Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him for a crime

Charles Clarke entered the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport last February eager to go back to his mother after a months-long visit with relatives. But instead of a quick, easy trip home to Orlando, Clarke lost his life savings — $11,000 in cash — to law enforcement officials who never even proved he committed a crime.

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Clarke, a 24-year-old college student, said losing that $11,000 was "devastating." He's been forced to live with his mom, trumping his plans to move closer to school. He's fallen back on other family for financial support. And he had to take out loans for school instead of paying for it up front — for which he's still in debt. "It's been a struggle for me," Clarke, who's now fighting in court to get his money back, said.

But law enforcement officials may have been working within the confines of the law when they took Clarke's money. Under federal and state laws that allow what's called "civil forfeiture," law enforcement officers can seize and keep someone's property without proving the person was guilty of a crime. They just need probable cause to believe the assets are being used as part of criminal activity, typically drug trafficking. Police can then absorb the value of this property — be it cash, cars, guns, or something else — as profit: either through state programs, or under a federal program known as Equitable Sharing that lets local and state police get up to 80 percent of the value of what they seize as money for their departments.

So police can not only seize people's property without proving involvement in a crime, but they have a financial incentive to do so.

People can get their property back through court challenges, but these cases can often be very expensive and take months or years.

It's these laws that law enforcement officials cited in taking Clarke's cash, and in seizing thousands of other people's property across the country. But Clarke's story shows just how flimsy the initial basis for taking someone's money can be — starting with, simply, how his checked luggage smelled.

The government is mainly basing its forfeiture of Clarke's $11,000 on one claim: His checked bag and money smelled like marijuana, so, according to law enforcement, the money was very likely obtained or meant for illegal drug activity.

A spokesperson for the US Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of Kentucky said it couldn't directly comment on a case with pending litigation, but he pointed to a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent's affidavit outlining why police felt justified in seizing Clarke's cash.

Full story at link: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/17/8792623/civil-forfeiture-charles-clarke

 

[manboychef]

I guess now if someone that isn't already wealthy is carrying around hard currency he is already a bad guy, regardless of if he committed a crime. I guess he should have used one of our "fine" banking institutions that have allowed real criminals to launder millions upon millions of dollars to wire the money to himself....for a fee nonetheless.

It is time for the people to come together and start asking the hard questions, and demanding answers. We are a nation founded on rebellion, we can't even hold onto our money without being subject to harassment! This is not what our founding fathers wanted, and you can call me "old fashioned" but I don't want it either.

 

[TheRapperGoneBad]

I guess now if someone that isn't already wealthy is carrying around hard currency he is already a bad guy, regardless of if he committed a crime. I guess he should have used one of our "fine" banking institutions that have allowed real criminals to launder millions upon millions of dollars to wire the money to himself....for a fee nonetheless.

It is time for the people to come together and start asking the hard questions, and demanding answers. We are a nation founded on rebellion, we can't even hold onto our money without being subject to harassment! This is not what our founding fathers wanted, and you can call me "old fashioned" but I don't want it either.

Quoting for the message behind your post.

We can be beatin with out reason
Shot an killed for nothing
And have our money stolen directly from out pockets with as little as a police officer accusing you of a crime.

What happened to rights? When will America stop this digusting treatment of its citizens..

How many more innocent lives need to be ruined before someone actually gets the picture.

Using there position of power, given to them by the people for a form of protection, to take anything an everything we have for personal gain an to further repress the people.

Stand up to this these fuckers deserve to rot.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

The story I posted also reminds me of this one.

http://www.abqjournal.com/580107/news/dea-agents-seize-16000-from-aspiring-music-video-producer.html

DEA to traveler: Thanks, I’ll take that cash

Maybe he should have taken traveler’s checks.

But it’s too late for that now. All the money – $16,000 in cash – that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque.

An incident some might argue is still theft, just with the government’s blessing.

Rivers, 22, wasn’t detained and has not been charged with any crime since his money was taken last month.

That doesn’t matter. Under a federal law enforcement tool called civil asset forfeiture, he need never be arrested or convicted of a crime for the government to take away his cash, cars or property – and keep it.

Agencies like the DEA can confiscate money or property if they have a hunch, a suspicion, a notion that maybe, possibly, perhaps the items are connected with narcotics. Or something else illegal.


Or maybe the fact that the person holding a bunch of cash is a young black man is good enough.

“What this is, is having your money stolen by a federal agent acting under the color of law,” said Michael Pancer, a San Diego attorney who represents Rivers, an aspiring music video producer. “It’s a national epidemic. If my office got four to five cases just recently, and I’m just one attorney, you know this is happening thousands of times.”

A Washington Post investigation last year found that local, state and federal agents nationwide have seized $2.5 billion in cash from almost 62,000 people since 2001 – without warrants or indictments. It’s unknown how many got their money back.

It happened, Rivers said, to him on April 15 as he was traveling on Amtrak from Dearborn, Mich., near his hometown of Romulus, Mich., to Los Angeles to fulfill his dream of making a music video. Rivers, in an email, said he had saved his money for years, and his mother and other relatives scraped together the rest of the $16,000.

Rivers said he carried his savings in cash because he has had problems in the past with taking out large sums of money from out-of-state banks.

A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied.

Rivers was the only passenger singled out for a search by DEA agents – and the only black person on his portion of the train, Pancer said.

In one of the bags, the agent found the cash, still in the Michigan bank envelope.

“I even allowed him to call my mother, a military veteran and (hospital) coordinator, to corroborate my story,” Rivers said. “Even with all of this, the officers decided to take my money because he stated that he believed that the money was involved in some type of narcotic activity.”

Rivers was left penniless, his dream deferred.

“These officers took everything that I had worked so hard to save and even money that was given to me by family that believed in me,” Rivers said in his email. “I told (the DEA agents) I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money. They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that.”

Other travelers had witnessed what happened. One of them, a New Mexico man I’ve written about before but who asked that I not mention his name, provided a way for Rivers to get home, contacted attorneys – and me.

“He was literally like my guardian angel that came out of nowhere,” Rivers said.

Sean Waite, the agent in charge for the DEA in Albuquerque, said he could not comment on the Rivers case because it is ongoing. He disputed allegations that Rivers was targeted because of his race.

Waite said that in general DEA agents look for “indicators” such as whether the person bought an expensive one-way ticket with cash, if the person is traveling from or to a city known as a hot spot for drug activity, if the person’s story has inconsistencies or if the large sums of money found could have been transported by more conventional means.

“We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” Waite said. “It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.”

DEA agents may choose to ask the person whether his or her possessions can be searched in what is called a “consensual encounter.” If the subject refuses, the bags – but not the person – can be held until a search warrant is obtained, he said.

Waite said that he could not provide exact figures on how often seizures occur in Albuquerque but that last week the DEA had five “consensual encounters” that resulted in seizures.

Whatever is seized is held during an internal administrative process (read: not public) while a case is made to connect the property to narcotics. Subjects can file a claim to have the items returned – and then they wait, sometimes forever.

While travelers like Rivers still have to worry about DEA agents, state and local law enforcement in New Mexico no longer has these virtually unlimited seizure powers. Five days before Rivers’ encounter in Albuquerque, Gov. Susana Martinez signed into law a bill that bars state and local law enforcement from seizing money or property under civil asset forfeiture. The law takes effect in July.

But the new state law won’t supersede the federal law, meaning federal agencies such as the DEA are still free to take your cash on arguably the flimsiest of legal grounds.

Meanwhile, Rivers is back in Michigan, dreaming, praying.

“He’s handed this over to God,” his attorney said.

Which seems infinitely safer than handing over anything further to government agents.

 

[cj]

So much for the land of the free

 

[manboychef]

Once again the absurdity of the DEA knows no bounds. The cold consent searches are bullshit too. So many people fit that criteria (one way ticket bought with cash, large sum of money that could have been brought a different way {what do they mean? like bring it as change in a giant calgon water bottle, as travellers checks that you have to pay for, wired to a bank that has a bunch of fees for withdrawing your money}going too or from a city that is a drug hotspot...most cities are drug hotspots so this is moot)

If you do not comply with cold consent searches they just take your bag and wait for a search warrant, which they will no doubt get because we live in a police state. They say his bag smelled like marijuana and a dog hit on it. It is proven that dogs are wrong 87% of the time, and most cops say they smell marijuana even though they don't in order to take away our 16th amendment rights.

University study produces over 200 K-9 false alerts



The accuracy of drug- and explosives-sniffing dogs is affected by human handlers’ beliefs, possibly in response to subtle, unintentional cues, UC Davis researchers have found.

The study, published in the January issue of the journal Animal Cognition, found that detection-dog teams erroneously “alerted,” or identified a scent, when there was no scent present more than 200 times — particularly when the handler believed that there was scent present.

“It isn’t just about how sensitive a dog’s nose is or how well-trained a dog is,” says Lisa Lit, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurology and the study’s lead author. “There are cognitive factors affecting the interaction between a dog and a handler that can impact the dog’s performance.”

And it turns out, these factors can be even more important than the sensitivity of a dog’s sniffer.

“Dogs are exceptionally keen at interpreting subtle cues, so handlers need to be cognizant of that to optimize the overall team performance,” adds Anita M. Oberbauer, UC Davis chair of the Department of Animal Science and the study’s senior author.

To evaluate the effects of handler beliefs and expectations on detection-dog performance, the researchers recruited 18 handler-detection dog teams from law-enforcement agencies. All of the teams were certified by an agency for either drug detection, explosives detection or both.

The dogs all were trained to either alert passively at the location of a scent by sitting or laying down, alert actively by barking or by doing both. The teams included 14 male dogs and four female dogs, including Labrador retrievers, Belgian Malinois, German Shepherd dogs and Dutch Shepherd dogs. The dogs’ level of experience ranged from two to seven years and their human partners had as many as 18 years of dog-handling experience.

A church was selected as the location for the study, since it was unlikely to have contained either explosives or drugs in the past. It was also a place where neither the dogs nor the handlers had been before. The researchers created four separate rooms for the dogs to examine or “clear.”

The handlers were told that there might be up to three of their target scents in each room, and that there would be a piece of red construction paper in two of the rooms that identified the location of the target scent. However, there were no target scents — explosives or drugs — placed in any of the rooms.

Each room represented a different experimental condition or scenario:

In room #1 the experimenter did nothing.
In room #2 she taped a piece of red construction paper to a cabinet.
In room #3 she placed decoy scents, two sausages and two tennis balls hidden together out of view.
In room #4 she placed a piece of red construction paper at the location of hidden decoy scents, two sausages and two tennis balls.
The dog-handler teams conducted two separate, five-minute searches of each room. When handlers believed their dogs had indicated a target scent, an observer recorded the location indicated by handlers. All of the teams searched the rooms in a different order.

Although there should have been no alerts in any of the rooms, there were alerts in all of them. And more alerts occurred at the target locations indicated by human suggestion (red construction paper) than at locations of increased dog interest (sausages and tennis balls).

In the early 20th century in Germany, a horse named Clever Hans was believed to be capable of counting and other tasks. It was later determined that Clever Hans was actually responding to the minute, postural and facial cues of his trainer and other observers. Similarly, detection dogs may be alerted to subtle and unintentional human cues that direct dog responses, including pointing, nodding head-turning and gazing.

Although Lit is careful to note that her findings do not mitigate the abilities of handlers and their dog teams to perform successfully, she believes they are significant. It is her hope that the study can be replicated and expanded to further assess hidden cues handlers may be giving their dogs. “It might be the case that everyone is doing the same types of things so that [they could be addressed] directly,” she says. END

Barry Continues:

K-9’s cannot smell through material. Odors permeate out and create a scent cone that the dog detects. Almost everything has pores for odors to
permeate. Even plastic baggies have tiny, microscopic pores. To prove this to yourself, place tuna inside a plastic baggie and sniff the outside of the bag. You will notice you cannot smell the fish. Wait a few hours and you will notice you can smell the permeated fish odor on the outside of
the baggie. Lead is a heavy metal and non-porous but if you hide your stash in a lead box, the K-9 handler will become suspicious.

Temperatures affect permeation. Colder temperatures slow permeation so freezing your stash in a block of ice slows the permeation to almost
nothing but blocks of ice could make a smart K-9 handler suspicious. The trick is to secret your stash in materials that have a slow permeation rate without contaminating the outside of the packaging. You must then hurry and transport your stash before the pot odors have time to permeate and develop a scent cone on the outside of the packaging.

Foil and glass and oils and cold temperatures are all good to use because they all slow permeation.

Trying to mask odors does not work. K-9’s smell like humans see. When presented with a bowl of stew, humans see all the ingredients but only
smell one odor…stew. Dogs can separate odors with their supernatural snouts. When a K-9 sniffs the same bowl, she smells onions, pepper,
tomatoes, beef, beans, etc. So if you place your herb in a plastic baggie, spray it with perfume, then seal it in plastic tubing and drop it in your auto’s fuel tank, a scent cone will develop on the outside of the fuel tank. The K-9 will enter this scent cone and smell the plastic baggie, the gasoline, the perfume, the plastic tubing and the marijuana. This explains how my K-9 detected hundreds of pounds of marijuana hidden in gasoline tanks.

K-9’s are trained to detect marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. They are not trained to detect mushrooms or LSD.

I hope this information keeps you out of a human cage that is far worse than the cages kops keep their dogs.

Drug sniffing dogs have all the credibility of polygraph testing, and should thus, not be allowed to give the go ahead to search. If you say no you cannot search, and there is no reasonable suspicion (ie:drugs in plain view, scent of recently burned crack or marijuana, or erratic driving) there should not be a search conducted. You can't even use a person acting nervous because most people become nervous when a cop pulls them over...it is a natural reaction to the realization that you are going to at the very least have an extra bill that month, or may be losing your right to drive, or in the extreme, your freedom.

 

[SmokingAces]

So much for the land of the free

That's what I was thinking. Stories like this one make me feel physically sick.