
Stop and Seize - misiti3780
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/
======
keerthiko
I didn't find this listed, so obligatory Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
link[0].

The extent to which authority figures intervene in normal citizen life in the
US always seems like some medieval European feudal lord stuff to me.

[0]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks&list=PLmKbqjSZR8T...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks&list=PLmKbqjSZR8TZa7wyVoVq2XMHxxWREyiFc)

------
armenarmen
Organizing the police to be parasites rather than predators of narcos. A few
steps away from 'payola' but still.

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nateabele
Yet another reason why you _never_ talk to the police, and _never_ consent to
a search.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc)

~~~
acjohnson55
Good luck with that. I agree with you, but it's hardly a solution given that
you can be arrested on practically any pretense.

~~~
zipwitch
Unless you know the right magic spells to invoke in order to keep the demons
away. I know one that goes, "I'm not consenting to any searches. Am I free to
go? Am I under arrest?" If you keep chanting it in the right tone, there's a
good chance you'll escape.

~~~
TheCraiggers
"...there's a good chance you'll escape."

I'd love to see a citation on that, because I can easily see that going the
other way: cop considers you a smart-ass and decides to teach you a lesson.
Maybe you appear nervous or he/she claims that your eyes are glazed, and now
has probable cause to detain you further and get a warrant to have your car
torn apart looking for drugs or other contraband.

Yes, you'll eventually win in court if you're truly innocent and you keep
saying you don't consent to searches, ask if you're free to go, and ask for a
lawyer. Of course, that doesn't mean the officer can't make your life hell
during and after the stop if they so desire. The point is, they have the
power, not you. You can't even leave until they say you can. The best you can
hope for is that the cop maybe gets a reprimand after you complain, and good
luck getting any compensation beyond that.

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rbcgerard
1 in 12 households are unbanked -
[https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/](https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/)

I'd bet far more of these people are getting being hurt by this than the "bad
guys"

~~~
icantthinkofone
So about 8%. Bordering on market insignificance. Insignificant in a lot of
areas but definitely not the norm.

~~~
pessimizer
>So about 8%. Bordering on market insignificance.

That's crazy talk.

~~~
icantthinkofone
Some web development companies drop support for browsers when their versions
drop below 10%. Not crazy at all.

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a3n
Highway robbery.

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jmadsen
Old news, but who's doing anything about it?

~~~
davidw
I did something - I flagged it as being off topic in that it's 1) politics and
2) mainstream news.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530)

I'd also recommend that people get more involved in politics to stop stuff
like this. _However_ , please do that elsewhere - there are _tons_ of places
on the internet to talk politics, but only one Hacker News.

~~~
danieltillett
I see you are being down voted. I do understand your view point, but I don’t
see where politics comes in and unfortunately this story is far from
mainstream. Now maybe if this happened to Kim or Miley then it would be
mainstream, off topic, and something would change.

~~~
davidw
I don't care if you folks downvote me. I'd rather that than you all
transforming HN into a site for politics and "outrage" articles, and ruining
it.

The Washington Post is a fairly mainstream news organization, isn't it?

It's very, very much a political and "outrage" story. Does anyone really feel
'intellectually gratified' after reading it? I know I don't. I feel angry. To
me that means it's not really something that belongs here. This isn't a site
for political activism.

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diydsp
What's interesting to me, in addition to the obvious major point, is _how_
this process is taught: in private seminars.

I have seen this in other areas involving questionable practices, especially
involving law enforcement. Training agencies put together professional
seminars- just as any of us might take a programming seminar- and teach
lessons that "improve" the officers' skills, but at the same time, in the
privacy of the seminar, strain the boundaries of what's legal.

That's the part that I find fascinating. In contrast to larger-scale fascist
movements, in which anti-national behavior is spread from the top-down (I'm
thinking of slave-era American and modern Arabic racism here or the classic
example of Nazism), this type of nation- and rights-destroying behavior
emanates from numerous, distributed "educational facilities."

It's fascinating to me because there's no single identifiable point to put the
finger of blame on, because the erosion happens so gradually, the damages to
the common good take place in such tiny increments and because it's not
motivated by a common, uniting goal (although law enforcement is the
simulacrum), but by numerous distributed organizations motivated by making
cash via the trainings and who motivate the participants the same way. It's as
if multi-level marketing were getting applied to professional gang-banger
training.

And through the logic of "training seminar," why exactly _not_ produce week-
long seminars in gang-banging? It's not illegal to teach people how to break
the law, there is a need in the form of customers who want to know how to do
it and there is money to be made in educating others in the arts of
carjacking, robbery and drug sales using slides, role-playing and case
studies. It is up to the customer whether or not to make use of the
information...

One final point is that there is an implied escalation of consent in the
"professional" veneer of the "training seminar." This happens due to our
assumptions that 1. spending money on a seminar results in at least some
useful information 2. information learned in a private seminar is not expected
to be unethical or useless. This leads to training seminars on law enforcement
(and several other topics) operating as an "offshore zone" where unacceptable
behavior gets legitimized: The police chief could never train their officers
to perform manipulative, borderline illegal practices, but he can easily sign
off on a training where these practices occur and become part of their
department[s repertoire. The kinds of conversations and education that could
never take place in a public-supported institution such as a police station
can easily happen outside the publicly-supported sphere, in the conference
room of a hotel, led by a small, scarcely memorable, unaccountable training
organization.

~~~
pixl97
>It's not illegal to teach people how to break the law

I'm sorry, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to jail.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130908/00044524444/eight...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130908/00044524444/eight-
months-jail-teaching-people-how-to-pass-lie-detector-test.shtml)

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/09/polygraph_countermea...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/09/polygraph_countermeasures_man_jailed/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6308878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6308878)

~~~
chillingeffect
> I'm sorry, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to jail.

That's a disproportionate amount of bluster given that 1. That was a _single_
counterexample. 2\. The article you posted says:

Federal District Judge Liam O’Grady said: "There’s nothing unlawful about
maybe 95 per cent of the business he [Dixon] conducted” but found criminal
fault in his willingness to assist would-be applicants and others to lie to
federal agencies, the Washington Post reported.

In other words, the polygraph-beating information was not illegal, but he was
prosecuted for helping people lie to federal agencies (a crime itself).
Undercover agents ensnared him via a technicality. But if the class were
restricted to polygraph-beating, without persuading students to lie to
federales, he wouldn't have served his relatively minor sentence of 8 months.

Contrast _one guy_ going to jail for 8 months with the _hundreds of millions_
of dollars seized from people not charged with crimes in the original article.
Consider the zillions of materials and resources available for learning to
assault someone, to hack into computer systems, to break locks, websites on
"how to rob someone" (google it) and make explosives and the distinction is
clear.

~~~
pixl97
That is a single counterexample simply because I decided to post a single one.
Working in the firearms industry for years has shown me that if the ATF/FBI
don't like what you are doing they can legally make your life hell. 'Someone'
makes an anonymous tip, judge rubber stamps a warrant to search all your
premises. Two parts from unrelated weapons in the same building, conspiracy to
build a machine gun.

What you don't understand is, you don't understand the full technicalities of
the law and your adversary does. Does it really matter if they don't convict
you in the end if you exhaust all your resources fighting them on lawyers?

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adaml_623
Is this an opportunity for a startup to automate the process of retrieving
money?

Like [http://www.getfixed.me/](http://www.getfixed.me/) but on a more serious
scale!

(I'm not in the US so not something I can do)

~~~
FiatLuxDave
This is a good and socially valuable startup idea. The next time HN has a
thread about startup ideas, I hope that you (or someone else reading this)
posts this.

Kudos for posting this.

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davidwparker
Previous discussions from submission ~month+ ago.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280889)

------
jchrisa
Related discussion from 2 days ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444785)

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peg_leg
This has been going on to some extent for decades. Now that John Oliver (a
satirist) does a story it's all of a sudden front page news?!

~~~
Torgo
I first read about this in Reader's Digest in the 1980's or early 1990's. Yes
I am annoyed by the fact that nobody gave a shit until a TV funnyman talked
about it decades later, accompanied by a million Facebook posts of "why is it
that only comedians talk about this!!!1" Contrary to popular opinion, this is
the sign of a public that doesn't read, doesn't actually care about news, and
isn't informed. John Oliver gets his story ideas from the news, it's all there
if his fans cared to look.

~~~
goldfeld
I think it's really plain to see how even the most educated youth today think
they're getting culture enough from TV series, documentaries, Facebook links
and Wikipedia trips. Who ever reads a longform piece of good journalism or
(gasp!) a book anymore? I guess the answer is those who are force-fed this
ancient and boring medium by means of still being able to afford a
citizenship-minded Liberal Arts degree that would otherwise implicate them in
more debt than their projected lifetime employment value.

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einrealist
If you need to carry "seizable" amounts of money around, you should put that
in an envelope along with a written statement that describes the purpose. And
if possible, the envelope should be sealed by a solicitor.

I like to see what happens then. It should be a sufficient hurdle.

~~~
FireBeyond
You mean like in multiple of the examples that are cited in the article? Lay
church members carrying funds from their congregation, going to purchase
property for the church (well, the police said “both of them disclaimed
ownership of the money, so it was seized” - no kidding, because it was for the
church).

Or the gentleman buying a car, who had the car ad, contact information for the
prospective seller, who confirmed that he had an appointment to meet that
person? “No, based on my investigation I have concluded this is money for a
drug purchase”.

