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by baddox 3833 days ago
> where exactly do you draw the line in between law enforcement taking obviously stolen property and law enforcement taking personal property?

The difference is the "obviously stolen" part. None of the ludicrous instances of civil asset forfeiture I have read involve property that is obviously (or even allegedly) stolen. Heck, half the time it's just a cop pulling someone over on a highway, stealing their cash, and sending them on their way.
1 comments
harryh 3833 days ago
Without data to support the claim, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that half the time it's a cop taking money from some random person on a highway.
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mattmanser 3833 days ago
People have been posting these stories here for a while, here's a couple of examples:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/st...

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/21/us/asset-seizures/

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harryh 3833 days ago
That first one was ok.

In general though I wish articles like this relied less on anecdote and more on data. I'm way more convinced by evidence of large scale issues than I am by a single story no matter how egregious.

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baddox 3833 days ago
I was talking only about blatant misuses of civil asset forfeiture, and the "half" figure wasn't meant to be taken literally. All I meant is that there are plenty of instances of civil asset forfeiture where there is not even the pretense of criminal involvement, where a police officer simply takes property from someone and it's up to them to fight to get it back.
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harryh 3833 days ago
The software I work on has plenty of bugs (as it was made by humans) but it's still pretty useful. I think to have any real discussion here we need some sort of data on error rates. Sure, it's sucks for the guy that gets his rightful property taken from him. But is that happening 10% of the time? 1% of the time? .01% of the time?

My opinion on the matter would change drastically depending on which one of those numbers reflects reality.

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baddox 3833 days ago
I don't understand. My position is that blatant abuses of civil asset forfeiture should happen less and should be punished severely. The standard required to seize assets should probably be higher, and there should be far less burden on the asset owner to reclaim their assets.

In your analogy, that's me saying that we should try to reduce the number of bugs in our software. I don't think this is controversial.

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harryh 3833 days ago
Ah. Then we agree!

I think I mixed up your opinion with some other folks who think we shouldn't have asset forfeiture at all. Sorry about that. My mistake.

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