
Judge: NYC Seizing Thousands of Cars Without Warrants Is Unconstitutional - bane
http://www.amny.com/news/taxi-and-limousine-commission-seizing-of-cars-is-unconstitutional-federal-judge-rules-1.10911628
======
zaroth
I agree 100% this is a perfect example of where we the people rely entirely on
the judiciary to provide a remedy. That such an obviously illegal practice
could continue for years unfortunately does not reflect well on any thoughts
of swift justice.

It should be possible to get a temporary restraining order against the city in
cases like this within days of the first contested case. It should be easy to
demonstrate there is no imminent harm of telling the city, you have to stop
doing this until we decide it's OK or not, and quite the opposite, cars are an
essential and significant asset, and this policy placed a potentially massive
burden on the citizens it effected.

In one of the examples, by the time the victim prevailed against the illegal
seizure backed by zero evidence or investigation of any kind, they had already
sold off his car, and offered nothing in return. A pretty large part of the
population doesn't have a spare $2,000 in cash to get their own car back while
the city makes them prove in front of a Kangaroo Court that they were driving
their own family to the airport... Missing from the article -- is there any
hope of any kind of restitution? Can the victims now pursue a civil case
against the city?

~~~
mtgx
This is why the US needs a Constitutional Court so badly to vet bills after
they get signed by the president, like other countries have. Then you wouldn't
get stuck with unconstitutional laws for many years or even decades, letting
them abuse an entire _generation_ of people.

Now the replies will go like "but the US has an adversarial justice system!".
Yeah. Except for that whole three decades old secret FISA court that is in
charge of spying. No adversary there.

~~~
adventured
Having either an adversarial system or constitutional court doesn't stop a
government from using its power to do illegal, immoral, secretive, or plainly
unconstitutional things.

Historically, and across pretty much every nation that has ever existed,
governments have routinely chosen to disobey their own laws, do terrible
things in secret, and so on.

I also fail to see how a constitutional court prevents FISA from existing if
you have executive orders and national security doctrine (the two things that
made FISA and the NSA spying possible). You'd need to throw out a lot of
things to make a constitutional court work. As it is, national security
doctrine would simply bypass a constitutional court check when it comes to
creating FISA. You would have to try to elevate it above all possible counter
considerations, and good luck with that.

------
mapt
You: The city is stealing my car without probable cause in an attempt to
extort money from me.

City DA: No they're not.

What's your recourse here? Call the FBI or federal prosecutor and report an
organized crime syndicate being run by corrupt law enforcement professionals?
Because... isn't that what this is?

Is there any onus, or even incentive, for them to listen and investigate? Is
the _only_ way to redress the problems a civil lawsuit against the City citing
Bivens and various appellate court principles like malicious prosecution?
Because grand theft auto, extortion, racketeering, and fabrication of evidence
/ perjury are not civil offenses, and conservative readings of the concept of
'standing', as I understand it, make it rather difficult to challenge the
authors of a failed / withdrawn prosecution in order to get at the legal
principles which triggered it.

Concepts like this one, as well as things like civil asset forfeiture, are so
clearly in direct violation of the Constitution that at some point, it's not
legitimate to shelter enforcers under cover of "just following orders". We
still have laws (Constitutional and common), and Peabody, Minnesota doesn't
have the right to do things like put all the gay residents to death by
legislative fiat & judicial compliance; If you found this occurring, you
wouldn't need to _file a lawsuit_ alleging that a _constitutional overreach_
has been committed and demanding merely _that the policy cease to be in
effect_. Instead, you would get some overriding authority, like the state
police or the FBI, to run in with SWAT teams and arrest and prosecute every
last person peripherally attached to the Peabody legislature or judiciary or
law enforcement. For murder.

No amount of 'adopting selective prosecution based on what we can win, since
the courts recognized a valid affirmative defence' or 'changing training
programs to be more in line with civil rights' or 'firing/reprimanding the
officers involved and settling a civil suit' makes killing the gay population
of Peabody less of a crime, and no amount of lawsuit would be required to get
that recognized.

~~~
zaroth
Wish more people would simply call it what it is. If we can't even do that,
certainly we'll never see an actual prosecution.

The name of a thing is important, and calling it exactly 'grand theft auto,
extortion, racketeering, and fabrication of evidence / perjury' versus
something like 'civil asset forfeiture' or in this case, not even that, it's a
glorified falsified _parking ticket_!

I mean, how did this actually play out in court? "So, Your Honor, you're not
going to believe what happened. I was going to drop my niece at the airport
and these thugs pulled me out of the car, showed me a badge, impounded my car,
and now want me to sign a document and pay them a stack of cash to get it
back." Prosecutor, "Actually, we employ 170 people to do this, and we've done
it 21,000 times".

The article they quote saying it's a corrupt money-making scheme for the city
was an interesting read: [http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140724/long-
island-city/ta...](http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140724/long-island-
city/taxi-inspectors-say-theyre-pressured-make-illegal-cab-seizures)

~~~
mapt
"“They’re stopping cars without legal justification all the time,” said
Kaeckmeister, who in the past year has gone to two tribunal hearings to
testify before a judge that his superiors forced him to seize a car when he
didn’t have the evidence to do so."

His superiors pressured him to steal a car by threatening to fire him, and to
fabricate evidence, perjure himself, and file false police reports in order to
hold it for ransom without legal basis. It shouldn't make a difference whether
he's in the traffic enforcement business or the puppy breeding business, the
same actions are a clear crime regardless of his background; He wasn't even
under duress by the definition of that word used in the courts, though perhaps
whistleblower protections apply (if they still exist).

Dude's just confessed, before a judge, to a massive profit-seeking criminal
conspiracy over and above what was authorized by local legislature. Arrest
_somebody_.

~~~
tajen
The problem is it grants legitimacy for a parallel network of justice
enforcement. When there are so many stories about constitution being violated
with FISA, SWAT teams, police stations using military gear, TSA, systematic
torture, drone strikes without fair trials, civil asset forfeiture and now
systematic seizure of cars, who could we blame if, say, Anonymous decided to
take it to the street and burn houses of every single TLD agent? Is US justice
still acting on the name of the lowly, or is the constituion so blatantly
violated that the people will fund and sponsor an "alternative network"?

------
maehwasu
And once again, the nice thing about living in not America is that bribes are
significantly cheaper.

------
grecy
>“‘Probable cause’ is not a talismanic phrase that can be waved like a wand to
justify the seizure of any property without a warrant”

Does that apply to civil forfeiture as well? Sounds like it should.

~~~
mtgx
For some reason, Courts so far have agreed to buy the government's whole
twisted logic that "things can be guilty of crimes", and under that twisted
logic it seems to make sense to do that.

~~~
liquidise
Very true. I am still awaiting the day this is extrapolated to gun rights and
watch the hypocrisies rain.

~~~
scott_karana
> I am still awaiting the day this is extrapolated to gun rights and watch the
> hypocrisies rain.

Are you saying that all gun owners are also supporters of civil forfeiture?...
Or have I misunderstood?

~~~
brewdad
I _think_ he's saying that guns kill people, not people with guns kill people.

------
aswanson
Why is the regular news reading more and more like my Onion RSS feed? I have a
feeling things were always this absurd, if not more so, but the idiocy gets
amplified now by the channels being so connected.

~~~
Arnt
Sounds like a contorted way of saying "I click the clickbait" ;)

~~~
mlrtime
you might like /r/nottheonion

~~~
Arnt
Or I might be depressed, or distracted. Am I going to look? Your guess is as
good as mine.

------
thoman23
So the government should _not_ arbitrarily seize property from its own
citizenry? I'm sure they will take that under advisement.

------
peeters
I think the most interesting, or scary, part of all of this is the
justification for this warrantless search and seizure: to stop Uber from
operating in the city. Usually the government has to invoke public safety to
try to justify removing individual rights. Now they can just invoke the taxi
lobby I guess.

------
avoutthere
Wow, how was this ever legal to begin with?

~~~
jff
The authoritarians that run NYC are tremendously contemptuous of the common
man. See: anything Bloomberg has ever done.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Stop and frisk something something...

------
dandare
This is on of the things that fascinates me about the US. Such blatant
injustice would be unthinkable in the Europe.

~~~
bzbarsky
It would? [http://www.webpronews.com/french-police-told-to-seize-
uber-c...](http://www.webpronews.com/french-police-told-to-seize-uber-cars-on-
sight-2015-06/) begs to differ, after about 30 seconds of googling.

------
dannysu
I was getting redirected to
[http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/](http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/)
if I clicked the link on HN.

If I copy & paste the link to a new tab, then it worked for me.

~~~
bsimpson
If I turn off Ghostery, the link loads for me.

They are probably trying to dissuade ad blocking. It might work better for
them if they told you what was happening (instead of just sending you to a
blank page).

~~~
scintill76
Or, it just breaks in a way they didn't intend or know about. I've had both
Ghostery and HTTPS Everywhere subtly break things, in cases where the author
probably wouldn't bother to target those users. I guess we're kind of asking
for it, running a client that doesn't comply with standards...

------
briandear
Has anyone ever died because of an unlicensed limo? Is it really a threat to
public safety? If consenting adults agree to a transaction, I am not sure how
that's the government's business. However, if an unlicensed vehicle was
portraying itself as a licensed vehicle, then you have a fraud issue, not a
public safety one.

~~~
MrApathy
Some years back NYC [1] (under Mayor Giuliani) instituted a policy whereby
drivers suspected of driving while intoxicated would have their vehicles
seized by the police. Unlike unlicensed limos, DWI is a real public safety
problem.

The problem with what NYC did, however, was that a driver could be found not
guilty of DWI and still have his car seized. There were many complaints
regarding due process, uneven applications, etc., and eventually the city
abandoned this policy.

I mention this not because I sympathize with drunk drivers (I don't), but
because it's not the first time the city has done something like this.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/24/nyregion/drive-drunk-
lose-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/24/nyregion/drive-drunk-lose-the-car-
principle-faces-a-test.html)

------
dools
Just another example of how prohibiting human behaviour instead of regulating
leads to over zealous police and undue burden on law abiding citizens.

They should take a page out of London's book and allow minicabs to operate.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Is the lack of any page displaying with adblocking turned on intentional, or
is it simply bad design?

~~~
barkingcat
It means you're using a bad ad blocker. Using uBlock origin it displays fine.

~~~
notwhereyouare
I had to disable my uBlock Origin in order to see the page

~~~
gorhill
Just checked and it works fine using default settings. If you added more
filter lists, the issue is likely caused by one of them.

------
timtas
Yet another reason why I've stopped using plural pronouns to refer to the
state at any level.

------
pbreit
Is this an Uber thing? I didn't see it mentioned.

~~~
_delirium
This is a much older fight in NYC than Uber. They're probably involved in a
good number of the cars in question in recent years, but a back-and-forth over
to what extent to tolerate vs. crack down on unlicensed taxi services has been
going on for decades. The general category is often called by the somewhat
racist term "gypsy cabs".

~~~
talmand
Why is that a racist term?

To be honest, I had never heard the term until recently when I heard it used
on a TV show.

~~~
PhineasRex
"gypsy" is an ethnic slur that refers to the Romani people.

~~~
talmand
Interesting. From my quick reading I can see why some would disagree with the
usage.

Although, I also find it interesting that, apparently, in English law it
refers to a nomadic person regardless of race or origin. Which is a use of
"gypsy" that I was familiar with.

------
bsder
What's the deal with all the Forbes links redirecting to welcome? How do I
stop this?

I tried checking the "Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the
page" box in Firefox, but it doesn't appear to be stopping it.

Presumably too many people are starting to use things like "Google Sent Me".

~~~
ukd1
Can we just ban submissions from sites like this?

~~~
bcoates
Here's a better, less Forbesy article that loads for me:

[http://www.amny.com/news/taxi-and-limousine-commission-
seizi...](http://www.amny.com/news/taxi-and-limousine-commission-seizing-of-
cars-is-unconstitutional-federal-judge-rules-1.10911628)

~~~
dang
Ok, we've changed the url to that from
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2015/10/13/j...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2015/10/13/judge-
rules-that-new-york-city-seizing-thousands-of-cars-without-warrants-is-
unconstitutional/). I'm not sure it's a better article, but probably close
enough.

------
c22
This is a stupid grammar nitpick I only offer in the hopes that you find it
useful for your writing. No dismissal of your arguments or denigration of your
character is intended.

I think you want the word "affected" in your second paragraph. Effects are the
result of causation, whereas affect refers to the causation. The citizens were
affected by the effects of this policy.

~~~
RHSeeger
Contrary to the opinions of others, I appreciated your post. While a nitpick,
you provided the both the correction and a good way to remember which word is
used in which situation. As someone who has to stop to consider which one to
use sometimes, I appreciate the extra effort.

~~~
david-given
You may be interested to know --- well, _I_ find it interesting --- that there
are lesser known meanings of 'affect' and 'effect' which are _the other way
round_. You can effect a change, where 'effect' a verb. And people can have an
affect, where 'affect' is a noun largely synonymous to 'mood'.

I believe it's even possible to affect affects by effecting an affect effect,
in effect. English is weird.

(Linguistic tangents are best tangents!)

~~~
logfromblammo
You may be able to distinguish between mood-noun "affect" and influence-verb
"affect" by pronunciation. I place the emphasis for the former on the first
syllable, just as in "affectation" whereas the emphasis is on the second
syllable in the latter. So they are homonyms, but not exactly homophones.

I never liked the verb sense of effect. It always seemed to me to be too much
like a managementspeak verbizating torturement of the ordinary noun sense of
effect. Obviously, the verb sense means "to produce an effect", but are you
really gonna diss the perfectly cromulent already-existing word that has meant
that for longer--"affect"? ~

 _In condimentarius scriptor apostrophe delenda est._

