This article is 8 years old?
2015 was eight years ago? Fuck am I feeling old now.
it's not like anything changed substantially since it was written
How do we know that if we're only looking at old data? What if the numbers have only gone up since then!?
We know that because all the systemic issues are still fundamentally the same. Things don't just happen randomly in the world.
Things don’t just happen randomly in the world
They absolutely do, but either way, if the issues are systemic then surely you can find a more recent article rather than expecting us to discuss data from the Obama era.
I'm sure these numbers are publicly available and if you're claiming that situation changed in a positive direction then feel free to show that. Meanwhile, thinking that life is just a series of random events that don't have systemic causes is a pretty hilarious way to live.
Yeah it's not like there were any big events in the meantime. Certainly not two elections of very different presidents or a whole global pandemic. Certainly nothing crazy that could change the data in one way or the other
Oh and here is a report from 2020, no surprises there
If anything these events led to even further militarization of police in US, certainly can't think of any meaningful police reforms that happened during this time.
: "Don't be silly, cops don't commit crimes, they stop them!"
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did.
Armstrong claims that "the police are now taking more assets than the criminals," but this isn't exactly right: The FBI also tracks property losses from larceny and theft, in addition to plain ol' burglary.
"In a given year, one or two high-dollar cases may produce unusually large amounts of money — with a portion going back to victims — thereby telling a noisy story of year-to-year activity levels," the Institute for Justice explains.
A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.
One final caveat is that these are only the federal totals and don't reflect how much property is seized by state and local police each year.
Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary.
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