that is called theft......and not the legal kind.......like the office will lose his job theft.
they cant just seize legally held property without a warrant.....and unless you have drugs in the car, there is no reason for him to reasonably assume its "drug money"..........
if hes taking your property......you are either under arrest.....or he has a warrant.
you are making up hypothetical situations which dont happen in real life.
Unfortunately that is not actually the case, reality is actually the opposite of what you think.
I'm not saying this for the purpose of saying bad things about Police or Law Enforcement, rather to simply tell you what the actual law, case history & current events are. Suggesting that perhaps you might also want to start taking this up at the political level / law writing level to fix this.
This is something that I have been researching & following for a number of years & is a cause that I feel strongly about.
It is not illegal and the courts have made a surprising number of rulings allowing it.
Including surprisingly ruling that the police don't have to tell you how to get your stuff back or the time frame before it's gone for good.
In once again a great twist of the law beyond belief, the courts twisted the constitution to the breaking point & said that "Property" can basically commit a crime itself and since "Property" is not a person, it has no rights.
Thanks to the ever expanding "War on Drugs", and the corruption that "free money" brings, law enforcement is fully in agreement with using those tactics as it brings in windfalls of cash to the departments to spend on new equipment they don't have the money for & sometimes direct bonuses to the local officers salary payments.
To be fair, statistically someone driving around with a big pile of cash and no other explanation could quite possibly be involved in drug sales / drug money couriering, and many of the cases often result in taking the cash, letting the carrier go without any issue & nobody contests it & the government / police department split the proceeds.
Kind of works
It is and can be reasonably argued that taking away their cash is what actually hurts the big drug dealing groups and wasting time on mules is pointless as they know little & can't often help much.
It is a well known issue and if you really want to bring up a never ending stream of wrong doings, there is literally hundreds of stories and news articles about it.
Basically, if you have something the police want (Cash, too fancy a car, jewelry etc.) and they can articulate that they reasonably believe it is the proceeds of drugs / crime or is involved in drugs / crime, they can just take it from you and tell you tough luck & are not even required to tell you how to get it back. You have to go pay your own lawyer to figure it out & usually put up 10% of the value in bond and then get a court date to prove (guilty till proven innocent), that the items are not proceeds from a crime or drug related items. Then maybe you'll get them back after waiting for a year for your court hearing.
It is not uncommon at all for suspected "mules" to be relieved of large amounts of cash on the side of the road and then tossed back without so much as a ride or charges. Happens all the time.
However sometimes it goes really wrong & law abiding citizens get on the wrong end of money hungry enforcers.
One of the members here has a good story about the state patrol deciding his luxury car was too good for him & trying their best to take it.
One of the first big cases back in the 80s, the FBI wanted really badly some property they couldn't buy, proceeded to try to grab it using that same statue and shot the owner (rather rich) dead during their raid.
There was an entire town in Texas that was famous as literally bandits with badges and was well known for stopping minority people on the highway, taking everything they owned and then tossing them back on the highway with nothing, even taking their religious necklaces & children's electronic toys. On that one in the end it got shut down, because there was enough of an outcry that the legislature changed the laws to make it harder, but the judge told the people they can't get their stuff back, the best they could do was get a promise that the town was not going to be evil again.
So unfortunately, thanks to this great "War On Drugs" that so many "Righteous" people support, the police can actually just take your stuff and walk off with it & tell you to figure out how to get it back yourself.
So when you wonder why I hate the war on drugs and want legalization even though I oppose drugs, well just remember half the time you complain about what the police / government do / can do... it all came from the powers you gave them to stop those dirty drug users.
While this very rarely affects law abiding citizens, the problem is like most loose ended powers hastily granted "to deal with the problem", when you get on the wrong end of it, you find yourself in a very difficult place with it being near impossible to find justice.
I'm not saying this for the purpose of saying bad things about Police or Law Enforcement, rather to simply tell you what the actual law, case history & current events are. Suggesting that perhaps you might also want to start taking this up at the political level / law writing level to fix this.
