turn them all
| in for storage or sell them within 24 hrs of being served -
| either selling them to a dealer or turning them in to the
| cops or to a very hard to find, expensive, and specialized
| type of gun dealer who doesn't advertise.
|
| Keep in mind - accused - not a finding of or anything - and
| the court is happy to issue these orders ex-parte based off
| accusations which the impacted party has no chance to rebut
| or is necessarily even aware of at the time the order is
| issued. And the bar to issue it is very, very low. The
| accusations don't even need to make sense or be supported by
| any police calls or the like.
|
| In theory? Fine. In practice, a very common abuse and
| harassment tactic. Or actually necessary.
|
| If you can't find the specialized type of dealer and get him
| everything within 24 hrs, and can't sell everything for
| penny's on the dollar to a standard gun dealer in time, then
| you have to turn them into the cops. Or be committing a
| felony.
|
| Oh and the court will demand proof when you go to reply
| to/contest the emergency order that you did everything within
| the requisite amount of time, and did indeed turn everything
| in.
|
| In Santa Clara county - among others - apparently the cops
| will also never actually return the guns to you either.
| Because 'it would look bad if you then used them in a crime'.
| Yes, this is clearly against the law. They DGAF.
|
| There are multiple outstanding lawsuits against them for
| this, last I checked, but the courts keep putting them on the
| back burner as after the Judge Persky recall no one wants to
| be involved in anything like this in the current political
| climate.
|
| They'd much rather drag it out for years or even decades over
| procedural matters.
|
| Even if it's _really_ clear what the legal thing to do is.
|
| One or two guns, not a lot of money. But folks with
| collections? Better not piss off anyone you're living with.
| tekknik wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be someone you're living with
| unfortunately.
| bambax wrote:
| Well, maybe people should not own guns. At all. Any gun,
| let alone "a collection".
| lazide wrote:
| Why allow anyone to own anything?
|
| In this case, while it may (temporarily) remove (if the
| party is willing to follow the law!) one method of
| domestic violence, it's not like it's hard to come up
| with alternatives. In many parts of the world, the
| preferred method of domestic violence is throwing acid on
| someone's face.
|
| The concern here is abuse of due process, and that it's
| so trivial to take away someones rights and property
| using falsehoods and BS bureacracy, while also not
| _actually_ solving any of the underlying problems.
|
| Since, for instance, if that emergency order was for
| someone who _actually_ was a problem, they still have a
| full day to go after whoever while still legally owning
| everything, and if they go on the run, it's not like they
| care about another felony!
| bambax wrote:
| I'm not defending the police, or forfeiture laws; I'm
| just surprised one would use guns as an example, because
| it's still so surprising to me, as a European, that
| people would have guns in their homes like it's the most
| natural thing in the world.
|
| Guns are dangerous -- in fact they don't have any other
| purpose beyond inflicting harm (unlike other dangerous
| things such as cars or drugs, etc.) I'm aware of the 2nd
| amendment, but firearms don't look like a good rhetorical
| argument in a discussion about property.
| lazide wrote:
| In the US it is, clearly.
|
| And statistically, very very very few guns kill people.
| The US has well over 300 million, and it is far from the
| top cause of death or serious injury.
|
| If anything, a collection of them is even less likely to
| be dangerous, no? Since if someone is collecting
| something, they tend to be familiar with it and are
| putting effort into keeping it safe and in good
| condition.
|
| Even Germany allows gun collections, albeit with a mind
| blowing amount of paperwork.
|
| And they are worth money. And prone to people trying to
| grab/forfeit/confiscate.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > as a European
|
| "European": I'm getting a bit tired of this trope on HN.
| What does that even mean? There are fifty countries in
| Europe and twenty-seven in the EU. There is huge cultural
| variation over that continent that is, give-or-take, the
| size of the continental United States.
| > that people would have guns in their homes like it's
| the most natural thing in the world.
|
| This is weird. There are many countries in Europe with
| hunting (or sport shooting) laws where it is legal to own
| a firearm and keep at your home. For many countries, it
| needs to be locked up.
| mindslight wrote:
| As a casual gun owner, my main requirement for
| entertaining any sort of gun prohibition is simple -
| disarm the police first. The police operate within
| domestic society, where the power of the government is
| supposed to flow from the rights of the citizenry. Police
| are also involved in the sheer majority of violent
| confrontations across society, and thus preemptive de-
| escalation would be quite significant at changing the
| overall societal dynamic. And disarming the police
| wouldn't even involve any kind of constitutional
| amendment, since we're essentially talking about
| employment regulations. It would also address the worry
| that police will find some way to except themselves from
| any new regulations prohibiting firearms, as they have
| traditionally done with existing regulations on guns and
| many other judicially-banned armaments. So if you're
| advocating for gun prohibition, put your best foot
| forward and get to work on the police.
| bambax wrote:
| I would agree we should disarm the police. For some
| reason most people get upset when you say this, not just
| in the US but everywhere I've tried. In France at the
| last presidential election there was only one candidate
| (out of 12) who defended the idea, and he scored 0.77% of
| the vote, so there's a long way to go...
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Your legal system that considers you a serf is not to be
| emulated.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| serfdom disappeared from western europe in the 1400's...
| several hundred years before slavery in the united
| states. what are you talking about?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| What about Finland or Switzerland? Both have very high
| personal gun ownership rates, but incredibly low gun
| violence. How do you explain that?
| lrasinen wrote:
| Speaking only for Finland: most of the guns are for
| hunting: rifles, shotguns and the like. A statistic from
| 2016 has 1.5 million guns, 220 000 of which are handguns.
|
| Second, the legislation is very strict. You need to have
| a reason for owning a gun; hunting and shooting sports
| are valid, personal protection isn't. You need to belong
| to a relevant association (such as hunting clubs or
| shooting clubs). You need proper locked storage in your
| apartment. Carrying a gun in public without a reason
| (such as going to a shooting range) is forbidden, and
| even then should be minimized.
|
| Should you violate any of these conditions, you're liable
| to lose your gun license and all guns will be seized.
| Also the police may revoke the license on suspicion of
| violent behaviour.
|
| So, if you want to get a gun, you have to live squeaky-
| clean. Illegal guns are of course another matter.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Those things you list as "very strict" are incredibly
| easy. And they do not make any difference to the US
| regarding domestic violence.
| lrasinen wrote:
| True; the intent isn't to make owning guns impossible,
| but it takes some dedication to get into guns, and once
| you get one, next ones are easier to obtain.
|
| The end result is a small minority having multiple guns
| per person, the majority not having any, so citing
| Finland as a country with high gun ownership is
| misleading.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am not replying to dispute your comment. I didn't
| consider your idea about concentration of ownership. It
| is a good point!
|
| About gun ownership in Finland, Wiki tells me:
| > There are approximately 1.5 million registered small
| firearms in the country. Out of those, 226,000 are short
| firearms (pistols, revolvers) with the rest being long
| firearms (rifles, shotguns). There are approximately
| 650,000 people with at least one permit, which means 12%
| of Finns own a firearm.
|
| Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in
| _Finland
| hinkley wrote:
| You can thank Ronald Reagan for that.
| polski-g wrote:
| You believe that police abuses originated in the late
| 1980's?
| kbelder wrote:
| Sure, 'Hinkley', you _would_ think that.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| It's maddening to hear such a story. It should have ended
| with the invoice.
| germandiago wrote:
| That is clear abuse. I think there should be very clear law
| and the same that the police should be extremely diligent
| applying laws, abuse should be punished the same way. But for
| this, rules need to be crystal clear.
| Aerroon wrote:
| If that happened to me I would put up posters with the face
| and name of the thief (police officer) that did that in his
| neighborhood. I would want everyone to know what kind of an
| asshole he is.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There is a cap implied. The only reasonable reason to hold the
| property is for evidence. Once the statue of limitation runs
| out, or the appeals process is exhausted, there is no
| reasonable reason to hold the property anymore.
| gist wrote:
| > but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the
| maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's
| up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the
| ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful
| ruling.
|
| Not always correct as a principle.
|
| To define a time period also means the police will tend to keep
| the property at least as long (or even a bit longer) than the
| time period listed. If the time is 'reasonable' (and yes that
| can vary for sure) it's ambiguous enough to make someone wonder
| if they would be called out as 'unreasonable' and that in
| itself (in many but not all cases) makes them think a bit more.
|
| For example you will notice that at takeout places there are no
| signs saying how many forks or ketchup you can take (it's
| implied 'reasonable'). Imagine if the sign said 'you can take
| no more than 5 forks' my guess is many people would then think
| 'it's ok I don't need to forks but since I can I will take 5
| forks just in case'.
|
| Anyway to the point how much would people think is
| 'reasonable'?
|
| 10 years - no way 5 years - no way (unless needed for a
| specific purpose ie a trial) 1 year - probably not 1 month -
| might be to short
|
| ... and so on.
|
| I'm not saying so much a time shouldn't be applied but that
| it's not always apparent and also people tend to push to the
| 'last minute' with timing and so on.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| One way that a time cap or caps could be set is by legislation,
| as you mention; but judges don't write legislation. There is a
| way the rules develop as "common law" -- via judicial decisions
| -- but frequently that involves a process of gradual firming up
| through several cases that cover different situations. For
| example:
|
| - There would be cases where a person's medications were
| confiscated; the courts would probably find that these need to
| be returned within a few days.
|
| - There would be cases where a person's groceries were
| confiscated along with their car; perhaps the courts would find
| that the groceries don't have to be returned at all but rather
| their value replaced (it is hard to set a consistent timeline
| for groceries since crackers are good for weeks but ice cream
| in a car is good for maybe a few hours) whereas the car must be
| returned within a few weeks.
|
| - And so on.
|
| It generally isn't up to a court, faced with a specific case,
| to come up with a rule that covers a wide variety of
| dissimilar, if related, situations. Information for those
| situations is not generally covered in the case before them so
| it would be hard for them to make a good decision. They also
| aren't tasked to go get that information, since their job is to
| decide a particular as in an expeditious manner.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| This is a good point.
|
| I've always thought a constitutional amendment to make every
| law in the books auto sunset, unless explicitly voted in by
| congress
|
| I would think this would have made the PATRIOT ACT obsolete
| some time ago, among other things
| shkkmo wrote:
| The Patriot act was reauthorized (in part) several times, but
| expired in 2020.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| It's not useless at all. It provides the framework for lawyers
| all across the nation to contest property detentions on a case
| by case basis, some will find sympathetic judgments, and the
| facts behind the case law results will be cited and reused in
| further rulings.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| https://medium.com/exploring-history/7-worlds-longest-servin...
|
| "James Holmes, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Aurora,
| Colorado, received an astonishing 12 life sentences along with
| an additional 3,318 years"
|
| The cap is the heat death of the universe for the US
| fencepost wrote:
| I suspect that this pattern for sentencing is so that even if
| some charges/convictions are reversed the remaining sentence
| makes that reversal not really significant in real-world
| terms.
| porknubbins wrote:
| It is very common to naively think laws should be rewritten to
| be clearer but experience quickly shows why that doesn't work.
| Basically laws can only work when they are interpreted by
| reasonable jurists because the real world is full of grey areas
| and human language is not clear enough to fully divide the
| space of "everything that can happen in the world" into clear
| legal and illegal categories.
|
| In programming terms, an appeal's court deciding an exact
| number of days police can confiscate property is like hard
| coding in a global constant that then can never be changed,
| deep in an obscure file. The legislature should decide that,
| which is more like making a big visible constant at the top of
| the file that people see and can have input into.
| lobochrome wrote:
| How does a judge get rich?
| hansvm wrote:
| With qualified immunity on the books, if the police reach into
| your car and steal something important then you're out of luck.
| I'm not optimistic that better definitions around this
| particular method of theft would have any effect at all on the
| fruits of that power imbalance.
| photonthug wrote:
| > This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very
| often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps
| attorneys and judges very rich
|
| The best part is the insulting pretense that it's all very
| rigorous and formal, and that it requires a giant intellect
| years of training to appreciate the intricacies of the legal
| and ethical calculus these chosen few are dealing with every
| day. But the closest things to axioms are precedent, basic
| rights, etc and these are routinely ignored whenever it's
| convenient.
|
| If you watch kids often enough you'll occasionally observe the
| kind of bully who is actually kind of smart. They make up rules
| for a game, describe just enough so that play can begin, and
| then enforce them arbitrarily, add new ones when necessary to
| keep power, and generally pick on whoever they were going to
| pick on anyway but do it under the appearances of upholding
| fair play, etc. These bully's become lawyers instead of cops.
|
| The actual intent of the rule of law and civilized society in
| general is wholly predicated on these kids being outnumbered by
| some equally argumentative children who happen to actually be
| concerned with fairness, or at least consistency. This needs to
| happen in every generation forever, regardless of the fact that
| it's easier and more profitable to be a jerk, and that being a
| jerk gets you to places where you can have longer lasting
| impacts. It's all so fragile.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I think a lot of your complaint is a result of too many laws.
| Why don't we establish principles instead of trying to nail
| down every edge case. It's the edge cases that enrich the legal
| profession and leave the law open to abuse.
|
| All these new laws "for the internet." When we could just
| follow the intent of existing laws. Though, for some reason we
| rarely codify intent and instead lean toward making laws to
| punish a certain individual or company (tiktok).
|
| It's illogical and undermines the law. I guess that is the
| intent.
| maxwell wrote:
| Maybe civil law is objectively superior to common law.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| I immediately thought of the same thing. They'll stop retaining
| seized property indefinitely and start retaining it for 7
| decades instead.
| germandiago wrote:
| I am no lawyer or something like that. I think the full topic
| must be much more complex than that.
|
| However, I agree there should be a lot of simplification and
| there is a lot of overregulation and contradictions.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because
| it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can
| be held.
|
| This is because a hard maximum duration would result in either
| things being held until the end of a 5 year period because they
| can or evidence being lost because the police need to give it
| back after 14 days.
|
| It however does provide the very useful definition of why it
| can be held. They must release it when they have no purpose for
| retaining it.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I don't think it's remotely practical to have a hard limit
| because what's entirely reasonable in some cases is entirely
| unreasonable in others.
|
| Rather, how about a *short* limit for how long something can be
| held without relevant charges being filed. And if they break
| that limit they automatically become liable for replacement
| with a *new* item (or replacement with the newer version if the
| version they took is no longer reasonably available.) The only
| true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it
| uneconomic.
|
| They'd be paying for it with _our_ money. Standard economic
| drives don 't affect organizations that are funded with
| someone else's money.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| Judges are rich?
| iambateman wrote:
| The fourth amendment prohibits unreasonable seizure.
|
| Shouldn't this have been obviously unconstitutional since like
| 1800?
| LightHugger wrote:
| It depends on the mangled interpretation and enforcement of the
| courts, and the courts are run by evil motherfuckers.
| Loughla wrote:
| The problem is in defining unreasonable.
|
| If it just said it prohibited seizure, or prohibited asset
| seizure past 30 days or something to that effect, it would be
| much easier.
|
| But because it doesn't, we have to interpret the language. This
| is a difficult proposition; it's literally open for
| interpretation.
|
| Like most things in the constitution, it's messy, but still
| pretty good.
| iambateman wrote:
| Certainly! It's just strange to me that we haven't completely
| nailed this one down already in the courts.
|
| It's not like AI or guns where the tech is totally different.
| "Don't take my stuff forever" hasn't changed much. :)
| rlewkov wrote:
| Being vague is often necessary. E.g., what is cruel and usual
| punishment.
| londons_explore wrote:
| We shouldn't need a court to make this the case...
|
| The police have a role of serving the publics interests. Taking
| someone's phone and keeping it for a year is clearly
| substantially detrimental to that specific member of the public,
| and rather unlikely to be of commensurate benefit to the rest of
| the public.
|
| Therefore, such activity isn't what we pay them for or expect
| them to do - at a minimum we should be firing any cops who do
| this deliberately, _even_ if it weren 't illegal.
| mempko wrote:
| Interesting fact, police seizure (police stealing from people who
| are arrested, even if they are never prosecuted) is more than
| criminal theft. In other words, police steal more from people
| than criminals.
| chaboud wrote:
| I thought this was an obviously ridiculous statement, and then
| I looked it up. In many of the last 25 years, civil asset
| forfeiture outpaces criminal burglary in total losses.
|
| Wow. I thought civil asset forfeiture was a messed up problem
| before...
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| I would say that you don't live in a real country if the
| government can just arbitrarily take your stuff from you
| legally. It makes it doubly absurd that the US wants to
| export this "democracy".
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Step 1: seize property
|
| Step 2: hold onto it for an indefinite period of time
|
| Step 3: steal the property
|
| Step 4: when the owner comes for their stuff, claim the property
| went missing
|
| Step 5: wait for a lawsuit that usually doesn't come because the
| property isn't worth enough and nobody wants to get in a suit
| with cops for what's usually small claims
|
| None of this is going to change unless you prevent cops from
| handling seized property.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Step 5: wait for a lawsuit that usually doesn't come because
| the property isn't worth enough and nobody wants to get in a
| suit with cops for what's usually small claims
|
| Which is why class-action lawsuits are a thing.
| from-nibly wrote:
| Any time I hear the word reasonable in a law, I throw up my
| hands. That word is not concrete. It's the "give up on life
| pants" of legalese. Respect yourself and others, if you can't
| define proper limits then you don't know what you want or how to
| get it. In which case you should leave everyone else in peace.
| tgv wrote:
| Idk where you come from, but defining is hard. It's really hard
| to define a table or a chair. You can come up with some
| definition, but probably someone has a table or a chair that
| doesn't fit it.
|
| Defining what's _reasonable_ is much harder, but it can be
| parceled out through individual cases, and slowly build
| jurisprudence.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Defining is not hard. You can say "a table is a flat board
| with four support structures roughly 1 m (+/- 5 cm) in
| height, built for the purpose of keeping things off the
| ground". Anything that fits that description is a table, and
| anything that doesn't, isn't. Supposed tables with three
| legs, or Japanese tables, aren't tables by this definition;
| they are something else. Perhaps this is a problem, or
| perhaps it isn't.
|
| I would argue that an imperfect definition that doesn't
| completely encompass a situation is better than a loose
| guideline, because the definition is unambiguous, while the
| guideline will always leave room for bickering about
| interpretation.
| brewdad wrote:
| Do we really want to spend our time in the legal system
| litigating what a table is? What if I use a chair as a
| place to set my dinner plate while eating on the sofa? A
| reasonableness standard is the only practical way to start
| defining a law. The specifics and edge cases get worked out
| over time. Otherwise, I can add a fifth center support to
| my table and now you have to rewrite every law pertaining
| to tables. Rinse. Repeat.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Do we really want to spend our time in the legal system
| litigating what a table is?
|
| Well, the point of it being defined is that you don't
| have to.
|
| >What if I use a chair as a place to set my dinner plate
| while eating on the sofa?
|
| Did you forget the other half of the argument? Why should
| there be a problem if you want to eat on your chair?
|
| >Otherwise, I can add a fifth center support to my table
| and now you have to rewrite every law pertaining to
| tables.
|
| Why would the definition of what a table is need to be
| modified if someone transforms a table into not-a-table?
| cwillu wrote:
| Because presumably the laws about the sale, use and
| disposal of tables-of-mass-consumption where written for
| a reason, and dodging them by adding or removing a leg
| would result in criminals getting away with terrible
| table crimes because of the technicality. Let alone what
| the police will do to poor students sitting in their
| "tables" (you know, the ones with four legs and a small
| horizontal working surface).
|
| Silly definitions enshrined into law are why cameras
| arbitrarily limit the length of the videos they will
| record, lest they be accused of being video equipment and
| thereby subject to additional tariffs.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >dodging them by adding or removing a leg would result in
| criminals getting away with terrible table crimes because
| of the technicality
|
| If it's a crime to do X on a "table" and you do X on a
| not-table, by definition you're not committing a crime.
| Saying that you're getting away with a crime in such a
| situation is like saying that you're getting away with a
| crime by driving your car within the speed limit, whereas
| if you were an honest criminal and drove a little bit
| faster the police would be allowed to ticket you. If
| there are clearly demarcated limits that people are
| allowed to stay within, it's not a technicality whether
| you're on one side or the other.
|
| >Let alone what the police will do to poor students
| sitting in their "tables" (you know, the ones with four
| legs and a small horizontal working surface).
|
| Sorry, I don't understand the argument.
|
| >Silly definitions enshrined into law are why cameras
| arbitrarily limit the length of the videos they will
| record, lest they be accused of being video equipment and
| thereby subject to additional tariffs.
|
| What the alternative, given that the government wants to
| tax "professional video equipment" but not "consumer
| video equipment" and there's a gradient from one to the
| other?
| cwillu wrote:
| No, it's like saying I'm getting away with a crime by
| driving 120mpg on a 55mph limit highway, because the car
| I'm driving has an extra wheel.
| fluoridation wrote:
| If adding an extra wheel to your vehicle lets you drive
| at 120 mph on a 55 mph road, that's not getting away with
| a crime. It's not a crime. You didn't "get away" with
| anything. Your modified vehicle is subject to different
| laws.
| spencerflem wrote:
| But should it?
| fluoridation wrote:
| Iunno. There could be reasons why it should, there could
| he reasons why it shouldn't, or it might not matter
| either way. Maybe the government wants to encourage
| people to modify their cars to have an extra wheel, and
| it does so by allowing their drivers to drive faster.
|
| If you want a less contrived example, where I live
| motorcycles require different licenses depending on their
| engine displacement, but since electric motorcycles have
| a displacement of 0, they can be ridden without
| registration or license. Is this due to oversight or to
| encourage use of electric motorcycles? Are people who
| ride electric motorcycles without a license getting away
| with exploiting a loophole, or are they using the law as
| intended?
| spencerflem wrote:
| Totally - especially when people are incentivized to try
| to find loopholes, it's extremely hard to find an
| airtight definition of anything.
|
| Three wheeled cars used to be made to bypass the
| definition of what a car is and avoid needing to be
| subject to crash testing and other safety regulation. My
| parent's home is a complicated 'single-unit condo' which
| is as far as I can tell, basically a lie to get past
| regulations on building new houses.
|
| I guess my point is, if you agree that the law is good
| then you should not want the definition to be easily
| bypassed with a loophole, and having something that's
| flexible helps a lot with this. And if the law is bad
| then you'll be glad for one though it makes things silly
| compared to repealing the law.
|
| And if you see someone using a loophole for a law you
| like, especially if they are doing so in a cheeky way
| like the billionaires playing games with shell companies
| to avoid taxes, it's fair to be mad at them even if it's
| not "technically illegal".
| fluoridation wrote:
| I prefer rigid, clear-cut laws that may be bypassed by
| loopholes to flexible laws that may be applied at the
| whim of judges. I worry less about people doing clever
| tricks to save a few bucks and more about the government
| abusing loosely-written laws against me.
| spencerflem wrote:
| And I guess I'm more concerned with companies using
| loopholes to sidestep environmental protections, and
| other such things
|
| (happens frequently- one chemical finally gets banned so
| they switch to an almost identical one)
|
| imo. it's usually big players who have the time and the
| lawyers to exploit loopholes in the first place.
|
| won't deny that there is downsides though
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/section-772.1
|
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/chapter-3-prop
| ert...
|
| We have no trouble defining what things are and often do.
| Granted we don't have a strict definition of a "table",
| but we do for general furniture/furnishings, on top of
| which there are standards set by the various federal
| agencies and import control by the trade departments.
| Regardless, there can be one tomorrow like so many things
| provided in the first link.
|
| Some of these are revised as needed, but anyway getting
| past the point.
| monkaiju wrote:
| This would immediately be useless IRL in cases and is why
| we try to establish precedence-based definitions of
| reasonableness. Simple but incomplete definitions work
| pretty easily in many engineering contexts, especially
| because you can easily scope the realm that you apply the
| definition to, but would immediately fall flat in something
| as large and complex as the legal context.
|
| Honestly the more I study social/political systems, the
| more obvious it becomes just how much more difficult the
| problems in that space are than the engineering ones I'm
| used to...
| fluoridation wrote:
| I disagree. It's not that definitions "fall flat", it's
| that people don't like the conclusions that are derived
| from those definitions. If tables are defined as above
| and are supposed to be taxed at 20% while chairs are
| taxed at 15%, and someone builds a 1 m-tall chair with
| three legs and a 1 m^2 seat, that's not in itself a
| problem. It's only a problem because the government would
| like that "chair" to be taxed as if it was a table. But a
| definition can't be incorrect; it's a definition.
| bawolff wrote:
| > a table is a flat board with four support structures
| roughly 1 m (+/- 5 cm) in height, built for the purpose of
| keeping things off the ground
|
| That is a terrible definition of a table. This is how you
| get loop holes in laws.
|
| Law is not computer code. There is a reason we have judges
| and a court system to interpret laws.
| fluoridation wrote:
| The particular definition isn't as important as long as
| it doesn't leave room for ambiguity. It could be "a table
| is anything made of wood" and it wouldn't matter.
|
| >Law is not computer code. There is a reason we have
| judges and a court system to interpret laws.
|
| I'm of the opinion that the judicial system should be as
| dumb as possible. It's the legislative system where the
| real work should happen.
|
| PS: Downvoting does not constitute a counterargument.
| gamepsys wrote:
| The definition of a table does matter a lot, even in law.
| For example, businesses may deduct purchases of tables
| from their taxes. It wouldn't be right if a company
| couldn't deduct a plastic table from their taxes because
| it wasn't a legal table or if a company could deduct a
| music box because it was legally a table.
|
| When you start talking about seizing assets then the
| definition is all that more important.
| bawolff wrote:
| > PS: Downvoting does not constitute a counterargument
|
| You didn't really give an argument to counter.
|
| In fairness, i didn't really either.
|
| "The particular definition isn't as important as long as
| it doesn't leave room for ambiguity" is a pretty
| controversial statement. To me, this seems obviously
| false. However, i think its kind of like arguing about
| what makes a good person. Yes you can appeal to certain
| general principles, but at some level the general
| principles come down to "because i think so".
|
| As a fundemental principle, i think which behaviours the
| law forbids and which it does not is important. The
| purpose of law is to regulate certain behaviors; it is
| not an exercise in mathematics or formal logic. This
| seems self-obvious to me, but as a normative claim there
| is not much i can say to convince you if you disagree.
|
| To that end, i think criminalizing the wrong conduct is
| worse than mild ambiguity in laws, when the ambiguity can
| largely be resolved through common sense. I believe the
| principle of precedent in common law systems combined
| with the principle that ambiguities should generally be
| interpreted to benefit the defendent, effectively
| mitigates the downsides of allowing mild ambiguity.
| tgv wrote:
| Not only are there are tables with three legs, but also
| tables with a single support in the middle, and tables
| suspended from the ceiling. There are low tables, and high
| tables. Shelves can also have four support structures (note
| there's a lot of wiggle room in those two words) of
| approximately 1m. Such a definition would allow so many
| loopholes...
| fluoridation wrote:
| The government of Fluoridationia doesn't care about
| objects that are not legally tables. It will go to your
| house and charge you a license fee for your shelf-that-
| is-legally-a-table and ignore the flat round piece of
| wood you hanged from the ceiling.
|
| A "loophole" is not in itself a problem.
| legacynl wrote:
| > Supposed tables with three legs, or Japanese tables,
| aren't tables by this definition; they are something else.
| Perhaps this is a problem, or perhaps it isn't.
|
| > Perhaps this is a problem, or perhaps it isn't.
|
| Eh? If you're talking about defining a 'table' but
| something that is clearly a table doesn't fit in your
| definition, than you failed at what you're trying to do.
| That is a problem.
| fluoridation wrote:
| There's a difference between what is a "table", and what
| is _legally_ a table. As an equivalent example, someone
| who is legally blind may not be blind in the colloquial
| sense of the word. There are practical reasons why a
| legal definition may be broader or narrower than the
| colloquial definition. For example, the legal definition
| of blindness is broader, to accommodate disabled people
| who for the purposes of earning a living are as good as
| completely blind. My definition of table is narrower
| because I 'm just making an example, but if we suppose it
| to be a real definition, it might be because the
| government wanted to tax the sales of the most common
| variety of tables sold, without bothering to deal with
| the uncommon cases, so it made a simple definition but
| effective definition without ambiguous cases. The fact
| that someone might call a table something that is not
| legally a table is not _in itself_ a problem. It 's only
| a problem if it goes against the purpose of the
| definition. Like I said in a different reply, the
| government might want to tax something that is legally
| not a table as if it was. In such an event, the
| definition would not be perfectly useful for their
| purposes.
| bawolff wrote:
| > if you can't define proper limits then you don't know what
| you want or how to get it
|
| What if what you want is simply for the onus to be on the cops
| to defend why they need to do something, instead of it just
| being assumed they can do whatever they want?
| mistercheph wrote:
| It's actually the entire point of the way that a well designed
| law is written, say enough to make the extreme cases
| unambigous, say little enough that the judiciary can decide the
| rest. It's an intentional design element that balances power
| between the legislative and judiciary branches.
| xrd wrote:
| It would be egregious to keep property for years even if the
| arrest were made with charges. But, in the DC case, "the
| protesters did not face any charges" and their phones were kept
| for 14 months. That's doubly insane.
| commercialnix wrote:
| Most people who live in cities are very domesticated. In third
| world countries and also small towns in USA, where the police
| blatantly rob people under the color of law, people form their
| own small gangs and literally hunt the other gang (irrespective
| of costume/uniform) down and kill them.
|
| Highway robbery is highway robbery, uniformed or not.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| The US just found a way to formalize gangs and subsidize their
| thievery. They even give the gangs uniforms.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-05-17/dozens-o...
| freen wrote:
| Can't sell it, have to hold it, storage isn't free, so
| effectively if it isn't evidence, they can't keep it.
|
| I wonder if you are owed interest on cash held for an extended
| period of time.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Non-news, because it will have little effect. Tell the tow
| companies that? And they will laugh, and tell you to get off
| their lawn. Any and all legal jurisdictions in the U.S. have a
| multitude of tow companies profiting from theft. (Seizure) Even
| San Francisco has TWO companies investigated by the FBI... No
| arrests were made.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| How about charging interest and lost market gains on any property
| wrongly seized, and no qualified immunity for wrongful seizure
| either. Liability for both the department and individual as a
| private citizen.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| The current Supreme Court would overturn this decision in record
| time.
| pstuart wrote:
| The fact that the police can materially gain from this is a toxic
| incentive. They should not have _any_ of these ill-gotten gains.
| dools wrote:
| But will they help Afro Man repair his door?
| phkahler wrote:
| What about when there isn't an arrest?
| maxwell wrote:
| Then it sounds unreasonable.
| shynome wrote:
| Interest, 15 days interest-free period, if the item is
| damaged/expired, the principal and interest will be calculated
| based on the invoice amount
| atoav wrote:
| This is not a problem at all in the EU and I can't help but
| wonder if the source of the problem isn't the word of the law but
| the fact in the US police appears to have an incentive to seize
| assets that is not connected to any criminal proceeding.
|
| In the EU if something is seized that isn't relate to a case it
| just produces costs for the police district as it needs to be
| stored, processed etc. In the US the value goes directly into the
| koffers of the people doing the seizing. If you give your kid a
| cookie everything it steals, you should not be surprised it ends
| up being a thief.
|
| So if you want that kind of thuggish behavior to stop, you need
| to remove the incentive to do so. If anything there should be a
| slight _disincentive_ , so only useful assets are seized and your
| police avoids unnecessary cost or does not abuse their power to
| seize things to punish innocent people.
|
| My general advice for looking at any issue is to first analyze
| the incentive structure and the environment actors operate in.
| Friedduck wrote:
| The fact that we even have to have this conversation tells you
| how far afield from our stated values we have drifted.
|
| Some municipalities are just corrupt. If your cops are going to
| conferences to learn how they can seize property, they're
| criminals. We should start treating them that way.
| wordsarelies wrote:
| Duh, they have to destroy it to be indemnified.
|
| Fifth amendment compensation doesn't happen cause the courts are
| corrupt. No blame no problem.
| torcete wrote:
| There are a lot of people saying that bitcoin is just another
| bubble and it will burst one day like the tulipmania bubble.
| Maybe, maybe not. I don't know.
|
| However, there is one thing about bitcoin that is absolutely
| true. It is un-seizable.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > there is one thing about bitcoin that is absolutely true. It
| is un-seizable.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h...
|
| "U.S. Attorney Announces Historic $3.36 Billion Cryptocurrency
| Seizure And Conviction In Connection With Silk Road Dark Web
| Fraud"
| einpoklum wrote:
| Wow, now I can surely be certain that the US is a liberal
| democracy where residents are safe from arbitrary abuse by
| government.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| I'm not sure I'm capable of understanding such fuss. The stuff is
| into the united states of america. Her property. Would one hide
| from the government so much they worry about having siesures? One
| wonders the secrets those monsters keep safely hidden in there
| layers.
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