This demonstrates why no government agency should be self-funding. If fees are collected they should be refunded to taxpayers. If a budget is needed it should go through the normal budget process and be given a budget directly from incoming taxes. So everything’s aboveboard and transparent.
As soon as an organization is self-funding it’s open to both regulatory capture and corruption. We need to remove the incentives for bad actors, not just trying to catch bad actors after the fact.
This would have a huge impact on small police departments who self-fund through tickets in the community exploitation. Police should not be tax farmers. Police should be for the people and buy the people, tax farmers are exploitive by their very nature. They should not be the same person.
I’ve never really understood how a “public” institution is expected to be funded by anything other than tax dollars
At the very least no fine or enforcement mechanism. I’m ok with for example a postal service charging for some service. But involuntary charges going towards funding the institution charging it is just rife with perverse incentives.
I see your point. But I still think the perverse incentives exist. Once you have customers, you deviate from your mission. Right now the US postal service is largest customer is bulk mail, spam. They’re basically stuck in regulatory capture now. They can’t do things to reduce unwanted spam, they can’t offer services to people to not deliver bulk mail. Because their largest customer is bulk mailers. The people receiving the mail aren’t their customers anymore. They’re the product.
I forget the name of the company exactly I think it was inbox, they were working in San Francisco, they would go to the post office and receive the mail for individuals then scan the mail and send it to people digitally. Basically it was the postal service but no physical delivery. They had a pilot program going, but then the bulk mailers got wind of it, and used pressure to shut it down. So innovation that’s available I think in Finland or Sweden is not a possible in the US due to regulatory capture.
That’s an known issue with any customer driven org too. Prioritizing existing markets and customers vs up and coming ones.
The postal service almost was set up to do small time banking and email services but got cut down by Congress. So they had tried to push for providing more services to meet existing demand, but we’re hamstrung on their efforts.
The push towards privitazation at all cost has really hurt the effectiveness and efficiency of government ran orgs in the United States.
Cops are just gangsters most people trust sadly. They are a protection racket that steals from you (taxes) and is actually not required to protect you at all.
The biggest and most successful gang.
TaXaTiOn iS tHeFt
tax bad
cops bad
corrupt military dictatorships goodWhat do you call taking someone’s money without their consent, using force/threat of violence?
Taxes pays my education and healthcare, it funds the military that makes russia think twice before invading my country, it builds and maintains all the roads and bridges I use every day to move around, it pays food and housing for the people that can’t afford that themselves.
I’m gladly paying taxes as long as it’s not all going to the pockets of corrupt politicans.
https://kbin.social/m/privacy@lemmy.ml/t/283970/Cops-still-take-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-do#entry-comment-1326204
Listen, I hate cops too, but if you’re taking part in and benefitting from modern society, you’re gonna have to chip in for that convenience. If you don’t like it, live off the grid.
Sure, but that wasn’t my point. My point is that you have no say, and therefore it isn’t voluntary, making it theft technically.
If you’re using definitions of a word that can not effectively differentiate between two very distinct things, you’re using the wrong definition or the wrong word.
Taxation is not theft. Piracy is not theft. Using definitions of theft that include them triggers George Orwell alarms in anyone who knows better.
How are they very distinct? If I am forced to pay someone money against my will, with threat of violence if I don’t, how is that not theft? Just because a state does it, does that make it different somehow?
If I didn’t vote for it, it is by definition against my will.
You are committing what is called an oversimplification fallacy. I’m assuming you’re an anarchist? If not, how is it very different, as you are opposing government’s right to run themselves just like an anarchist (do you see what an example of an oversimplification fallacy is?). If so, please understand that arguing definitions is not how you will convince the 99% of the world who think anarchism is nothing but puerile stupidity that it isn’t.
That said, you seem to have ignored half my point, that piracy isn’t theft. Or are you saying you think it is, as well? Was it theft before it was illegal?
Better than trying to pretend taxation is theft, you should probably just affirmatively attack taxation with real reasons.
With this thinking, getting paid for your work is theft for your employer.
no because those in power are always right: we must not question authority
It’s not a very good point. You do have a say: vote.
Though it can be reasonably argued that voting doesn’t work because of all the corruption, in which case all I can say is we need to stop the two party tyranny by ending FPTP voting and promote/enact ideas that reduce the influence that money can have on politics.
I would argue that voting doesn’t make it voluntary. Even if I don’t vote for a particular taxation, it might go through anyway if the majority wants it. Majority rule goes against the will of the minority.
If they were required to protect you, it would be better (not perfect, but better).
Alass, they have no duty to protect the people; Police Have No Duty to Protect the Public
Civil Forfeiture is theft and Qualified Immunity is a murder license. Not that there seems to be any way to convince anyone in power to fix it
Qualified Immunity is just straight up illegal. We just need to challenge it with the proper wording of the law that the Reconstruction Congress passed in 1871.
16 Crucial Words That Went Missing From a Landmark Civil Rights Law
The phrase, seemingly deleted in error, undermines the basis for qualified immunity, the legal shield that protects police officers from suits for misconduct.
By Adam Liptak Reporting from Washington
May 15, 2023
In a routine decision in March, a unanimous three-judge panel of a federal appeals court ruled against a Texas inmate who was injured when the ceiling of the hog barn he was working in collapsed. The court, predictably, said the inmate could not overcome qualified immunity, the much-criticized legal shield that protects government officials from suits for constitutional violations.
The author of the decision, Judge Don R. Willett, then did something unusual. He issued a separate concurring opinion to draw attention to the “game-changing arguments” in a recent law review article, one that seemed to demonstrate that the Supreme Court’s entire qualified immunity jurisprudence was based on a mistake.
“Wait, what?” Judge Willett wrote, incredulous.
In 1871, after the Civil War, Congress enacted a law that allowed suits against state officials for violations of constitutional rights. But the Supreme Court has said that the law, usually called Section 1983, did not displace immunities protecting officials that existed when the law was enacted. The doctrine of qualified immunity is based on that premise.
But the premise is wrong, Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, wrote in the article, “Qualified Immunity’s Flawed Foundation,” published in The California Law Review.
Between 1871, when the law was enacted, and 1874, when a government official produced the first compilation of federal laws, Professor Reinert wrote, 16 words of the original law went missing. Those words, Professor Reinert wrote, showed that Congress had indeed overridden existing immunities.
“What if the Reconstruction Congress had explicitly stated — right there in the original statutory text — that it was nullifying all common-law defenses against Section 1983 actions?” Judge Willett asked. “That is, what if Congress’s literal language unequivocally negated the original interpretive premise for qualified immunity?”
The original version of the law, the one that was enacted in 1871, said state officials who subject “any person within the jurisdiction of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution of the United States, shall, any such law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom or usage of the state to the contrary notwithstanding, be liable to the party injured in any action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.”
The words in italics, for reasons lost to history, were omitted from the first compilation of federal laws in 1874, which was prepared by a government official called “the reviser of the federal statutes.”
“The reviser’s error, whether one of omission or commission, has never been corrected,” Judge Willett wrote.
The logic of the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence is that Congress would not have displaced existing immunities without saying so. But Professor Reinert argued that Congress did say so, in so many words.
“The omitted language confirms that the Reconstruction Congress in 1871 intended to provide a broad remedy for civil rights violations by state officials,” Professor Reinert said in an interview, noting that the law was enacted soon after the three constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War: to outlaw slavery, insist on equal protection and guard the right to vote.
“Along with other contemporaneous evidence, including legislative history, it helps to show that Congress meant to fully enforce the Reconstruction Amendments via a powerful new cause of action,” Professor Reinert said.
Judge Willett, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, focused on the words of the original statute “in this text-centric judicial era when jurists profess unswerving fidelity to the words Congress chose.”
Qualified immunity, which requires plaintiffs to show that the officials had violated a constitutional right that was clearly established in a previous ruling, has been widely criticized by scholars and judges across the ideological spectrum. Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, wrote that it does not appear to resemble the immunities available in 1871.
Professor Reinert’s article said that “is only half the story.”
“The real problem,” he wrote, “is that no qualified immunity doctrine at all should apply in Section 1983 actions, if courts stay true to the text adopted by the enacting Congress.”
Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of “Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable,” said that “there is general agreement that the qualified immunity doctrine, as it currently operates, looks nothing like any protections that may have existed in 1871.” The new article, she said, identified “additional causes for skepticism.”
She added that “Judge Willett’s concurring opinion has brought much-needed, and well-deserved, attention to Alex Reinert’s insightful article.”
Judge Willett wrote that he and his colleagues are “middle-management circuit judges” who cannot overrule Supreme Court decisions. “Only that court,” he wrote, “can definitively grapple with Section 1983’s enacted text and decide whether it means what it says.”
Lawyers for the injured Texas inmate, Kevion Rogers, said they were weighing their options.
“The scholarship that Judge Willett unearthed in his concurrence is undoubtedly important to the arguments that civil rights litigants can make in the future,” the lawyers, Matthew J. Kita and Damon Mathias, said in a statement.
“Normally,” they added, “you cannot raise a new argument for reversal for the first time on appeal, much less at the Supreme Court of the United States. But one would think that if the Supreme Court acknowledges that it has been reciting and applying the statute incorrectly for nearly a century, there must be some remedy available to litigants whose judgments are not yet final.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. @adamliptak • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2023, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: 16 Crucial Words That Went Missing From a Landmark Civil Rights Law.
Why would those in power fix it? they are benefiting from the police keeping those with power in power. This way those in power don’t even have to pay the bonus they provide to the police.
this happens everywhere with a strong police force. just moreso in the us
People always tell me I should trust cops more, this is a handy fact to have in my back pocket.
ACAB.
Yes, Ballentine, even you, you fluffy little snitch.
In case you didn’t know: Fuck the police. It’s not that I don’t like them, i fucking hate them…
I really think it is the system. It is a system that gives positive feedback for negative human behavior. And I have no solution for it. But I believe that regardless who becomes police it will break their humanity. And that seems like a bad system to me.
thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Definitely the system and not the job itself. As someone living in northern Europe, there are massive headlines and repercussions whenever cops misbehave (for example, every case of a cop pulling their gun here has to be documented, and could result in fines or getting fired if not appropriate, even without firing it). It was hard for me to understand why Americans hated cops until I realized they could get away with murder without being held accountable for their actions, and often would.
There’s a large number of people in the US that fetishize the police. They honestly believe that if a cop shoots someone, they must have had a good reason and will 💯 support the cop without hearing any details. These people view the world as a struggle between good and evil. The cops and themselves are on the side of good, and if they don’t take aggressive action to keep evil at bay, evil will win and destroy us all. This is why Conservatism, Nationalism, and Christian fanaticism go together so well; they all share the same fundamental outlook on the world. The right wing has weaponized this in the US and we’re paying the price for it.
Hey man, it’s only 99% of them that make the rest look bad.
This was a good article, US centric, but interesting. Would have been better if it didn’t start with a picture of a happy looking dog and a seizure of $100k cash which the author can’t even explain. The law says you have to prove you didn’t get the money illegally, if I had $100k in my suitcase I think I would be able to explain how I got it.
In the US, you are innocent until proven guilty. Civil asset forfeiture runs against this idea. The burden should be on the government to prove this stuff is ill-gotten gains, anything else is unamerican.
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Even if you immediately explain why they will take the cash anyway. Then you spend months in court paying lawyer fees for the chance of getting it back.
Try not to suck any cop dick on your way across the parking lot.
Look its the US cops, it’s like not prodding venomous spiders, it’s basic self protection.
You do realizing that explaining why will not cause them to let you keep the $100k. They WILL seize it, regardless of your reasons. They take note of those reasons you give so they can use that against you in a court of law, however.
Do you like your cops freshly washed, or do you like that end of shift musk, for when you’re sucking that cop dick?
It must be nice to have thousands of dollars and have no idea where it came from. But realistically it’s highly unlikely that you would walk around with it.
Presumably you either were handed it in which case you know where you got it from, or you got it out of the bank in which case you must have a business or lottery winnings or inheritance you can point to.
I cannot imagine any innocent scenario where you have vast of money (in currency form) of which you are unable to provide origin information on.
This is the same argument as “you wouldn’t object to a search if you have nothing to hide.” The fact is that anyone walking around with thousands of dollars, however “nice” you imagine that to be, is entitled to do so without any explanation due to you or the government.
No it’s common for cash. Anytime you buy anything very expensive, such as a house or you want to take out a fun contract you have to submit to anti money laundering searches. This is also true of physical cash.
Sorry, but you’re conflating “using” cash with “having” cash. I can’t speak to the rest of the world, but in the United States, the 4th amendment of the Bill of Rights states that you’re to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. You can have any amount of money on your person for any reason you like, so long as you don’t do something illegal with it. These cops are stealing cash under the pretense that it could have been used for something illegal, which directly conflicts with the idea of being innocent until proven guilty. The sham they perpetrate is that it’s the cash being accused, not the person. It’s bullshit and they have no intention of doing anything other than keeping the cash.
Want to withdraw all of your cash in dollar bills so that you can lay on it like a mattress? Legal, and cops shouldn’t have any claim to it.
Want to withdraw all of your cash in golden dollar coins and try to swim in it like Scrooge McDuck? An ill-advised plan, considering how fucked the American healthcare system works, but legal, and once again, cops should have no claim to it.
Just having property - cash, gold, diamonds, very small unicorn figurines, whatever - is not an illegal or even inherently suspicious act.
Without probable cause, there’s no reason a government agent should ever be able to take any property from you.
People sometimes carry tens of thousands of dollars in cash to buy cars in-person. It’s more common than you think.
So they can advise where the cash comes from. The problem wasn’t carrying it it was not been able to give an adequate explanation as to its origin.
That process requires a lengthy and expensive court case and even then sometimes they don’t get the cash back.
Also even if they give an immediate explanation to the officer they are pretty much guaranteed to take the cash anyway. The cop has a financial incentive to do so and will assume the victim is lying.
This poor fool thinks the cops give a fuck what you say or what proof you have.
The cops don’t care, they’ll claim you’re lying and take the cash anyway.
The possession of the money is treated as probable cause. The police are not tasked with finding the ultimate truth of things, just acting on probable cause.
So you’re on the road with $10,000 in cash. The police find out. You tell them the true reason. They write it down, then seize the money because it was suspicious to you to carry $10,000 in cash.
Then, of course, you can go petition to get the money back. At which time, you have to prove by a preponderance of evidence (the same bar as if you were suing them for damages) to get the money back.
the explanation you get to give to the judge as you now get to fight for your money back. the police officer is under no obligation to even listen to you as he steals from you.
You don’t just have to explain it, you have to hire a lawyer and take them to court to prove it, which is opposite of every other law in the country where you are innocent unless proven guilty.
I’m not agreeing with it, but if I had $100k in my back pocket I would know how I got it. Like I said, the article should have focused on normal people with reasonable and understandable amounts, who probably wouldn’t be able to afford the court costs either.
The point is, that’s not enough. You have to prove it in a court of law. Which, for $100,000, might cost most of that $100,000 and years of time.
There have been some clear-cut seizure cases where the legitimacy of the money was obvious and it was either not worth the legal fees to clear up or simply insane to clear up. We are a “reasonable doubt” country for a reason, and if you can’t prove someone came about their money illegally, you shouldn’t be stealing it from them.
and the cop isnt going to give a shit to listen to you, because hes still gonna take it, and you have to expend time and money going to court to prove the money is innocent.
and even then you might not get it back
You’re assuming they don’t just kill you on the spot to make sure you don’t take it back
theres been plenty of people who ahd proof how they got their money legitimately, and still had it taken.
Why?
because police want to buy more military gear, and your seized cash goes directly into their toy fund.
Who I am, what I’ve said, what I’m in support of and not in support of, that stuff isn’t information I want shared willy nilly with the rest of the world. I like choosing who gets to know me.
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