“An organized group of Southern California bandits has brazenly hijacked armored cars and grabbed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. The heavily armed thieves reportedly have damaged trucks, hassled their victims, covered up video cameras—and even celebrated their haul. “Wowee!” and “way to go, buddy,” they allegedly cheered, after pulling a recent heist.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that this is the latest example of California’s ongoing crime wave, epitomized by “third world” scenes of pilfered freight trains and brazen smash-and-grab robberies. But it’s nothing of the sort. Actually, it’s more pernicious than the usual crime spree because a sheriff is the mastermind and his deputies are looting the armored cars.
For instance, San Bernardino County deputies stopped the same Empyreal Logistics armored-car driver twice and took a total of nearly $1.1 million in cash owned by legal marijuana dispensaries, per news reports. The government has not charged the armored-car company nor the cannabis firms with any crimes, but the sheriff keeps the cash, anyway. Critics are right to call it highway robbery.
Welcome to the dystopian world of civil-asset forfeiture, a drug-war relic that allows police—often at the behest of district attorneys—to take people’s cash, cars, and properties based on their suspicion that the property was involved in a crime. Officials never have to prove that the property’s owner was involved in a crime.
The agencies have every incentive to employ this strategy routinely given that they keep the proceeds and spend the money on vehicles, guns, and whatever. News reports found police so adept at abusing this process that they sometimes target people who own the kind of fancy SUVs and sports cars that they’d like to have available in their motor pool.
Not only does this process deprive Americans of their Fourth Amendment right to be safe against the government’s searches and seizures, but it undermines the credibility of law enforcement by turning cops into our adversaries. San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus claims that “80 percent of marijuana at dispensaries was grown illegally.” If that’s true, then the sheriff simply needs to, you know, go to court and prove it.”
“what about the onslaught of frivolous suits that would come down against the police? That also misses the mark, particularly when considering that it is not possible to simply enter a federal courthouse and file a lawsuit because you’re mad at the cops. Before suing a government actor, a plaintiff must satisfy two conditions: that the public servant affirmatively violated someone’s constitutional rights, and that the violation of the rights is clearly established in prior case law. Without qualified immunity, a would-be litigant would still need to prove to a federal judge that his constitutional rights were infringed on. Qualified immunity is only the second part—the part that sends a victim searching for a perfect court precedent where another victim experienced a near-identical sort of misconduct.
It’s for that reason that the doctrine gives license to some disturbing behavior—the sort that should concern anyone who positions himself as a defender of responsible governance. An example: “The City Officers ought to have recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong,” but the police “did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment.” This is a real quote from a real decision from a real federal court—the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit—awarding qualified immunity to two government actors who we apparently cannot trust to know that stealing during a search warrant is unconstitutional unless there is some obscure court precedent saying so. I’d posit that most of the public has more faith in police to do their jobs with integrity. I certainly do.”
“Police being able to keep what they seize is one of the primary motivators for fine and forfeiture abuse, and it’s obvious to everybody except for the mayor and the police department that’s what was happening in Brookside. Without that incentive, the police would not be sniffing around every single car it comes across for a potential score.”
“despite tightening the rules for when police can keep seized property, Florida remains one of the most prolific practitioners of civil forfeiture. The Sunshine State took in more revenue through forfeitures than any other state in 2018, according to a survey by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm. Local and state police can evade the new restrictions by working with the federal government, just like the Miami-Dade police did in Salgado’s case. In return for calling in the feds, they get a cut of the proceeds.
“The federal government is literally paying state and local police to circumvent state law,” says Justin Pearson, managing attorney for the Institute for Justice’s Florida office. “That’s not the way things are supposed to work.””
“I sued the city for racial discrimination and police misconduct, winning a modest settlement. But I had been slurred a “sand n—-r” and wrongfully detained on an erroneous warrant in a city I once considered home. The effect on me was not readily apparent, but, in time, I would discover that a nameless fear had imperceptibly unhinged me.”
“Add stress balls to the list of innocuous items that have landed innocent citizens in jail due to shoddy police work and unreliable drug field tests.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled last week that two Atlanta police officers are not entitled to qualified immunity from a civil lawsuit brought against them by Ju’zema Goldring for malicious prosecution. Goldring says the officers falsely accused her of jaywalking and cocaine trafficking, based on a field test of a powdery substance inside a stress ball she had in her purse.
Goldring spent nearly six months in the Fulton County jail because she couldn’t afford bail and told local news outlet NBC 46 that she was occasionally put in solitary confinement. What’s more, she was left in jail for four months after a crime lab concluded that the mysterious powder was sand, not cocaine.
According to the 11th Circuit’s opinion, Atlanta police officers Vladimir Henry and Juan Restrepo stopped Goldring on October 10, 2015, for allegedly jaywalking. Goldring claims she wasn’t jaywalking. In any case, the officers took Goldring to the police station and proceeded to cut open a stress ball they found in her purse and test the powdery substance inside using a Nark II field test for drugs.
As Reason reported earlier this year, such drug field test kits are manufactured by several different companies and are used by police departments and prison systems across the country. The test kits use instant color reactions to indicate the presence of certain compounds found in illegal drugs, but those same compounds are also found in dozens of known licit substances. And although the tests are fairly simple to use, they’re still prone to user error and misinterpretation.”
“All too often, official versions of events turn out to be completely at odds with video and audio records of what actually happened. Given stark discrepancies between some police reports about searches and arrests and video footage of the same events, it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that the powers-that-be habitually lie about their conduct.”
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“the cops barged into a house without permission, tossed it without legal authority, and then lied about the search to conceal their misdeeds.
“If Yezek did not have the security cameras in and outside of his home, he very well could be sitting in prison,” one of Yezek’s attorneys told reporters.”
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“”San Antonio police dash camera video obtained by the KSAT 12 Defenders contradicts the department’s long-held narrative that a woman shot and killed by an SAPD sergeant in early 2019 had pointed a weapon at him prior to being shot,” the TV station reported last year after the shooting death of Hannah Westall.
In addition, police originally insisted that there was no bodycam recording of the incident. That turned out to be untrue and Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales has reopened his investigation.”
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“These situations are pretty egregious, but recordings don’t have to contradict police. They can, instead, support the official story, and undermine bogus claims of abuse, rights violations, and innocence by criminal suspects. When cops are above-board, that’s exactly the purpose the recordings serve.
But it’s all too easy to find situations where police told stories that didn’t match recordings of which they were unaware or which they tried to suppress. Sometimes an officer loses a job or even (very rarely) faces charges, but it often leaves the impression that an especially incautious or unconnected cop was thrown to the wolves to appease critics. How many lies remain unexposed is anybody’s guess.
It’s worth pointing out that the FBI, which often investigates misconduct by state and local police, itself resists recording interviews.
“When the rule prohibiting FBI agents from recording interviews was instituted, the reasoning mostly was that their testimony under oath is credible and means something to the court and the public,” James M. Casey, a former FBI agent, explained last year. “That should still hold true.”
But “trust us” really doesn’t fly the more we see the government’s enforcers at work. It’s too easy to find examples of them playing fast and loose with the truth when there’s a record of their conduct.”
“A working paper published last week by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and written by researchers at the University at Albany, SUNY and RAND Corporation bills itself as the broadest and most rigorous examination at the school-level of how SROs impact student outcomes. Using national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 collected by the U.S. Department of Education, the paper found that while SROs “do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools,” they do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.
“We also find that SROs intensify the use of suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and arrests of students,” researchers wrote. “These effects are consistently over two times larger for Black students than White students.”
The study found that the introduction of SROs to schools did appear to improve general safety and decrease non-gun-related violence, like fights and physical assaults. However, the authors say, those benefits come at the cost of increasing both school discipline and police referrals.”
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“The number of police in schools has skyrocketed in schools over the past four decades, first in response to drugs, then mass shootings. Police departments and organizations like the National Association of School Resource Officers argue that well-trained SROs act as liaisons between the school and police department. A good SRO, they argue, can actually reduce arrests.
Civil liberties groups and disability advocates, on the other hand, have long argued that increases in school police and zero-tolerance policies for petty disturbances have fueled the “school-to-prison” pipeline and led to disproportionate enforcement against minorities and students with disabilities.
Other recent research has come to similar conclusions as the new working paper. For example, a study published last August by researchers at the University of Maryland and the firm Westat found that increasing the number of police in schools doesn’t make school safer and leads to harsher discipline for infractions.”
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“The authors of the new working paper say that school districts should weigh the benefits of safer hallways against the high cost of putting more kids in contact with the criminal justice system.”
“Over his 17 years on the job — including eight as the union president of the Fraternal Order of Police in South Florida — 49 people have complained about him to Internal Affairs as he amassed 19 official use-of-force incidents, $600,000 in lawsuit settlements and a book’s worth of terrible headlines related to his record and his racially inflammatory social media posts, many of which attacked alleged victims of police violence.
Yet Ortiz has repeatedly beaten back attempts to discipline him. He returned to work in March from a yearlong paid suspension during which state and federal investigators examined whether he “engaged in a pattern of abuse and bias against minorities, particularly African Americans … [and] has been known for cyber-stalking and doxing civilians who question his authority or file complaints against him.” The investigation was launched after three Miami police sergeants accused him of abusing his position and said the department had repeatedly botched investigations into him.
But investigators concluded their hands were tied because 13 of the 19 use-of-force complaints were beyond the five-year statute of limitations, and the others lacked enough hard evidence beyond the assertions of the alleged victims. The findings underscored a truism in many urban police departments: The most troublesome cops are so insulated by protective union contracts and laws passed by politicians who are eager to advertise their law-and-order bona fides that removing them is nearly impossible — even when their own colleagues are witnesses against them.”
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“As a police officer with an encyclopedic knowledge of labor law and grievance procedures, Ortiz shielded himself over the years with the extensive protections woven into the local union’s collective bargaining agreement and Florida’s “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights,” a police-friendly law that passed decades ago and has been continuously beefed up with bipartisan support. He has also availed himself of a controversial judicial doctrine, called qualified immunity, which shields police from certain forms of liability.
Among the special provisions that have made policing Florida’s police so difficult is a rule in the bill of rights that says all investigations must be wrapped up in 180 days. Critics say the rule is a vehicle for sympathetic colleagues to protect an officer simply by dragging their feet. In its review of Ortiz, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reported that between 2013 and 2018 seven citizen complaints against him were voided because the department failed to finish investigating within the prescribed time limit.
An even more significant obstacle in the bill of rights is a rule that officers must be shown all evidence against them before they are interviewed about complaints — a right that isn’t afforded to civilians and that flies in the face of normal investigative techniques. It allows officers to tailor their responses to the evidence, avoid being caught in lies and even, says former Miami police chief Art Acevedo, “interfere with the investigation or retaliate” against witnesses.”
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“Ortiz’s record stands out sharply compared with those of his peers. The 49 citizen complaints against him are 2½ times more than the combined complaints against the department’s four other captains. Those other captains also have a combined 16 use of force incidents on their records, three fewer than the 19 on Ortiz’s record.”