Why Did Arizona Democrats Kill A Bill Protecting Citizens From Police Overreach?
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 5 months ago
Reason.
An Arizona bill requiring police and prosecutors to get a criminal conviction before they could attempt to force defendants to forfeit their assets died Thursday at the hands of a bloc of mostly Democratic lawmakers.
Civil asset forfeiture is a mechanism that lets law enforcement seize and keep the assets of people believed to have committed crimes. Many states do not require defendants to actually be convicted—or sometimes even charged—with a crime before police take their property. People are thus put in the position of having to prove their innocence in order to get the money back, subverting due process. Meanwhile, police agencies keep the money they seize and sell the other property they take, thus filling in gaps in their budgets.
This leads inevitably to corruption, as cops look for a pretext to stop people, search them or their vehicles, and—if they find large sums of cash or other valuable property—claim it simply must be proceeds from drug trafficking and try to keep it for themselves. This process was sold to the public as a way to fight drug cartels and other criminal kingpins, but in reality most forfeitures are for relatively small amounts taken from underprivileged people who lack the resources to fight back.
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What’s extremely unusual is for all the Democrats to vote against a forfeiture reform bill, especially after the same legislation passed out of the Senate unanimously. In their explanation for why they voted no, a couple of legislators said the quiet part loud: The pandemic is hurting government budgets, and they don’t want to give up the revenue.
Dam the constitution and due process rights. Money is money, and if it’s gotten immorally, then so be it.
We are rulers. “All of your money are belong to us.”
On May 25, 2020 at 8:45 am, X said:
“An Arizona bill requiring police and prosecutors to get a criminal conviction before they could attempt to force defendants to forfeit their assets died Thursday at the hands of a bloc of mostly Democratic lawmakers.
Would be completely unnecessary if we still had a Bill of Rights… but we don’t. The Fifth Amendment of the Old Constitution of the FUSA once addressed this issue explicitly…
On May 25, 2020 at 12:25 pm, Hugger said:
Shiney badges mean special rights.
On May 25, 2020 at 2:21 pm, Fred said:
It’s the same reason the Republican Supreme Court GAVE cops the right of qualified immunity, just like every totalitarian State has ever done. Asset seizure is Red Flag laws for money, cars, boats and houses. Of course, since everything is permitted and licensed and you are a wholly owned corporate subsidiary you don’t actually own anything anyway
On May 25, 2020 at 7:57 pm, Ned said:
The party of “the people” bends us over again.
On May 26, 2020 at 12:55 pm, TheOtherGeorge said:
” In their explanation for why they voted no, a couple of legislators said the quiet part loud: The pandemic is hurting government budgets, and they don’t want to give up the revenue.”
If there is a difference , at this point, in the level of corruption between our government and Mexico’s government, I fail to see it.