According to the reports to Congress from the DOJ, they are seeing a steady increase of sized assets, however these reports clearly don’t cover the majority of asset forfeiture cases as the balance sheet is in the low millions, rather than billions.
Funny story. (Funny as in peculiar, not as in laughable.) So in the 1970s during the cocaine trafficking wars, congress ordered the FBI to gather all the officer-involved homicides across the nation and report them to the BJS for analysis for sake of transparency. It was an order the FBI ignored. In the meantime there were enough mismatches between known forensic police reports, known forensic data and witness accounts to start some volunteer projects to track officer-involved killing. Since FOIA information was resistant to release, and sometimes came over-redacted, they relied on tracking incidents through news, obituaries and coroner reports to link dead bodies to police bullets, or police brutality.
It was a thing and a concern, and like our obscenely terrible prisons, no-one cared much.
…Until 2014 and the killing of Michael Brown leading to the Ferguson unrest of 2014, and a public story as problematic as the Warren Commission statement. Witness accounts still conflict with the police report which was revised several times post hoc to match the ballistics, eventually leading to an accounting suggesting Brown acted very strangely (rather than getting shot while his hands were up, consistent with the witness accounts.) Two things really put in sharp bas relief the problematic nature of the incident:
One was that Brown (dead or alive) was allowed to sit and bake in the sun for hours, and Wilson was in no hurry to get medical care to a bleeding Brown, which ran contrary to the image of law enforcement presented for years in Law ＆ Order and dozens of other pro-police TV shows. And secondly, the police response to the protest was to send in officers by the hundreds in their MRAPs, show poor fire discipline brandishing their weapons at the protestors, and then, at the minute of Curfew, roll around in the MRAP, wrecking lawns parks and streets and lobbing CS Gas grenades willy-nilly into backyards and homes. The police looked like children on sugar and caffeine playing with NERF weapons, whooping like drunken Texans. And half the nation thought this was acceptable, possibly coinciding with the Ferguson affair taking place in a black-majority neighborhood.
That week, several news agencies started their own projects to catalogue deaths cause by law enforcement. It was a bad time for it, since phone cameras were becoming ubiquitous. Police started trying to confiscate phones (they still do, even in states with laws to protect the recording of police in action). The volunteer services tracking police violence traded notes. In 2014, the Washington Post tracked about a thousand deaths by law enforcement. Around 2015, meta analysis averaged it about four a day, noting that a lot of them fall through the cracks. A report in 2017 showed that precinct coroners routinely cover for their brethren in blue to erase questionable action. A lot of people had strokes or heart attacks or some other fatal outcome just before police bullets punched through them. So the total officer-involved death-toll could be under reported by as much as 75%, much like sexual assault.
After George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020 (during the COVID-19 lockdown) and the whole nation erupted in protests and unrest, the FBI decided it might be a good idea to start tracking and reporting officer-involved homicide, as they were asked to do decades previously. This is not to necessarily get an accurate report, but to publish an official report that people can point to when they want to say it’s not really that bad. After all precincts self-report, and we know how honest they are inclined to be, right?
Well it turns out they’re not even willing to report. It turns out police generally are crap at filing incident reports, unlike Nicholas Angel of the MPS. Even if the FBI wanted to just seize precinct reports and sift through them, they’re not there, or often miss critical details. And our precincts internal affairs subdivisions are more interested in keeping incidents low rather than running a clean precinct. These all inform the current ACAB assumption today: It is just plum impossible to be a good cop on account that everyone is expected to cover for the bad ones. And they do, even when they lose sleep about it, go full alcoholic and eventually quit. Andy Taylor, Barney Miller and even James Gordon would have no place in law enforcement in the US.
So, BJS stats are official but we can expect that incidents that make the justice system look bad (at any level) are under-reported.
Anyhow, you can check out Tim Cushing’s beat on Techdirt as asset forfeiture news often flashes across there, including the rare happy moments when someone gets their money back, or an officer gets rightly dressed down for abusing his power to take stuff.
I don’t know how to read the balance sheets but all the numbers are reported in thousands, so it looks like billions to me. (I’m not sure which numbers refer to assets actually seized)
According to the reports to Congress from the DOJ, they are seeing a steady increase of sized assets, however these reports clearly don’t cover the majority of asset forfeiture cases as the balance sheet is in the low millions, rather than billions.
https://www.justice.gov/afp/reports
Funny story. (Funny as in peculiar, not as in laughable.) So in the 1970s during the cocaine trafficking wars, congress ordered the FBI to gather all the officer-involved homicides across the nation and report them to the BJS for analysis for sake of transparency. It was an order the FBI ignored. In the meantime there were enough mismatches between known forensic police reports, known forensic data and witness accounts to start some volunteer projects to track officer-involved killing. Since FOIA information was resistant to release, and sometimes came over-redacted, they relied on tracking incidents through news, obituaries and coroner reports to link dead bodies to police bullets, or police brutality.
It was a thing and a concern, and like our obscenely terrible prisons, no-one cared much.
…Until 2014 and the killing of Michael Brown leading to the Ferguson unrest of 2014, and a public story as problematic as the Warren Commission statement. Witness accounts still conflict with the police report which was revised several times post hoc to match the ballistics, eventually leading to an accounting suggesting Brown acted very strangely (rather than getting shot while his hands were up, consistent with the witness accounts.) Two things really put in sharp bas relief the problematic nature of the incident:
One was that Brown (dead or alive) was allowed to sit and bake in the sun for hours, and Wilson was in no hurry to get medical care to a bleeding Brown, which ran contrary to the image of law enforcement presented for years in Law ＆ Order and dozens of other pro-police TV shows. And secondly, the police response to the protest was to send in officers by the hundreds in their MRAPs, show poor fire discipline brandishing their weapons at the protestors, and then, at the minute of Curfew, roll around in the MRAP, wrecking lawns parks and streets and lobbing CS Gas grenades willy-nilly into backyards and homes. The police looked like children on sugar and caffeine playing with NERF weapons, whooping like drunken Texans. And half the nation thought this was acceptable, possibly coinciding with the Ferguson affair taking place in a black-majority neighborhood.
That week, several news agencies started their own projects to catalogue deaths cause by law enforcement. It was a bad time for it, since phone cameras were becoming ubiquitous. Police started trying to confiscate phones (they still do, even in states with laws to protect the recording of police in action). The volunteer services tracking police violence traded notes. In 2014, the Washington Post tracked about a thousand deaths by law enforcement. Around 2015, meta analysis averaged it about four a day, noting that a lot of them fall through the cracks. A report in 2017 showed that precinct coroners routinely cover for their brethren in blue to erase questionable action. A lot of people had strokes or heart attacks or some other fatal outcome just before police bullets punched through them. So the total officer-involved death-toll could be under reported by as much as 75%, much like sexual assault.
After George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020 (during the COVID-19 lockdown) and the whole nation erupted in protests and unrest, the FBI decided it might be a good idea to start tracking and reporting officer-involved homicide, as they were asked to do decades previously. This is not to necessarily get an accurate report, but to publish an official report that people can point to when they want to say it’s not really that bad. After all precincts self-report, and we know how honest they are inclined to be, right?
Well it turns out they’re not even willing to report. It turns out police generally are crap at filing incident reports, unlike Nicholas Angel of the MPS. Even if the FBI wanted to just seize precinct reports and sift through them, they’re not there, or often miss critical details. And our precincts internal affairs subdivisions are more interested in keeping incidents low rather than running a clean precinct. These all inform the current ACAB assumption today: It is just plum impossible to be a good cop on account that everyone is expected to cover for the bad ones. And they do, even when they lose sleep about it, go full alcoholic and eventually quit. Andy Taylor, Barney Miller and even James Gordon would have no place in law enforcement in the US.
So, BJS stats are official but we can expect that incidents that make the justice system look bad (at any level) are under-reported.
Anyhow, you can check out Tim Cushing’s beat on Techdirt as asset forfeiture news often flashes across there, including the rare happy moments when someone gets their money back, or an officer gets rightly dressed down for abusing his power to take stuff.
As if the numbers matter, or anyone can trust anything these thugs say.
I don’t know how to read the balance sheets but all the numbers are reported in thousands, so it looks like billions to me. (I’m not sure which numbers refer to assets actually seized)
Ahh, I’m operating on four hours of sleep, so I missed that. I was reading it as millions.
No problem, I did too but one of the tables didn’t make sense and then I saw the heading lol