6 Completely Legal Ways The Cops Can Screw You

By admin on January 25, 2013

We are so lucky to be living in an era of law when it’s no longer common for, say, suspects to be interrogated with live cobras tied to the ends of nightsticks. Unfortunately, there are still many colorful ways the police can royally screw you while Lady Justice shrugs.

For instance, you might be surprised to learn that right now in the U.S., it’s actually legal for the cops to…

#6. Steal Your Stuff

Imagine you had your car stolen, but then fortune smiles upon you and the cops find it after the thief used it to smuggle 200 pounds of cocaine across the border, running over 30 children in the process while sexually assaulting the car itself.

You realize you’re going to need to get all of its fluids replaced from a mechanic with a soft voice and gentle hands, but you still want it back, because hey, it’s your car, right?

Yeeeah, there’s some bad news: It has been sold to buy a new espresso machine for the station’s break room.

It’s called civil asset forfeiture. You probably already have heard of something like this, where the police get to seize the car and house of some drug kingpin and stick the money in the department’s budget (that’s criminal forfeiture).

But then there’s this loophole where the police can seize anything they suspect has been used in a crime, even if it doesn’t belong to the criminal, and even if there hasn’t been a conviction.

Then if you, as the actual owner of the goods, try to challenge it, the burden of proof is on you to prove you didn’t know it was going to be used in a crime. That’s civil forfeiture.

For the police, there is no legal requirement to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that, say, your TV set was once used by a ring of Dutch pedophiles to view kiddie porn. They can simply take it, without ever giving it back, even if they never formally charge anyone for a crime.

You’re Shitting Me!

In 2004, Zaher El-Ali, a Jordanian immigrant and U.S. citizen, sold a truck to a man who agreed to pay for it in installments. Before he could finish the payments though, the man was arrested for drunk driving and the truck was seized. Seeing as the car still legally belonged to Zaher (he still had the title), he demanded it back. The police refused, and possibly laughed.

Because civil forfeitures are so simple, over 40 percent of police executives admitted their budgets depend on cash from them. That means each year, those stations have a quota of forfeitures to fill and technically there is really no stopping them from filling it with YOUR Xbox.
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