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Police and Prosecuters use civil-forfeiture laws to exhort and rob average citizens

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P

Piecake

Member
Might be old since I saw it on slate's 10 best stories they didnt do column. The article was just too shocking and good not to post though. Shit be nuts

Story 1
On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with big Potential!”

They pulled into a mini-mart for snacks. When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.
He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.

No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.

Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.

The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.

Later, she learned that cash-for-freedom deals had become a point of pride for Tenaha, and that versions of the tactic were used across the country. “Be safe and keep up the good work,” the city marshal wrote to Washington, following a raft of complaints from out-of-town drivers who claimed that they had been stopped in Tenaha and stripped of cash, valuables, and, in at least one case, an infant child, without clear evidence of contraband.

Outraged by their experience in Tenaha, Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson helped to launch a class-action lawsuit challenging the abuse of a legal doctrine known as civil-asset forfeiture. “Have you looked it up?” Boatright asked me when I met her this spring at Houston’s H&H Saloon, where she runs Steak Night every Monday. She was standing at a mattress-size grill outside. “It’ll blow your mind.”
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Story 2
In West Philadelphia last August, an elderly couple named Mary and Leon Adams were finishing breakfast when several vans filled with heavily armed police pulled up to their red brick home. An officer announced, “We’ll give you ten minutes to get your things and vacate the property.” The men surrounding their home had been authorized to enter, seize, and seal the premises, without any prior notice.

“I was almost numb,” Mary Adams, a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother with warm brown eyes and wavy russet hair, recalled. When I visited her this spring, she sat beside her seventy-year-old husband, who was being treated for pancreatic cancer, and was slumped with exhaustion. A little earlier, he had struggled to put on his embroidered blue-and-yellow guayabera shirt; his wife, looking fit for church in a green jacket, tank top, and slacks, watched him attentively as he shuffled over on a carved-wood cane to greet me. Leon explained his attachment to their home in numerical terms. “1966,” he said. “It’s been our home since 1966.”

Mary had been working as a truck-stop cook in segregated South Carolina when she met and married Leon—a man from “way out in the woods, just a fireplace and a lamp”—and followed him north. Leon had been hired as a cook at the Valley Forge Music Fair, outside Philadelphia, where James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and the Kingston Trio would one day perform. After renting a room in the city, the Adamses found a sweet little two-story house within their budget, five miles from Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. It had a narrow covered porch that reminded Mary Adams of the country.

The home served the Adams family well over the next half century, as Leon took a job as a steel-plant worker, and later as an elementary-school janitor, and Mary worked as a saleswoman at Woolworth and, eventually, as a patients’ care assistant at Bryn Mawr hospital. (“I treated every patient as a V.I.P., whether you were in a coma or not!”) More recently, the home has helped the couple ease into their retirement. “I love digging in the dirt,” she said, referring to their modest, marigold-lined front yard, and “sitting on the porch, talking to neighbors.”

Their home also proved a comfortable place to raise their only son, Leon, Jr.—so comfortable, in fact, that the young man never quite flew the nest. At thirty-one, slender and goateed, Leon, Jr., occupied a small bedroom on the second floor. When his father, who had already suffered a stroke, fell ill with cancer, he was around to help out. But, according to a report by the Philadelphia Police Department, the younger Leon had a sideline: on the afternoon of July 10, 2012, he allegedly sold twenty dollars’ worth of marijuana to a confidential informant, on the porch of his parents’ home. When the informant requested two more deals the next week, the report said, he made the same arrangements. Both were for twenty dollars, purchased with marked bills provided by police.

Around 5 p.m. on July 19th, Leon, Sr., was in his bedroom recovering from surgery when he was startled by a loud noise. “I thought the house was blowing up,” he recalls. The police “had some sort of big, long club and four guys hit the door with it, and knocked the whole door right down.” swat-team officers in riot gear were raiding his home. One of the officers placed Leon, Jr., in handcuffs and said, “Apologize to your father for what you’ve done.” Leon, Jr., was taken off to jail, where he remains, awaiting trial.

The police returned about a month after the raid. Owing to the allegations against Leon, Jr., the state was now seeking to take the Adamses’ home and to sell it at a biannual city auction, with the proceeds split between the district attorney’s office and the police department. All of this could occur even if Leon, Jr., was acquitted in criminal court; in fact, the process could be completed even before he stood trial.

Mary Adams was at a loss. She and her husband were accused of no crime. Instead, the civil case was titled Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. The Real Property and Improvements Known as [their address]. For years, Mary had volunteered for the Philadelphia More Beautiful Committee, and as a block captain she always thought that civil forfeiture was reserved for crack houses and abandoned eyesores. Now her own carefully maintained residence was the target.
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Story 3
Another case involves a monthly social event that had been hosted by the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. In the midst of festivities one evening in late May, 2008, forty-odd officers in black commando gear stormed the gallery and its rear patio, ordering the guests to the ground. Some in attendance thought that they were the victims of an armed robbery. One young woman who had fallen only to her knees told me that a masked figure screamed at her, “Bitch, you think you’re too pretty to get in the mud?” A boot from behind kicked her to the ground. The officers, including members of the Detroit Police Department’s vice squad and mobile tactical unit, placed the guests under arrest.

According to police records, the gallery lacked proper city permits for after-hours dancing and drinking, and an old ordinance aimed at “blind pigs” (speakeasies) and other places of “illegal occupation” made it a crime to patronize such a place, knowingly or not.
After lining the guests on their knees before a “prisoner processing table” and searching them, the officers asked for everyone’s car keys. Then the raid team seized every vehicle it could find, even venturing to the driveway of a young man’s friend nearly a mile away to retrieve his car. Forty-four cars were taken to government-contracted lots.
Most of those detained had to pay more than a thousand dollars for the return of their cars; if payment wasn’t made promptly, the car would become city property. The proceeds were divided among the offices of the prosecutors, police, and towing companies.

After the A.C.L.U. filed a suit against the city, a district court ruled that the raid was unconstitutional, and noted that it reflected “a widespread practice” by the police in the area. (The city is appealing the ruling.) Vice statutes have lent themselves to such forfeiture efforts; in previous years, an initiative targeted gay men for forfeiture, under Detroit’s “annoying persons” ordinance. Before local lawyers challenged such practices, known informally as “Bag a Fag,” undercover officers would arrest gay men who simply returned their glances or gestures, if the signals were deemed to have sexual connotations, and then, citing “nuisance abatement,” seize their vehicles.

Detroit Police Department officials have said that raids like the one on the Contemporary Art Institute are aimed at improving “quality of life.” The raids certainly help address the department’s substantial budgetary shortfalls. Last year, Detroit, which has since filed for bankruptcy, cut the annual police budget by nearly a fifth. Today, “blind pig” raids around the city routinely result in the confiscation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of cars.
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But civil-forfeiture statutes continued to proliferate, and at the state and local level controls have often been lax. Many states, facing fiscal crises, have expanded the reach of their forfeiture statutes, and made it easier for law enforcement to use the revenue however they see fit. In some Texas counties, nearly forty per cent of police budgets comes from forfeiture. (Only one state, North Carolina, bans the practice, requiring a criminal conviction before a person’s property can be seized.) Often, it’s hard for people to fight back. They are too poor; their immigration status is in question; they just can’t sustain the logistical burden of taking on unyielding bureaucracies.

“The eye-opening event was pulling those files,” Guillory told me. One of the first cases that caught his attention was titled State of Texas vs. One Gold Crucifix. The police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued. That’s how it went in dozens more cases involving cash, cars, and jewelry. A number of files contained slips of paper of a sort he’d never seen before. These were roadside property waivers, improvised by the district attorney, which threatened criminal charges unless drivers agreed to hand over valuables.

Guillory eventually found the deal threatening to take Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson’s children unless the couple signed away their money to Shelby County. “It’s like they were memorializing the fact that they were abdicating their responsibility to fight crime,” Guillory said. “If you believe children are in sufficient danger that they should be removed from their parents—don’t trade that for money!” Usually, police and prosecutors are careful about how they broker such exchanges. But Shelby County officials were so brazen about their swap-meet approach to law enforcement, he says, “they put it in the damn document!”

Patterns began to emerge. Nearly all the targets had been pulled over for routine traffic stops. Many drove rental cars and came from out of state. None appeared to have been issued tickets. And the targets were disproportionately black or Latino. A finding of discrimination could bring judicial scrutiny. “It was a highway-piracy operation,” Guillory said, and, he thought, material for a class-action lawsuit.

Yet only a small portion of state and local forfeiture cases target powerful entities. “There’s this myth that they’re cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins,” Lee McGrath, of the Institute for Justice, who recently co-wrote a paper on Georgia’s aggressive use of forfeiture, says. “In reality, it’s small amounts, where people aren’t entitled to a public defender, and can’t afford a lawyer, and the only rational response is to walk away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting your money back.” In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county, and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight, police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without reporting where the money has gone.

During my time in East Texas, a police officer told me that if I ventured beyond Shelby County I’d learn that Tenaha was far from an outlier in the region. When I looked through courthouse records and talked with local interdiction officers in nearby counties, I saw what he meant. In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorney’s entire salary. Farther south, in Johnson County, I came upon a sheriff’s office that had confiscated an out-of-state driver’s cash, in the absence of contraband, in exchange for a handwritten receipt that gave the traveller no information about who had just taken his money, why, or how he might get it back.

Eventually, a recent law-school graduate named Jean-Jacques Cabou heard about the case, found the details galling, and offered his services. “Forfeiture cases like these are almost impossible to fight,” he told me earlier this year, after he’d devoted hundred of hours to the case. “It’s the Guantánamo Bay of the legal system.” As he sorted through Shamoon Yousif’s case records, Cabou noticed something odd. The investigation had drawn on resources from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center—a so-called “fusion center” in Maricopa County meant to integrate mundane local crime data with federal intelligence streams, in search of clues about terrorism plots. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano once hailed the fusion-center initiative as “one of the centerpieces of our counterterrorism strategy.” It has since lost lustre. Last fall, a Senate report concluded that these centers have produced mostly “irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting.” A Senate aide involved in the report told me that investigations prompted by the local centers often veer toward prospects with lucrative cash-seizure potential.
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman

Excellent article. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Its insane that some police departments are roving the streets shaking down innocent American citizens for booty. Be nice if the FBI or Justice department arrests these ass holes for piracy.

I mean seriously, giving officers and prosecuters bonuses from the forfeiture pool? The law is fucked up to begin with, and now you want to incentivize it? holy hell
 
N

No Love

Banned
this is fucking sick. It's like the Wild West or something. I hope all of these assholes go to jail, have their assets seized, sold, and the money turned over to their victims.
 
entremet

entremet

Member
Of course they're gonna prey on the poor. They don't have access to quality legal services.

This won't happen to a rich person without a fight from well paid lawyers.

And the fact that police are used for tax revenue is some Robin Hood shit. Taxes are terrible I get it. But cut services or raise taxes. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
 
P

Piecake

Member
entrement said:
Of course they're gonna prey on the poor. They don't have access to quality legal services.

This won't happen to a rich person without a fight from well paid lawyers.

And the fact that police are used for tax revenue is some Robin Hood shit. Taxes are terrible I get it. But cut services or raise taxes. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
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Yup, the article gives a good example of that. The old folks home that was taken was in Philly. Well, there was a case back with Andy Reid's sons with drugs at his home. Did Andy Reid's house get taken? Nope.
 
M

Mistel

Banned
passage from article said:
In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorney’s entire salary.
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So if I understand this correctly isn't this racketeering? I'm non US so this might sound naive but are law enforcement above the law themselves or is it just how your countries legal system works?
 
S

slit

Member
Stormtrooper said:
So if I understand this correctly isn't this racketeering? I'm non US so this might sound naive but are law enforcement above the law themselves or is it just how your countries legal system works?
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It depends on the jurisdiction. Some of these places are very small communities and nobody is probably paying attention and that's why it happens.
 
C

CornBurrito

Member
Stormtrooper said:
So if I understand this correctly isn't this racketeering? I'm non US so this might sound naive but are law enforcement above the law themselves or is it just how your countries legal system works?
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Technically no they shouldn't be above the law, but police officers and judges who abuse their power are known to get comically light sentences. There's some info about why here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Code_of_Silence
 
Aesius

Aesius

Member
I'm starting to think that the only way to beat this kind of bullshit is to become a cop. Or a judge, state rep, or some other public official.
 
P

Piecake

Member
Stormtrooper said:
So if I understand this correctly isn't this racketeering? I'm non US so this might sound naive but are law enforcement above the law themselves or is it just how your countries legal system works?
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Well, any sane person should realize that that should be illegal and should be considered extortion and racketeering, but the law got a bit fucked up.

The article goes into it. Basically, forfeiture was used in the revolutionary period to confiscate goods from pirate ships since it was easier to do that than find the captain.

Fast forward to the drug war in the 1970s, forfeiture laws were changed so that law enforcement could seize houses, drugs, other stuff from huge drug lords and the like. That is still fucked up though since how can you seize and sell assets when the dude isnt even convicted yet?

Now pirates, i mean police officers and prosecutors, are taking that law and applying that to everyone, though mostly poor minorities who can't afford legal counsel.
 
S

Seth C

Member
Aesius said:
I'm starting to think that the only way to beat this kind of bullshit is to become a cop. Or a judge, state rep, or some other public official.
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Good luck getting work as the "anti-cop" public official. Guess who the boys in blue will gang up on next? Gotta get out that angst from being bullied in high school by abusing the first glimpse of power they've ever had.
 
E

ElectricBlue187

Member
Seth C said:
Good luck getting work as the "anti-cop" public official. Guess who the boys in blue will gang up on next? Gotta get out that angst from being bullied in high school by abusing the first glimpse of power they've ever had.
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Cops were the football players in high school
 
S

super-heated plasma

Member
I know it's slightly off topic, but my friend had his ATV stolen. The cops managed to "find" it. But of course there is some bullshit law or something about how if someones stolen property is recovered, but the victim doesn't retrieve the property within a certain time frame, then the property somehow is up for grabs. A cop didn't want my friend contacted that they had his ATV because he wanted it for himself. So he made sure my friend was n't contacted. Unfortunately for him, a new employee at the department who didn't know about the cops plan contacted my friend to tell him they still had his ATV and if he knew when he was coming to get it.

To quote the Rolling Stones: "When every cop is a criminal..."
 
M

Mistel

Banned
Thanks for the responses it makes more sense now, So the application of opportunity, lack of ability to prevent it and general corruption leads to situations like those reported.
 
T

The Tofunator

Member
Seth C said:
Good luck getting work as the "anti-cop" public official. Guess who the boys in blue will gang up on next? Gotta get out that angst from being bullied in high school by abusing the first glimpse of power they've ever had.
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Ha, you think the cops were the ones being bullied? More like they've been training for this job since elementary school by shaking down other kids for lunch money. Now they have the power to do what they want with no overseer willing to stop them.
 
P

Piecake

Member
Stormtrooper said:
Thanks for the responses it makes more sense now, So the application of opportunity, lack of ability to prevent it and general corruption leads to situations like those reported.
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Well, some nutsos believe what they are doing is right, and apparently legal

This is the testimony of the cop in the first story

“And what are these indicators?” Garrigan asked.

“Well, there could be several things,” Washington explained. “The No. 1 thing is you may have two guys stopped, and these two guys are from New York. They’re two Puerto Ricans. They’re driving a car that has a Baptist Church symbol on the back, says ‘First Baptist Church of New York.’ They’re travelling during the week, when most people are working and children are in school. They’ve borrowed this car from their aunt, and their aunt is back in New York.” Profile factors like these, Washington explained, could help justify the conclusion that the two men’s money was likely tainted by crime. But also, he said, “we go on smells, odors, fresh paint.” In many cases, he said he smelled pot. In other cases, things smelled too fresh and clean, perhaps because of the suspicious deployment of air fresheners.

Later, the discussion turned to specific traffic stops. Garrigan asked about Dale Agostini, the Guyanese restaurateur who wanted to kiss his infant son goodbye before being taken to jail for money laundering. Why did Washington think he was entitled to seize the Agostini family’s cash?

“It’s no more theirs than a man on the moon,” Washington said. “It belongs to an organization of people that are narcotics traffickers.”

“Do you have any evidence, any rational basis to tell us that this money belonged to an organization of narcotics traffickers?” Garrigan asked. “Or is that more speculation?”

“I don’t have any evidence today,” Washington said.

Garrigan asked about an iPod that was also taken from Agostini’s car. “What was your basis for taking that away from them?”

“Well, it’s in the car, and all those things can be looked at,” Washington explained. “Because if they’re using any of those items in the process of travelling to do something that’s illegal, then you can take all of those things. Even if it’s a pillow that they lay their head on.”

“Is there any limit?”

“No. President Reagan says there’s no limit. It’s time to get serious about this thing. And I think that’s how some of our laws are the way they are, is because it’s time to fight the war on drugs and say, ‘Let’s fight them,’ instead of just saying we’re going to do it.”

Garrigan was relieved. Washington, rather than hiding behind legalistic justifications, proudly outlined his vision of forfeiture: that its scope was boundless, that mere “indicators” were enough to trigger it, and that warfare was an apt analogy for the pursuit of cash, cars, and even iPods from drivers whom he deemed suspicious. If that were a fair characterization of Texas policy, a judge’s sympathy for the plaintiffs seemed likely. So did a public outcry for reform.

“Did you find any drugs?” Garrigan asked.

“No.”

“Is there any evidence that they were buying drugs, instead of looking at restaurants in Houston?”

“No, not yet.”

“Do you, for some reason, think people driving up and down 59 owe you an explanation for why they might have money?”

“Sure they do.”

After the deposition, Garrigan was elated. “If I could bottle up the feeling I had when I left, and use it for bad days?” he told me. “That would be great.”
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Fucking nuts. That dude was apparently a super famous police officer in Texas too, and got his picture taken with a bunch of important people.
 
S

Shao Kahn on the Lawn

Member
Aesius said:
I'm starting to think that the only way to beat this kind of bullshit is to become a cop. Or a judge, state rep, or some other public official.
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Cops can't operate as individuals and the ones that take on the establishment find themselves on the outs with the people they need to keep them alive. They don't have to hurt you directly: they can just put you in a situation where you're going to get hurt (IE, you call for backup during a traffic stop and none is available for you).
 
Aesius

Aesius

Member
Seth C said:
Good luck getting work as the "anti-cop" public official. Guess who the boys in blue will gang up on next? Gotta get out that angst from being bullied in high school by abusing the first glimpse of power they've ever had.
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I guess I should have said "avoid" instead of "beat". You're right--very few people are going to have success taking on corrupt police forces.
 
S

Seth C

Member
The Tofunator said:
Ha, you think the cops were the ones being bullied? More like they've been training for this job since elementary school by shaking down other kids for lunch money. Now they have the power to do what they want with no overseer willing to stop them.
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It's a mix of the two. I have met several power hungry cops would clearly were not bullies in high school. They also weren't nerds, mind you.
 
P

Particle Physicist

between a quark and a baryon
a raft of complaints from out-of-town drivers who claimed that they had been stopped in Tenaha and stripped of cash, valuables, and, in at least one case, an infant child, without clear evidence of contraband.
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Holy shit. What happened to that child? This is so abhorrent. Wow.
 
T

Tapiozona

Banned
First story sounds like BS from the family's perspective. Live in Houston but buying a used car in a Podunk town instead where they were going to frolic in flowers? Oh, what's that pipe doing there...its for tobacco...no wait, its a gift! Large wad of cash...etc etc. Story doesn't mention any priors but since it didn't specify I'm assuming there were.
 
P

Piecake

Member
Tapiozona said:
First story sounds like BS from the family's perspective. Live in Houston but buying a used car in a Podunk town instead where they were going to frolic in flowers? Oh, what's that pipe doing there...its for tobacco...no wait, its a gift! Large wad of cash...etc etc. Story doesn't mention any priors but since it didn't specify I'm assuming there were.
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So the cops were right to demand all of their money even though they committed no crime? Unless you think being suspicious or stupid is a crime? I'm guessing you agree with the cops that their kids in the back were a diversionary tactic for their 'assumed' illegal intentions?

You should read the article. That town has a whole bunch of similar cases like that where they pull over cars for 'driving too close to the line", take them in on bullshit charges, and demand money from them or else they are going to prosecute.
 
H

hipbabboom

Huh? What did I say? Did I screw up again? :(
Piecake said:
So the cops were right to demand all of their money even though they committed no crime? Unless you think being suspicious or stupid is a crime? I'm guessing you agree with the cops that their kids in the back were a diversionary tactic for their 'assumed' illegal intentions?

You should read the article. That town has a whole bunch of similar cases like that where they pull over cars for 'driving too close to the line", take them in on bullshit charges, and demand money from them or else they are going to prosecute.
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I think he's calling you stupid too bro :(
 
K

Kettch

Member
Crazy stuff.

(Only one state, North Carolina, bans the practice, requiring a criminal conviction before a person’s property can be seized.)
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Even this doesn't sound like enough. That couple's son may get a criminal conviction eventually, that shouldn't allow police to seize their home because he's been making $20 marijuana deals out of it. Disregarding the idiocy of marijuana laws, they need to be forced to show that the home was primarily paid for with the proceeds of the illegal activity.

EDIT:

Tapiozona said:
First story sounds like BS from the family's perspective. Live in Houston but buying a used car in a Podunk town instead where they were going to frolic in flowers? Oh, what's that pipe doing there...its for tobacco...no wait, its a gift! Large wad of cash...etc etc. Story doesn't mention any priors but since it didn't specify I'm assuming there were.
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This part of the article is a good response:
Guillory eventually found the deal threatening to take Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson’s children unless the couple signed away their money to Shelby County. “It’s like they were memorializing the fact that they were abdicating their responsibility to fight crime,” Guillory said. “If you believe children are in sufficient danger that they should be removed from their parents—don’t trade that for money!”
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R

Reuenthal

Banned
Police have a valuable role to play in society but like any group of people none should be above the law including them. If they can get away with everything, then they would attract the wrong kind of people and resemble less a police force and more a criminal gang, which is the case with some police forces in some places in the world but not with some others. There is no excuse for this kind of thing.
 
S

Sethtimus Prime

Neo Member
Reuenthal said:
Police have a valuable role to play in society but like any group of people none should be above the law including them. If they can get away with everything, then they would attract the wrong kind of people and resemble less a police force and more a criminal gang which is the case with some police forces in some places in the world but not with some others. There is no excuse for this kind of thing.
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That seems to be what is happening.
 
P

Piecake

Member
Sethtimus Prime said:
That seems to be what is happening.
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The last two paragraphs of the article are great

“For a long time, Jonathan had this mentality about cops: they’re not good, they’re all bad,” she said. “I don’t want him to have that perspective.” Sometime last year, she stopped showing up at events tied to the lawsuit—she didn’t want her kids to get the wrong idea about police, whom she considers heroes in every other context. Jonathan remains “terrified” when he sees police, so an officer friend comes over sometimes in uniform and drives Jonathan around in his squad car. She has also insisted that the family keep up the tradition of visiting wildflower trails—this year, Boatright took pictures of her younger son, Jacob, now seven, romping around in a field of bluebonnets.

But she’s not sure that the campaign is working. As I prepared for a return trip to Tenaha, Jacob, who’d followed us throughout the night, tapped me on the hip and handed me a drawing that he’d made with a black felt-tipped marker. It featured a ship helmed by two bandits, brandishing a skull-and-bones flag, a sword, and wide smiles, with two faceless captives aboard. “Pirates,” he said
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I know, its not totally clear-cut that the kid is equating police with pirates, but the analogy sure is apt in this case
 
V

Valnen

Member
Seth C said:
Good luck getting work as the "anti-cop" public official. Guess who the boys in blue will gang up on next? Gotta get out that angst from being bullied in high school by abusing the first glimpse of power they've ever had.
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Gotta love how you come here blaming victims. That's the last thing kids who have been bullied need.
 
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