How California Representatives Became Highway Robbers – Orange County Register
Sacramento – An organized group of Southern California bandits has shamelessly hijacked armored cars and seized hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. heavily armed thief Allegedly They have damaged trucks, harassed their victims, covered up video cameras – and even celebrated their hauling. “Wow!” And “way to go, dude,” he reportedly cheered after pulling off a recent robbery.
You’d be forgiven for assuming this is the latest example of California’s ongoing crime wave, symbolizing “third World” Scenes of stolen goods trains and looting and looting. But it is nothing like that. In fact, it is more dangerous than a normal crime spree because a sheriff is the mastermind and his representatives are robbing armored cars.
For example, San Bernardino County deputies intercepted the same Imperial Logistics armored-car driver twice and took a total of $1.1 million in cash owned by legal marijuana dispensaries, per news reports. The government has not charged the armored car company nor the cannabis firms with any crimes, but the sheriff keeps the cash anyway. Critics are right to call it a highway robbery.
Welcome to the dystopian world of civil-asset confiscation, a drug-war relic that allows police — often at the behest of district attorneys — to take people’s cash, cars and properties on the basis of their suspicion that the property is a crime. was involved in. The authorities do not have to prove that the owner of the property was involved in any crime.
Agencies have every incentive to regularly employ this strategy, as they keep the income and spend the money on vehicles, guns, and more. News reports found that police are so adept at abusing this process that they sometimes target people who have the kind of fancy SUVs and sports cars they want to have available in their motor pool.
This process not only denies Americans their right to be protected against government searches and seizures from the Fourth Amendment, but it undermines the credibility of law enforcement by turning the police into our adversaries. San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dickus claims that, “80 percent of the marijuana in dispensaries was grown illegally.” If this is true, then the sheriff just needs to go to court and prove it.
Did I mention that the police agencies—not the drivers, nor the cannabis companies—are breaking the law, or at least seriously rambling on? California law requires police to obtain a conviction in an underlying drug case before confiscating personal property. In addition, federal law prohibits sheriffs from using forfeiture proceeds to target licensed marijuana businesses and reduce current revenue.
Why should the police follow the law when they can take whatever they want and force the victims to file suit to get their property back? Police often target victims without any means. Criminal enterprises can be surprisingly creative, as anyone who has studied cartels will know. Similarly, American law-enforcement scofflaws have come up with a creative act as well as laws upholding oddball rights.
“Similar Sharing” Program Allows local agencies to “partner” with the federal bureau to conduct forfeiture operations. By magically turning a local raid into a federal one, sheriffs can bypass their own state laws. Then the players and the local people distributed the loot. In this situation, the San Bernardino Department can keep 80 percent of the more than $1 million that was confiscated. And who’s going to enforce federal law when the Fed gets 20-percent of the action? If you wonder how justice works in countries where the police are untrustworthy, this should give insight.
Despite Deecus’ condemnation of fighting illegal development, it’s clear what’s going on. Sheriffs are taking advantage of the gap between state and federal marijuana laws. Thirty-seven states have legalized some marijuana sales (recreational or medical), but the Fed stubbornly keeps weed classified as a Schedule I narcotic along the lines of heroin and LSD.
It’s not a partisan issue, by the way, as both Biden and the Trump administration have been. dastardly to the point.
The Liberal Institute for Justice recently filed a federal civil rights court case, which makes this compelling point: “(I) t makes no sense to confiscate the currency legally collected from Empyreal’s vehicles as it should be used for investigation or enforcement against any business suspected of non-compliance.” Instead of being securely distributed throughout the financial system for greater transparency. The real reason Imperial is targeting it is because it is too profitable for these law-enforcement agencies to seize cash proceeds.” In a free society, laws should be logical and promote just results, not create catch-22 situations that punish the honest people who are trying to comply. Yet the country’s cannabis laws are out of an Orwell novel. For example, legal cannabis shops are required to pay taxes, but federal laws restrict their access to the banking system and state laws limit their ability to pay in cash.
Then law enforcement agencies take advantage of the situation to bolster their budgets. no friend of freedom should celebrate it Violation,
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