Those particular geese only lay golden eggs until you kill them.
My guess is they got greedy and then got attention. It was fine and good when they took PimpDaddy's caddy because drugs, but not so fine when they took his grandma's house too because he parked there for an hour last tuesday.
The racial aspect of this is a great big elephant-in-the-room stomping-on-your-toes issue in this situation. I figure if you're gonna whistle about it, whistle loud.
In the world of interconnectivity news travels fast. Take for example, ebola. Everyone was informed about it and hospitals took great measures because of an unprecedented disease awareness. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and Google make incredibly powerful distribution channels.
In the past, TV stations were incentivized to work with local police for a large percentage of their news stories, so they couldn't publish defamatory content. In today's world brains are connected more efficiently. One of the benefits is increase in transparency. For example, the ratio of security cameras to civilian cameras has flipped. Civilians have much better oversight over people they pay to protect them, increasing accountability. Similarly, the ratio of news publishers has flipped to civilians. Now the press has to follow reddit and twitter posts or risk loosing readership.
With the wrong incentives given, it is clear, that those things multiply ... and it is sad, because it also means, that mischief has multiplied in those people that should uphold justice.
He describes how excited the cops were to steal a guy's car. He even says "and gulp we had to give it back" because they didn't follow procedure. Put aside the inanity involved in stealing people's property in cases like this, it's a pure greed motive where cops are looking at the population to go raiding.
I think that it happened (can't find the link) because up to some point, the departments didn't get any money from forfeitures - when this changed, forfeitures exploded.
This month, the two largest newspapers in the USA and NPR covered the story. To my knowledge, that's substantially greater coverage than it has ever received before.
My guess is they got greedy and then got attention. It was fine and good when they took PimpDaddy's caddy because drugs, but not so fine when they took his grandma's house too because he parked there for an hour last tuesday.