Tag: Drug War

Unjust “Investigation”

Can we trust the FBI to stick to the rule of law and defend our rights?

Yesterday I more than suggested that the answer is “No.”

Adding more fuel to this negative judgment, last week Eric Boehm at Reason told the tale of a Federal Bureau of Investigation raid upon safe deposits.

“The FBI told a federal magistrate judge that it intended to open hundreds of safe deposit boxes seized during a March 2021 raid in order to inventory the items inside,” Boehm writes, “but new evidence shows that federal agents were plotting all along to use the operation as an opportunity to forfeit cash and other valuables.”

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton’s response, reportedly, was “that’s where the money is!” He actually didn’t say it, but FBI personnel understand the operative principle all too well . . . regarding safety deposit boxes.

Convictions? Hah!

They seize property on an expected-revenue-based rationale.

Since “details regarding the planning and execution of the FBI’s raid of U.S. Private Vaults arenow out in the open,” Boehm goes on to explain, it looks like the FBI has to say bye-bye to “more than $86 million in cash as well as gold, jewelry, and other valuables from property owners who were suspected of no crimes.”

The plot’s been foiled, it appears, but will the culprits within the FBI be prosecuted?

Seems unlikely.

Truth is, the culture at the FBI has never been good. Barring defunding (which would be politically difficult) perhaps FBI agents should be restricted to just investigation, stripped of their weaponry, forced to rely on state and local lawmen — and perhaps the U.S. Marshals — to make any searches and arrests at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags civil asset forfeiture, Drug War, police abuse

property rights

The Maine Alternative to State Robbery

Post author By Redactor
Post date July 19, 2021
3 Comments on The Maine Alternative to State Robbery

civil asset forfeiture, police, corruption, drug war

Around the country, one of the worst predations against people who save money or own property is civil asset fo r feiture.

This is the grabbing of the cash and other belongings of innocent people on the basis of a mere suspicion (or feigned suspicion) of wrongdoing. By government.

No evidence is required by law: no arrest; no conviction. Just the willingness of some police officer, sheriff, or other member of law enforcement to grab what doesn’t belong to him.

There’s only one cure: state by state, these asset forfeiture laws must be abolished.

The Institute for Justice reports that Maine has now repealed its civil forfeiture law, making it the third state to do so. IJ’s own efforts deserve much of the credit.

Another hero of the story is Billy Bob Faulkingham, one of my favorite legislators and the main sponsor of the bill. (He is also behind a right-to-farm ballot measure and a good voter-ID bill.)

The bipartisan “Act to Strengthen Protections Against Asset Forfeiture” — which passed without the governor’s signature — states that “for property to be forfeited under the criminal forfeiture laws, the owner of the property[must] be convicted of a crime in which the property was involved. . . .”

Is this the end of the injustice?

In Maine, maybe.

Being on the books doesn’t necessarily mean that a law will be obeyed. But if and when it is violated, victims in the state will now have stronger legal recourse and a much better chance of promptly getting back their stuff.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags civil asset forfeiture, Drug War, police, police corruption

crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Unfriending the Police?

police brutality, racism, criminal justice reform, drug war,

Defund the police?

First, take a moment to celebrate those on the American Left who have finally — miraculously — stumbled onto something they actually want the government to spend less money on.

Second, consider policing expert and Washington Post columnist Radley Balko’s amply backed-up contention that “the evidence of racial bias in our criminal justice system” is “overwhelming.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Balko notes that “lots of white people are wrongly accused, arrested and convicted” and “treated unfairly, beaten and unjustifiably shot and killed by police officers. White people too are harmed by policies such as mandatory minimums, asset forfeiture, and abuse of police, prosecutorial and judicial power.”

Even if police violence is “more of a problem for African Americans,” posits David Bernstein at Reason, “it’s not solely a problem for African Americans. Eliminating racism, in short, would still leave the U.S. with far more deaths from police shootings than seems reasonable.”

This is not an argument to ignore racism, but in favor of making effective changes in policy and law.

Maybe the solution to our police violence problems is not defunding departments, in a vast unfriending campaign, but to let up on some of their burdens, require them to do less. De-task.

For starters? Defund the War on Drugs!

Drug prohibition has been a criminal justice disaster — filling our jails with victimless criminals whose problem is drug addiction. In a myriad of ways, the drug war has spawned greater police corruption and introduced more intrusive and dangerous policing.

Let’s have a frank conversation about . . . making practical changes to our criminal justice system.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment

Prisoners All

drug war, prison, jail, prohibition, ban, freedom,

The logic for drug prohibition is direct: to keep people from hurting themselves with recreational drugs, we must prevent them from accessing those drugs.

Voilà!

There are a number of things wrong with that, though, and one is this: governments cannot even keep illegal drugs out of prisons.

In California, nearly 1,000 men and women overdosed last year in “an alarming spike in opioid use by those behind bars,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Steven Greenhut, writing in Reason, notes that confinement centers are “among the most tightly controlled environments on Earth, yet correction officials can’t figure out how to deal with dramatic spikes in the number of inmates who are dying from drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning.”

Doesn’t this make the prohibitionist “solution” absurd?

“If they can’t keep heroin off of death row,” Greenhut concludes, “then maybe they should rethink their ability to control the rest of us.”

There is a problem, here, though — it is easier to control “the rest of us.”

As with gun control laws, it is the law-abiding folks who fall in line. It is the edgier, less civic-minded people who tend to rebel.

But the two issues remain distinct: generally lawful and level-headed citizens still need to defend themselves from criminals, but do not feel a need to take drugs that can be deadly even in innocent hands. Thus the War on Drugs seems a bit less obviously tragic than gun control.

Which is why conceiving of the War on Drugs as unworkable prison policy writ large remains important.

Why would we want to make our society more like drug-ridden prisons?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Photo credit: Thomas Quine

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Tags ban, Drug War, freedom, jail, prison, prohibition

crime and punishment general freedom insider corruption

Puppycide

The cost of the War on Drugs is not to be reckoned just in dollars. Or in that more serious accounting index: lost lives. The hit to our civil liberties has been enormous, too, and instrumental in setting up the modern Surveillance State.

But beyond these, there is a stranger result: the War on Drugs is also, de facto, a War on Dogs.

“Detroit police officers shot 54 dogs last year, according to public records obtained by Reason,” writes C.J. Ciaramella. “That’s a marked increase over the number reported by the department in 2016 and 2015, and more than twice as many as Chicago, a city with roughly 2 million more people.”

Reason magazine has been covering the War on Dogs by police forces across the country — identified in Ciaramella’s article as “puppycide” — for years, and I’ve mentioned it here on Common Sense, too. The problem is not dogs shot because they are wild, or have rabies, or the like. One expects that sort of thing.

What is problematic is that a third of the Detroit shootings took place in the course of no-knock raids and other common police actions entailed by contraband interdiction. The Detroit number turns out to be “more animal shootings than the entire Los Angeles Police Department performed — 14 total — in 2016,” Ciaramella relates.

Excessive shooting of dogs is costly to cities, of course — to taxpayers, to be precise — in terms of civil lawsuits filed and settled. And to families, some of them quite innocent of any crime, who lose their pets.

It is a sign of a police culture corrupted by . . . the War on Drugs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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