Wisconsin Cops Tell Woman to Bring Cash to Bail Son Out of Jail, Then Steal Her Money
May 21st, 2012Via: Huffington Post:
When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.
She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer’s wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer’s bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. “The police specifically told us to bring cash,” Greer says. “Not a cashier’s check or a credit card. They said cash.”
So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.
Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.
“I told them the money had just come from the bank,” Beverly Greer says. “We had just taken it out. If the money had drugs on it, then they should go seize all the money at the bank, too. I just don’t understand how they could do that.”
The Greers had been subjected to civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It’s a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair.
It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family’s money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. “The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money,” Williams says. “Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money.”
Ah, legalized theft! Usually it’s in the form of taxes, but this “civil asset forfeiture” law is really quite the pecuniary Boot Stomping on a Human Face. Frederic Bastiat, in The Law, his 1850 classic blueprint for a just society, clarifies how government is the greatest single threat to liberty. With the police being government’s thugs, Bastiat describes legalized plunder: “See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
still believe that comic guru alan moore was right when he said that the state still falls into an anarchic structure. just teh biggest organized gangs/crime telling everyone else that its not anarchy because they have enough control to “protect” people from natural forces.
i dont think this sort of thing falls under extortion per se, that being an age old tradition, but still bet alot of suits that dont gain financially from these laws are high-fiving over drinks at this very moment.
Clever monkeys. Sounds like these police have found a new way to gently caress with people and steal more of their money. Very creative interpretation of “asset forfeiture,” I tip my hat to their deviousness.
http://www.snopes.com/business/money/cocaine.asp
“In one 1985 study done by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on the money machines in a U.S. Federal Reserve district bank, random samples of $50 and $100 bills revealed that a third to a half of all the currency tested bore traces of cocaine.”
I know that police dog handlers train their dogs to indicate on command, even in the absence of a trigger, if there even was a dog in the first place. Easy money. Easy probable cause. God bless America.
As Noble points out, money is often contaminated by trace amounts of drugs. Nobody can escape that.
This is a classic sign of a totalitarian government: implement laws in such a fashion that it becomes impossible to be law-abiding. Then the police have an excuse for arresting anyone, at any time, for any reason.
It’s a way of enforcing compliance. Nobody dares speak up or resist because everybody is already guilty. There’s no way not to be.