Hardly a chance, if you have a device that is used for criminal activity don't be surprised if that gives cops a reason to scrutinize you.
This article is so biased and reeks of agenda. There are no other more sympathetic people to do news stories for? My BS radar just off the charts. If you can look past the fair amount of cash in the car and the drug paraphernalia then there is a need for outrage. However, I can't.
While I might see a reason for seizure laws I could easily see them being abused. That said, the example given in the article isn't going to win over any opponents.
Where were the drugs? There was no solid evidence a crime had been committed. It is common for poorer people not to have bank accounts, which would explain the cash, and neither the cash nor the pipe are illegal.
It doesn't matter one tiny little bit if you think the people in question are drug runners, or even if they actually are, in fact, drug runners. All that matters is that the government took their property as a de facto punishment for having committed a crime (running drugs) without ever actually proving that they committed a crime.
So yeah, there was definitely an agenda here, but it seems to have been to demonstrate a genuinely scary trend in law enforcement and government overreach, which is exactly what it should be.
> 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.
I agree with the overreach of the law and possible, obvious abuses.
However, police are able to arrest for a crime at any point of the process. That said, other than ones that aren't reversible (like murder), they usually let you commit the crime and then arrest you. This makes it easier to prosecute you.
I don't necessarily have a problem with asset forfeiture just that it needs to be required to be associated with a conviction, there should be a cap on what the police get (to avoid overzealous use), and there should be a quick and logical appeal process to prevent innocents having property taken via 'splash damage'.
I'm pretty sure the pipe could and would be considered 'drug paraphernalia', and therefore possession is a misdemeanor in Texas.
Of course, pretty much everyone has 'drug paraphernalia' lying around somewhere. My coffee grinder, my wife's kitchen scales, our snack-sized sandwich bags, the spoons in our cutlery drawer...
Indeed, the article is biased and does reek of agenda.
It is biased against the idea of local police departments and prosecutors offices using the law to enrich themselves at the expense of those who can least afford it.
Nothing wrong with that agenda.
One could certainly give the benefit of the doubt to the police in any particular case where there's a large amount of cash drug paraphenelia involved. However, when this happens to a large number of people (who are never charged but their assets are seized) it's pretty clear what's going on.
In any case, the class action lawsuit was settled in the plaintiffs' favor so clearly, the police department must have recognized that they would lose (especially when the state declined to defend them).
The one with the 30-year old guy who lived at home who turned his elderly parents home into a drug house? Obvious what was going on there, but unless the kid recently paid his parents house off with 'drug money', it's easy to argue they have no right to take them home. Since they had been there since 1966 I could see it have been paid off quite a while ago.
I know there are other more sympathetic stories, there were plenty further along in the article. My issue was to open with that example is poor journalism.
