Cop Block

This excellent video produced by NewsChannel 5 in Tennessee shows how police use “civil asset forfeiture” laws to steal money from motorists:

The “Policing for Profit” report by the Institute for Justice mentioned in the video can be read online here. I highly recommend skimming through it and reading about the asset forfeiture laws on the books in your home state.

You can read the Institute for Justice study about civil asset forfeiture mentioned in the above video here.

On Monday I received a letter in the mail from a gang that calls themselves the IRS claiming I owe them money from a contract in 2008 I signed under duress.

Now I am under no obligation to pay this money because this contract was not signed voluntarily like most contractual obligations. But that doesn’t matter to this criminal gang whose supposed colors are red, white and blue.

One problem with this contract is that without going through the courts the police can come and steal my stuff to take care of this debt disregarding a little something the constitution calls due process.

22 year old college student Anthony Smelley found this out in Putnam County, Indiana last year. Reason Magazine has the story.

Around 3 in the morning on January 7, 2009, a 22-year-old college student named Anthony Smelley was pulled over on Interstate 70 in Putnam County, Indiana. He and two friends were en route from Detroit to visit Smelley’s aunt in St. Louis. Smelley, who had recently received a $50,000 settlement from a car accident, was carrying around $17,500 in cash, according to later court documents. He claims he was bringing the money to buy a new car for his aunt.

The officer who pulled him over, Lt. Dwight Simmons of the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department, said that Smelley had made an unsafe lane change and was driving with an obscured license plate. When Simmons asked for a driver’s license, Smelley told him he had lost it after the accident. Simmons called in Smelley’s name and discovered that his license had actually expired. The policeman asked Smelley to come out of the car, patted him down, and discovered a large roll of cash in his front pocket, in direct contradiction to Smelley’s alleged statement in initial questioning that he wasn’t, in fact, carrying much money.

A record check indicated that Smelley had previously been arrested (though not charged) for drug possession as a teenager, so the officer called in a K-9 unit to sniff the car for drugs. According to the police report, the dog gave two indications that narcotics might be present. So Smelley and his passengers were detained and the police seized Smelley’s $17,500 cash under Indiana’s asset forfeiture law.

But a subsequent hand search of the car turned up nothing except an empty glass pipe containing no drug residue in the purse of Smelley’s girlfriend. Lacking any other evidence, police never charged anybody in the car with a drug-related crime. Yet not only did Putnam County continue to hold onto Smelley’s money, but the authorities initiated legal proceedings to confiscate it permanently.

A couple years ago, probably in 2007 or 2008, I received a letter from a local gang called “Sheriffs Office,” whose members wear brown shirts and pants and drive cars with “Sheriff” written on the side. The letter said I owed some gang called “The State of Indiana” money and said that if I did not take care of this debt they would use asset forfeiture to take my stuff to satisfy this debt.

No court date, no due process, they would just straight up steal my stuff and I’d never see it again. This is usually used on suspected criminals but I have never been convicted of a crime, I just dare refuse to give these thugs money.

All this leads to corruption within government and police. It’s legalized theft and turns cops into robbers as they can come right into your house and take whatever they want without a court date and a conviction and even a warrant saying they can do it.

They will take your property for whatever reason they want, and guess what they do with it. A Downsize DC dispatch from Monday, the same day I received the bill has some stories.

In Texas, a district attorney has been indicted for using $200,000 of forfeiture funds to line his own pockets and pay for trips to casinos http://www.examiner.com/headlines-in-san-antonio/former-texas-county-district-attorney-indicted-for-misusing-200-000-for-extra-pay-and-casino-trips* In Indiana, where the law requires forfeiture loot to be spent on public education, only one county is complying with the law. In the other counties, law enforcement departments are keeping almost all the money, and the Attorney General doesn’t seem to care! http://reason.com/blog/2010/08/18/indianas-attorney-general-on-a

Are you surprised by this corruption? You shouldn’t be.

If confiscating property is an institutional mission, one must worry about the people such a group will employ to carry out that mission. If a government tells its employees that they must steal to meet their budgets – that is, engage in asset forfeiture – then some will rationalize that stealing is okay.

And they’ll steal from their employer, too.

The Institute for Justice has a tantalizing list of how some local posses have spent the loot. http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3117&Itemid=165

Here are some things the Institute for Justice article showed the forfeiture money being spent on.

• in Camden County, Ga., a $90,000 Dodge Viper for the county’s DARE program;

• in Colorado, bomber jackets for the Colorado State Patrol;

• in Austin, Texas, running gear for the police department;

• in Fulton County, Ga., football tickets for the district attorney’s office,

• in Webb County, Texas, $20,000 for TV commercials for the district attorney’s re-election campaign;

• in Kimble County, Texas, $14,000 for a “training seminar” in Hawaii for the staff of the district attorney’s office;

• in Albany, N.Y., over $16,000 for food, gifts and entertainment for the police department.

A sheriff in Georgia has even been the subject of a grand jury investigation for alleged misuse of forfeited assets (see also “Extravagance with Forfeiture Funds in Camden County, Ga.” on p. 19).  In this particular county,

$3,000,000 was used to build a sheriff’s substation;
vehicles were purchased not only for the department but also for other county departments and neighboring law enforcement agencies;
$250,000 was donated to the sheriff’s alma mater for a scholarship.

Despite claims to the contrary, cops accuse people of crimes or that they “owe” tax money and come in and legally steal your property and use it on their own adventures and budget needs.

One study of 770 police managers found that 40% agree or strongly agree civil forfeiture is “necessary” for budget supplement.

You don’t own anything, the government owns all your possessions and civil forfeiture proves just that. They can steal your house any time they want, they can steal your car any time they want, they can steal your TV or expensive collections or even your children any time they want, for whatever reason they want, and they don’t even have to prove it. A little something they call “reasonable doubt.”

That’s all it takes, the police just simply have to accuse you of something, with no facts, steal your property and possessions and you never see them again and the police meet their budgets.

All they have to to is trump up the bogus charges and scare you into a plea deal, which you should never take, and your ass is in jail and you never see your property ever again. Good luck getting it back.

So why should I give this criminal gang my hard earned money? What obligation do I have to them?  Who’s going to hold these legalized robbers accountable?

It’s time you stand up to this. Imagine if we had private protection agencies that we voluntarily agreed to fund and were held accountable. You think this would happen?

If they will not honor the 14th amendment then it is time we will.

From Cracked.com

We are so lucky to be living in an era of law when it’s no longer common for, say, suspects to be interrogated with live cobras tied to the ends of nightsticks. Unfortunately, there are still many colorful ways the police can royally screw you while Lady Justice shrugs.

For instance, you might be surprised to learn that right now in the U.S., it’s actually legal for the cops to…

Imagine you had your car stolen, but then fortune smiles upon you and the cops find it after the thief used it to smuggle 200 pounds of cocaine across the border, running over 30 children in the process while sexually assaulting the car itself.

You realize you’re going to need to get all of its fluids replaced from a mechanic with a soft voice and gentle hands, but you still want it back, because hey, it’s your car, right?

Yeeeah, there’s some bad news: It has been sold to buy a new espresso machine for the station’s break room.

It’s called civil asset forfeiture. You probably already have heard of something like this, where the police get to seize the car and house of some drug kingpin and stick the money in the department’s budget (that’s criminal forfeiture).

But then there’s this loophole where the police can seize anything they suspect has been used in a crime, even if it doesn’t belong to the criminal, and even if there hasn’t been a conviction.

“Let’s take the jet. Those bootlegged DVDs from China had to get here somehow.”

Then if you, as the actual owner of the goods, try to challenge it, the burden of proof is on you to prove you didn’t know it was going to be used in a crime. That’s civil forfeiture.

For the police, there is no legal requirement to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that, say, your TV set was once used by a ring of Dutch pedophiles to view kiddie porn. They can simply take it, without ever giving it back, even if they never formally charge anyone for a crime.

You’re Shitting Me!

In 2004, Zaher El-Ali, a Jordanian immigrant and U.S. citizen, sold a truck to a man who agreed to pay for it in installments. Before he could finish the payments though, the man was arrested for drunk driving and the truck was seized. Seeing as the car still legally belonged to Zaher (he still had the title), he demanded it back. The police refused, and possibly laughed.

Because civil forfeitures are so simple, over 40 percent of police executives admitted their budgets depend on cash from them. That means each year, those stations have a quota of forfeitures to fill and technically there is really no stopping them from filling it with YOUR Xbox.

Does this scenario sound familiar to you?

Cop: Sir, do you know how fast you were going?
You: Oh, couldn’t have been more than 40, 42.
Cop: Sir, it was over 100. I have it on my radar.
You: I see.
Cop: Sir, where are your pants?
You: That’s actually a very funny story, officer…

“All the drug money in the pockets was weighing me down.”

Luckily, those days are in the past. Not the part about “spending the night in jail for driving bottomless around school zones,” the radar thing. Police don’t need them anymore because now they can just guess your speed and ticket you based on that.

That’s as of June 2010, when the Ohio Supreme Court decided in a 5-1 ruling that a trained officer doesn’t need any of those newfangled gizmos to determine if a car was speeding. In accordance with the ruling, the visual estimate of an experienced police officer is enough to convict anyone of speeding, without the need for pesky wastes of time like independent verification and evidence.

Some might argue that this grants too much power to the police, but really, what’s the worst thing that could happen?

A horrible movie gets made.

You’re Shitting Me!

Mark Jenney of Akron definitely wasn’t the first person to ever get ticketed without a radar reading. But unlike other motorists, he refused to take it lying down and fought back, all the way to the state’s Supreme Court.

Sure, in the end he lost and had to pay his ticket, involuntarily helping to legalize radar-less ticketing and probably losing a shit-heap of money in attorney fees but… wait, we forgot where we were going with this.

Was it, “Next time, just pay the damn ticket?”

Picture yourself on a typical Wednesday morning, hunched over a shot of whiskey ready to commit mass murder on your brain cells, the smug little bastards. After taking one sip, a bunch of cops burst in and tackle you to the ground. In your state of shock and confusion you apologize for drinking and beg them not to tell your parents. It takes several minutes before you realize that you are 26, live alone and that you were just arrested for tasting alcohol in a bar.

Yeah, they got me for assault.

That’s the scenario in states with very broad Public Intoxication laws, like Texas. In 2006, Texas scored the highest number of drunk-driving fatalities in the country and, after determining that this was the rare problem that could not be blamed on immigrants or homosexuals, state officials decided to do something about it.

First, they fired a bunch of guns to clear their heads. Then they moved on.

Namely, they dusted off an old 1993 law and gang-interpreted it atop a pinball machine until it somehow became legal to arrest people for so much as being near a bottle of booze, anywhere. Including in a bar.

We’re not exaggerating for the sake of comedy here. Not only have they decided a bar is part of the “public” that “public intoxication” forbids, but they don’t even require a breathalyzer test to determine if a suspect really is drunk. They can make arrests based on nothing more than their hunches.

You’re Shitting Me!

In June 2009, Fort Worth officers used the new public intoxications regulations to arrest a bunch of folks at local bars that, by the way, happened to be the area gay and Hispanic bars. Naturally, according to witness testimonies, none of the arrestees were actually drunk, though they were dangerously brownish/homosexual.

So that’s what happened to Ricky Martin.

Damn, you mean the police are abusing a law that basically allows them to arrest anyone they please as long as there is some alcohol in their vicinity? In the South?

If you search for “asshole cop” on YouTube you will instantly get hundreds if not thousands of videos of some police officer tasing or otherwise abusing some kid or grandmother who may or may not deserve it. Police abuse videos surely are the fastest growing segment of online entertainment.

“In the face! IN THE FACE!”

Sadly, that entire genre might be on its way out. Currently, three states had made it illegal to film on-duty police officers, even (and especially) if they are beating up handicapped minorities in the middle of the town square.

“Memorizing is also a sort of recording. Stop remembering this!”

In Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland, they require both parties to consent to any recording for it to be legal. So, that cop whom you just filmed spouting profanities that reinvent the very idea of racism? Unless he always dreamt of being an Internet sensation, he can easily bust your ass and confiscate your camera.

“Why does he have so many pictures of his balls on here?”

There are 12 states in total that enforce an all-party-consent law, but only three interpret it to include public places of gathering with absolutely no expectation of privacy. So on one hand, that kind of sucks for people trying to record police misconduct, but on the other, hey, apparently security cameras are now illegal in parts of the Northeast! Looting party next week!

Yeeeah I am thinking NOT.

You’re Shitting Me!

Earlier this year, a Chicago man by the name of Christopher Drew was arrested for peddling goods without a license – a misdemeanor only slightly more socially-damaging than stealing garbage. But because he videotaped the arrest, Drew is now being charged with illegal recording, a class I felony punishable with up to 15 years of sharing a prison-cell with a 300 pound mountain of perversity named Bubba.

He’s not telling you about the fish he caught last year.

The case of Anthony Graber is even more disturbing. On March 5, Graber was pulled over for speeding and immediately had a gun pulled on him by an off-duty policeman. Luckily, his helmet had a built-in camera, so after 10 days, the video of this encounter hit YouTube.

This magically elevated Graber’s speeding to an “egregious traffic violation” and had him arrested for breaking wiretapping laws… punishable by up to 16 years in prison. We’re pretty sure you get less than that for having a flamethrower strapped to your helmet.

Spotting a prostitute can prove to be one of the most important skills you will ever learn, especially when it comes to telling real hookers from undercover cops. And thus, we present you with this wonderful bit of information on proper Whore Identification: In Washington, D.C. women carrying more than two condoms on themselves are considered prostitutes and can be arrested as such.

No, no, she’s cool. Said she never used a condom in her life. You think I should ask her out?

Or at least that’s the case in D.C.’s designated Prostitution Free Zones. You can’t be having prostitutes in your Prostitution Free Zones–that would defeat their very purpose–so is it really an overreaction of the D.C. police for arresting all women “congregating without a destination” in PFZs with at least three condoms in their purses? After all, those are the internationally recognized signs of people who takes stranger dick into their bodies for money.

She knits all her own condoms.

Come on, three entire condoms should be enough to last a typical person an entire lifetime of sexual activity. That’s why they only sell them individually at ridiculously marked-up prices. Add such suspicious behavior as “hanging out” into the mix and you have all the ingredients for Prostitute Stew.

“Can I get a ‘prostitute stew’ with a ‘handjob salad’ please?”

You’re Shitting Me!

The new practice has already caught the attention of various women rights groups around the country, and not just because innocent girls are possibly being thrown into holding cells with women that go by names like “Discount Debbie.” The main worry here is all that delicious AIDS the real working girls are spreading like well, like working girls who suddenly found condoms to be a huge liability.

“Let this one go, she doesn’t have any condoms on her.”

Man, who could have predicted that with the new Rubber Standard most prostitutes wouldn’t clean up their acts and go get MBAs or something, but rather start doing it without protection?

For the last couple of years, Identity Theft has been the exalted Grand Poobah of the American Paranoia Club, and for good reasons. The thought that someone out there might go into a long, prosperous career in bestiality porn, using our name and credit to fund it, constantly keeps us up at night.

And we have to surf the bestiality sites to make sure our good name isn’t sullied.

But you know what would be even scarier? If it was the police who took your identity and then created an entire new chapter in your life, one where they made you, like, a stripper from Ohio. Which is something the law actually permits them to do.

“Did I overdo it with the syphilis and incest rape? Probably not.”

This used to be illegal no more than eight years ago, but it all changed when Ohio passed a new law aimed at combating, ironically, identity theft. The 2002 law allows law enforcement agencies to take anyone’s personal information (driver’s license number, Social Security Number, etc.) and give it to an agent to use while undercover.

That in itself wouldn’t be so bad if the cops were using your identity to pose as somebody cool, like a mafia hitman or a T-Rex.

Or, in Bruce Wayne’s case, the Batman.

Sadly, the reality is most often less professional assassins and more street walkers or nude dancers.

You’re Shitting Me!

As far as we know, Haley Dawson has never taken her clothes off professionally. But for one month in 2003, a woman with the same name, address and SSN danced naked in front of a bunch of drunkards and Internet perverts at a strip-joint in Troy, Ohio. That woman was actually Michelle Szuhay, a criminal-justice student participating in an undercover police operation, using Dawson’s identity as her cover.

Yeah, Dawson: D-A-W-S-

Naturally, the real Ms. Dawson wasn’t informed that her good name was being tarnished and fantasized about by sweaty middle-aged guys for over 30 days. But it was all worth it, after local liquor-agents could charge the owner of the club with two misdemeanor charges of furnishing alcohol without a permit. The ends justify the means, people!

Here’s an excerpt from an interesting USA TODAY article discussing the dangers of high-speed police chases:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Innocent bystanders account for one-third of those who are killed in high-speed police chases, a USA TODAY review has found. The deaths have several communities around the USA wrestling with whether to restrict pursuits only to suspects in violent crimes.

About 360 people are killed each year in police chases, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Proponents of more restrictive chase policies say the fatality numbers are lower than the real toll because there is no mandatory reporting system for deaths in pursuits.

Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who has studied police pursuits since the 1980s, says the actual number of fatalities is “three or four times higher.” Another complicating factor: bystanders killed after police stop chasing suspects — even seconds afterward — are not counted.

About 35%-40% of all police chases end in crashes, Alpert says. He says the nation’s 17,000 police departments are moving toward more restrictive chase policies “because chasing someone for a traffic offense or a property offense is not worth the risk of people’s lives and well-being.” [Larry Copeland, "Deaths lead police to question high-speed chase policies," USA TODAY]

In fact, things are even worse than this brief sketch makes them out to be. It fails to account for non-lethal injuries, psychological trauma, loss of income due to injuries or trauma, and property damage resulting from high-speed police chases.

That so many innocent people are harmed by these chases shouldn’t really come as a shock to anyone. If you frequently drive aggressively and at high speeds while creating an incentive for someone else to do likewise, it’s inevitable that you’re going to harm innocent bystanders.

Incidentally, my parents were almost victims of a police chase earlier this year. They were at an intersection when a car, followed by two police vehicles, barreled through and came very close to hitting them. They were later able to find out (through a local newspaper) that the police were chasing someone because of cannabis possession.

Apparently, the same people who hand out speeding tickets — supposedly to protect us from reckless driving — thought it just and prudent to drive recklessly in order to catch someone who wasn’t even suspected of a violent crime.

To serve and protect, indeed.

* * * * *

Reckless behavior from police isn’t solely limited to car chases. In fact, police seem to make a habit of acting recklessly and instituting policies that are guaranteed to harm innocent people. Probably the most disturbing policy of this sort is the regularized use of “no-knock” SWAT team raids. The use of these raids is extremely problematic for a number of reasons.

First, SWAT teams often raid the homes of innocent people due to bad information or incompetence. Warrants for raids are often acquired using information provided from informants. In many cases, these informants are convicted criminals who are being offered lesser sentences in exchange for information, giving them incentive to fabricate stories.

Police have also been known to fabricate information themselves. It shouldn’t be too surprising, considering that police have “civil asset forfeiture” powers that let them seize property without due process and for personal benefit.

But who cares about civil asset forfeiture when cops conducting raids have been known to steal or otherwise abuse property even without it? The Philadelphia Daily recently mentioned a number of stories in which Philadelphia’s narcotics squad raided stores — claiming the small plastic bags they sold were “drug paraphernalia” — and stole cash, candy, and cigarettes (Jennifer Chou, “Police loot and destroy shops, keep cash, candy and cigarettes for themselves,” Cop Block).

Isn't it nice of that officer to cover his face with a black mask so that you can't identify him if you witness him commit a crime? (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

No-knock raids also pose a significant safety risk to the officers involved and the people being raided. Raids on homes, especially those conducted at night, generally surprise the occupants. When raid victims make sudden movements out of surprise or try to defend themselves from SWAT members who they reasonably believe to be burglars (burglars without badges, anyway), the results usually aren’t pretty.

All of these problems are amplified by the lack of accountability for police.

The Cato Institute’s interactive “Botched Paramilitary Police Raids” map describes dozens of these raids (conducted between 1985 and 2008) during which SWAT teams have terrorized innocent people, used excessive force, killed innocent people and nonviolent criminals, and/or lost the lives of members.

Here are a few excerpts:

• “Police conduct a blanket commando-style raid on Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Students are ordered at gunpoint to lie face-down on the floor while police search their lockers and persons for drugs. Some are handcuffed, while K-9 units deploy dogs to search students, lockers, and backpacks.

“The incident is captured on videotape by the school’s security cameras and makes national news. Media outlets report that the school has one of the best academic reputations in the state. A class-action lawsuit is pending and the principal of the Stratford school who helped organize the raid has since resigned.”

• “Police in Horn Lake, Mississippi raid a home after a tip from an informant that someone’s operating a meth lab inside.

“Once the paramilitary unit arrives at the scene, however, they find two houses on the property instead of one. They decide to pick one, and conduct the raid anyway. They end up waking up, terrorizing, and injuring a couple in their 80s, leaving the man with bruised ribs and the woman with a dislocated shoulder. They later locate the meth lab in the other house.

“Police chief Darryl Whaley insisted that his officers ‘acted properly’ and ‘followed procedures’ in guessing which home was correct before commencing with the raid.”

• “In March 1992, police in Everett, Washington storm the home of Robin Pratt on a no-knock warrant. They are looking for her husband, who would later be released when the allegations in the warrant turned out to be false.

“Though police had a key to the apartment, they instead choose to throw a 50-pound battering ram through the apartment’s sliding-glass door. Glass shards land inches away from the couple’s six-year-old daughter and five-year-old niece. One officer encounters Robin Pratt on the way to her bedroom. Hearing other SWAT team members yell ‘Get down!’ Pratt falls to her knees. She then raises her head briefly to say, ‘Please don’t hurt my children.’ At that point, Deputy Anthony Aston fires his weapon, putting a bullet in her neck, killing her.

“Officers next entered the bedroom, where Dep. Aston then put the tip of his MP-5 assault sub-machine gun against Larry Pratt’s head. When Pratt asked if he could move, another officer said that if he did, he’d have his head blown off.

“Though a subsequent investigation by a civilian inquest jury found the shooting ‘unjustified,’ the officer who shot and killed Pratt was never charged.”

* * * * *

The SWAT team raid horror stories I’ve mentioned aren’t a random sample, but you still probably noticed the pattern: they all have to do with drugs. Not every paramilitary police raid is about drugs, but fighting the drug war has been the primary purpose of SWAT raids.

In a Briefing Paper for the Cato Institute, Diane Cecilia Weber (“Warrior Cops: The Ominous Rise of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments”) details the rise of paramilitarism in law enforcement during the 80′s and 90′s. As she explains, the Posse Comitatus Act was passed towards the end of the Reconstruction era as a reaction to the occupation of the South by federal troops. The Act made it a criminal offense to use the Army for domestic law enforcement purposes without the consent of Congress (other parts of the military were subsequently added). It was revised during the 80′s to allow numerous exceptions for the purposes of enforcing drug prohibition. As Weber writes, the changes

encouraged the military to (a) make available equipment, military bases, and research facilities to federal, state, and local police; (b) train and advise civilian police on the use of the equipment; and (c) assist law enforcement personnel in keeping drugs from entering the country. The act also authorized the military to share information acquired during military operations with civilian law enforcement agencies. ["Warrior Cops"]

Since these changes were instituted, there has been a huge increase in the number of SWAT teams in the United States largely for the purpose of enforcing drug laws.

According to one estimate, SWAT teams now conduct approximately 40,000 raids every year (cited in Radley Balko, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Units, p. 11).

In Maryland, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times over a sixth month period in 2009 — an average of 4.5 times per day. Only 6% of these raids involved the special situations (e.g. bank robberies, hostage situations) that SWAT teams were originally created to deal with; the remaining 94% of the raids were conducted to carry out arrest or search warrants. More than 100 of these raids were conducted on people suspected of nonviolent crimes (Radley Balko, “4.5 SWAT Raids Per Day,” Reason Magazine).

* * * * *

I’m not sure I want to bring any of my views about the occupation of Iraq into this discussion (since many people probably see it as unrelated to police), but I can’t help but see a parallel. Recently, WikiLeaks released a video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter massacring number of civilians in Iraq including a Reuters photographer and his driver. Although some of the people were armed, none of them did anything to provoke the soldiers. When a van showed up to help the wounded, the soldiers open fire again killing more people and wounding two children.

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of the video was the attitudes of the soldiers. Their voices sound calm throughout the video. A gunner laughs after killing one of the men trying to escape. One of the men happily describes a pile of dead bodies as “Nice.” While the helicopter circles over a wounded man, the soldiers, apparently eager to finish him off, taunt “C’mon, buddy.” “All you gotta do it pick up a weapon” (the Rules of Engagement require people to be armed before they can be “engaged”).

When the van arrives, the soldiers immediately seek permission to shoot even though the men in the van were clearly there to rescue the wounded. One trigger-happy soldier anxiously exclaims “C’mon, let us shoot!” because it takes a few seconds for the permission to be granted. After they fill the van with bullets, one of the soldiers gleefully celebrates: “Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!”

When reinforcements show up and inform the soldiers in the helicopter that they wounded a child, the best one of the soldiers can come up with is “Ah damn. Oh well.” After a soldier in a tank drives over the body of one of the victims and laughs about it, two of the soldiers agree that “it’s their [the victims] fault for bringing their kids into battle.”

Shortly after the video was released, The New York Times ran a story mentioning the video that discussed the psychology of soldiers.

In recent days, many veterans have made the point that fighters cannot do their jobs without creating psychological distance from the enemy. One reason that the soldiers seemed as if they were playing a video game is that, in a morbid but necessary sense, they were.

Isn't indiscriminate killing hilarious? No? Then you must need more training! (Source: Salon.com)

“You don’t want combat soldiers to be foolish or to jump the gun, but their job is to destroy the enemy, and one way they’re able to do that is to see it as a game, so that the people don’t seem real,” said Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist and co-author of the forthcoming book “Wheels Down: Adjusting to Life After Deployment.”

Military training is fundamentally an exercise in overcoming a fear of killing another human, said Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of the book “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” who is a former Army Ranger.

Combat training “is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being” to take another life, the colonel writes. “Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened.” [Benedict Carrey, "Experts Explain Psychology of Iraq Airstrike on Video," The New York Times]

Two of the soldiers in the video recently published an apology for their actions. In it, they claim that the violence depicted in the video is commonplace in occupied Iraq (Josh Steiber and Ethan McCord, “Soldiers in ‘WikiLeaks’ Unit Apologize For Violence,” truthout).

I mention all of this because I think there’s an important lesson that should be obvious. Training people to think with the soldier mindset is dangerous.  And it’s especially dangerous to train cops, the people who are supposed to protect our safety, to think like soldiers. But this is exactly what’s happening. As Weber writes,

[t]he sharing of training and technology by the military and law enforcement agencies has produced a shared mindset, and the mindset of the warrior is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer charged with enforcing the law. The soldier confronts an enemy in a life-or-death situation. The soldier learns to use lethal force on the enemy, both uniformed and civilian, irrespective of age or gender. The soldier must sometimes follow orders unthinkingly, acts in concert with his comrades, and initiates violence on command. That mentality, with which new recruits are strenuously indoctrinated in boot camp, can be a matter of survival to the soldier and the nation at war.

The civilian law enforcement officer, on the other hand, confronts not an “enemy” but individuals who, like him, are both subject to the nation’s laws and protected by the Bill of Rights. Although the police officer can use force in life-threatening situations, the Constitution and numerous Supreme Court rulings have circumscribed the police officer’s direct use of force, as well as his power of search and seizure. In terms of violence, the police officer’s role is—or should be—purely reactive. When a police officer begins to think like a soldier, tragic consequences— such as the loss of innocent life at Waco—will result. ["Warrior Cops"]

I think it’s worth quoting Rad Geek, who refers to this attitude as the “siege mentality”:

Cops believe that they are “domestic warriors”, a class separate from mere “civilians” like you and your neighbors. They are fighting a battle in your hometown’s streets, as part of an ongoing occupation of hostile territory. They believe that they are in the midst of several “Wars,” wars which are like the United States government’s occupation and counter-insurgency campaign against South Vietnam, and that they need to be freed from restraints on the tactics that they can use in order to “really fight” like a military force engaged in total war. [Charles Johnson, "How cops see themslves (#2)," Rad Geek People's Daily]

Consider that their crusade against victimless crimes is so important to many cops that they believe the lives of everyone else who happens to be on the road become forfeit as soon as people allegedly in possession of cannabis try to drive away from them. Consider that the crusade is so important to some cops that they will dress up like Nazi stormtroopers, break into homes at night, threaten the occupants with military-grade weapons, and possibly even murder them — even if they don’t have an iota of credible evidence that any of the residents committed a crime.

Suddenly, cops don’t seem so different from the soldiers in the WikiLeaks video, do they?

* * * * *

Do you ever feel like we’re an occupied population and police are an invading army?

If it looks like a duck... (Source: The New York Times)

When newspaper articles distinguish between police officers and “civilians”; when the police train with the military; when they are armed with weapons designed for the military; when many of them use military-style tactics in their everyday work; when many cops are ex-military personnel; when they are told that they’re fighting “wars” against drugs, terrorism, and more; when they shoot peaceful protesters (whom one officer endearingly refers to as “scurrying cockroaches”) with rubber bullets and then laugh about it and use tasers to torture pregnant women who haven’t done anything wrong; it seems impossible to conclude otherwise.

See also:

• Steven Greenhut, “The Militarization of American Police,” The Freeman
• William Norman Grigg, “The Martial Law Mind-Set,” Pro Liberate
• Charles Johnson, “How cops see themselves,” Rad Geek People’s Daily

The Institute for Justice has recently released a report on civil asset forfeiture, a legal power that allows police to seize property without due process and often for personal benefit. The report, “Policing For Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture,” condemns asset forfeiture laws as “one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today.”

In addition to the report, the IJ has produced a concise, must-watch video summarizing the report. The video can be seen below. Please share it widely.

On YouTube, the video is accompanied by the following description:

Civil forfeiture laws represent one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today. With civil forfeiture, police and prosecutors can seize your property and use it to fund their budgets—all without charging you with a crime. Americans are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent—and law enforcement has a huge incentive to police for profit, not justice.

If police suspect that you committed a crime, they can arrest you and put you on trial. At that trial, prosecutors must prove you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But if police suspect your car was involved in a crime, they can take it, sell it and, in most places, pocket the proceeds to pad their budgets. They need not prove you committed any crime—or even arrest you—to take your property away.

Welcome to the upside-down world of civil asset forfeiture.
With civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent to get it back.

And because most state and federal laws allow police and prosecutors to pocket the proceeds, they have a big incentive to pursue profits, not justice.

How big? In 1986, the Justice Departments forfeiture fund took in 94 million dollars. Now it has more than a billion. State and local agencies receive forfeiture funds, too—but we don’t know how much because most states don’t publicly report on forfeiture.

No surprise—abuse is rampant. One New York police department spent forfeiture funds on food, gifts and entertainment. In Georgia, forfeiture funds paid for football tickets for a DAs office. In Louisiana, cops used funds to pay for ski trips to Aspen. And a DA in Texas used forfeiture dollars to buy TV ads for his re-election campaign.

Meanwhile, citizens are seeing cash, cars and other property taken away for the flimsiest of reasons. Carrying too much cash? Police can accuse you of selling drugs or laundering money and seize it, no conviction or even arrest required.

An Institute for Justice study grades state laws on how well they protect people from wrongful forfeitures. Only three states receive a B or better. The rest range from mediocre to awful—and so does federal law.

Worse, a federal legal loophole allows police and prosecutors to bypass state protections and keep pocketing forfeiture money. IJ’s research shows that the easier and more profitable these laws make forfeiture, the more it is used and abused.

Its time to end civil forfeiture. People shouldn’t have their property taken away without being convicted of a crime. And law enforcement shouldn’t be policing for profit