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Deputies seize $88,000 in cash in traffic stop
bondai
Member Posts: 1,239 ✭✭✭✭✭
Here is another example of police abuse. In this case they out and out stole money. I am wondering how much longer the citizens of this country are going to tolerate these Gestapo tactics ??? Everytime you are pulled over by a cop your life and your property are in danger.
http://www.the-dispatch.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060927/NEWS/609270339/1005/news
quote:BY SEAN JAREM
The Dispatch
Two men traveling south on Interstate 85 southwest of Lexington Tuesday told Davidson County sheriff's deputies that the $88,000 in cash they had hidden in their car was to buy a house in Atlanta.
Officers with the sheriff office's Interstate Criminal Enforcement unit didn't believe the story after a drug-sniffing dog found a strong odor of narcotics inside the car.
No drugs were found, and the two men weren't charged with a crime, but officers did keep the money, citing a federal drug assets seizure and forfeiture law.
Deputies first stopped the car for following too closely to another vehicle, said Davidson County Sheriff David Grice.
The two men told officers they had flown from Texas to New Jersey and were driving south to Atlanta to buy a house with the money, Grice said.
Federal investigators arrived and took the cash in order to make a case in federal court that the money would fall under federal forfeiture laws.
If a federal judge agrees with investigators, the Davidson County Sheriff's Office would receive 75 percent ($66,000) of the confiscated money.
"It takes about a year for the money to come back to the county," Grice said.
The money then would make its way into the sheriff's office general fund, where it could only be used for enhancement purposes, such as new equipment or additional training.
Grice said as a general rule the sheriff's office cannot count on forfeiture money, noting the money isn't a sure thing and can fluctuate from year to year.
But the Davidson County Sheriff's Office has had positive results in the past after bringing in $1.6 million in 2005 and $1.4 million in 2004.
This year Grice said officers have brought in about $400,000.
"It allows us to buy equipment without using taxpayers' money," Grice said.
Replacing older vehicles, installing newer radios in patrol cars and installing a new camera system in the jail were all paid for by drug forfeiture money, Grice said.
http://www.the-dispatch.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060927/NEWS/609270339/1005/news
quote:BY SEAN JAREM
The Dispatch
Two men traveling south on Interstate 85 southwest of Lexington Tuesday told Davidson County sheriff's deputies that the $88,000 in cash they had hidden in their car was to buy a house in Atlanta.
Officers with the sheriff office's Interstate Criminal Enforcement unit didn't believe the story after a drug-sniffing dog found a strong odor of narcotics inside the car.
No drugs were found, and the two men weren't charged with a crime, but officers did keep the money, citing a federal drug assets seizure and forfeiture law.
Deputies first stopped the car for following too closely to another vehicle, said Davidson County Sheriff David Grice.
The two men told officers they had flown from Texas to New Jersey and were driving south to Atlanta to buy a house with the money, Grice said.
Federal investigators arrived and took the cash in order to make a case in federal court that the money would fall under federal forfeiture laws.
If a federal judge agrees with investigators, the Davidson County Sheriff's Office would receive 75 percent ($66,000) of the confiscated money.
"It takes about a year for the money to come back to the county," Grice said.
The money then would make its way into the sheriff's office general fund, where it could only be used for enhancement purposes, such as new equipment or additional training.
Grice said as a general rule the sheriff's office cannot count on forfeiture money, noting the money isn't a sure thing and can fluctuate from year to year.
But the Davidson County Sheriff's Office has had positive results in the past after bringing in $1.6 million in 2005 and $1.4 million in 2004.
This year Grice said officers have brought in about $400,000.
"It allows us to buy equipment without using taxpayers' money," Grice said.
Replacing older vehicles, installing newer radios in patrol cars and installing a new camera system in the jail were all paid for by drug forfeiture money, Grice said.
Comments
Florida Police Search for Gunman Who Shot 2 Deputies, Killing 1
Thursday , September 28, 2006
Click to learn more...
LAKELAND, Fla. - Florida police on Thursday were searching for a gunman who shot two Polk County sheriff's deputies - killing one of them - while schools in the area were on lockdown during the manhunt.
The deputies were taken to Lakeland Regional Hospital following the early afternoon shooting, said sheriff spokeswoman Donna Wood. She didn't know their conditions.
Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Crime Center
Relatedly, local NBC affiliate WSFA in Montgomery, Ala., confirmed that one Montgomery Police officer was also shot downtown Thursday. The shooting happened on the 1800 block of Decatur Street. Police have arrested a suspect. There's no word yet on the officer's identity, but it's been reported the officer was taken to Jackson Hospital.
WSFA also confirmed that Booker T. Washington Jr. High, Highland Gardens, and Chisholm Elementary Schools were all on lockdown after the shooting.
The Florida shooting occurred in north Lakeland, Fla., near a high school. The suspect police are hunting was described as a black male wearing a white shirt with dreadlocks, who may still have a shotgun. Police said the incident began when the deputies made a routine traffic stop.
The suspect showed police a fake ID, then asked if he was going to be arrested. One of the deputies said "I don't know," then the suspect ran into the nearby woods. The two deputies and a K-9 dog pursued the suspect, and around 12:30 p.m. ET, "numerous" shots were fired, said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.
"As a result of that incident, two of our deputies have been shot, the canine's been shot and the suspect's still at large," Judd told reporters shortly before 3 p.m. ET Thursday.
Police surrounded a house where they believed the suspect was hiding out when the fugitive shot twice at them twice, he said. The police returned fire, and the suspect ran off again. There have been "numerous alleged sighting" of the suspect in the area, Judd said.
"Listen to me folks. We will find him, we will bring him to justice. The sooner, the better," Judd said.
He added that police are still trying to notify the families of the wounded deputies and that their names would not be released until that happens.
Authorities cordoned off a large area around the gunman's car, but had not ordered any residential evacuations. Helicopters circled in wide arcs as emergency vehicles raced up and down local roads.
About four hours after the shooting, a dozen cruisers from the neighboring Hillsborough County arrived at the search area.
Television video footage showed armed police with shields searching a wooded area with traffic backed up on nearby Interstate 4 in the town about 35 miles east of Tampa. The incident happened at Memorial Highway and Wabash, near Lakeland.
The shooting occurred near Kathleen High School, which was locked down, officials said. Two others schools farther away from the scene also were locked down.
A woman at Kathleen High School, who would identify herself only as Mrs. Platt, said students were locked in their classrooms and were safe. She referred other questions to the sheriff's office.
The students will remain on campus until officials approve their release, school district spokeswoman Leah Lauderdale said.
"We are just sitting tight and the students and the staff in the school, I'm sure, are sitting secure," Lauderdale said in a cable news interview.
FOX News' Steve Harrigan and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Why would you fly from Texas to New Jersey to go to Atlanta to purchase a house? That would raise suspiscion in any LEO I am guessing. I know for a fact that there are flights from DFW or Houston or San Antonio into Atlanta and they rent cars in Atlanta.
Now if they had to get the money from New Jersey, that is plausible. However, I would NEVER consider carrying that amount in cold hard cash. Ever heard of a bank check or certified check? $88k in cash is another big red warning flag to the LEO community.
Yes I am not surprised that almost all bills in the $20 denomination and up have been in contact with drugs at some point. However the dogs are not that sensitive or else they would alert on EVERY person and vehicle that is searched as it enters our military installations.
I would venture to guess these guys were up to no good and they will not come back to contest this money...just a risk of the trade for them.
Maybe the people they bought the car from were drug dealers, or a host of other possibilities.
They had no business taking that money based on just being suspicious, and For the Record, I'm not anti law enforcement.
Since when is carrying large amounts cash a crime? My Grandfather, who had a deep distrust of banks, sometimes had $10,000 in cash around the house.
Your's aint the only one[:D] when mine passed, the 5k in the umbrella was the capper!
OK...guess it is my turn to get yelled at.
Why would you fly from Texas to New Jersey to go to Atlanta to purchase a house? That would raise suspiscion in any LEO I am guessing. I know for a fact that there are flights from DFW or Houston or San Antonio into Atlanta and they rent cars in Atlanta.
Now if they had to get the money from New Jersey, that is plausible. However, I would NEVER consider carrying that amount in cold hard cash. Ever heard of a bank check or certified check? $88k in cash is another big red warning flag to the LEO community.
Yes I am not surprised that almost all bills in the $20 denomination and up have been in contact with drugs at some point. However the dogs are not that sensitive or else they would alert on EVERY person and vehicle that is searched as it enters our military installations.
I would venture to guess these guys were up to no good and they will not come back to contest this money...just a risk of the trade for them.
I have had a couple experiences with narc dogs.
The dope dog alerted on my car at Ft Hood back in the 70's, I had a leftover burrito in some trash I had left in my trunk the night before.
Another time I watched as the dog went through our barracks, we were ordered to stay in our bunks, I watched as the dog walked right past where one of the guys stash was.
They are not perfect by any means, and to use them as justification to confiscate cash without proof of a crime is a travesty.[V]
But this is not the cops fault, it is the judges & legislatures that allow it to happen.
Don
Don
But, that ain't the world we live in.
This morning, I watched another officer remove 10 kilos of cocaine from a Dodge minivan he had stopped for a traffic violation. The guys with the $88G that was seized? They may well have been on their way to make a score, or on their way home after selling a load.
Or, they may have been legitimately carrying a wad of cash.
Trouble is, you just can't do it, and anyone should know it. It's dumb on a number of levels. Fact is, most people carrying that much cash are up to no good, so the good people have to change their ways of doing things. I don't intend to blow up an airplane, but if I want to get on one, I have to be searched as though I do.
You don't like it, and I don't like it, but that's just the way it is.
Claim: A large percentage of U.S. currency bears traces of cocaine.
Status: True.
Origins: So often those
"everybody knows" facts we naively place reliance upon turn out to be embarrassingly false. Such is not the case here, in that there is some truth to the "U.S. currency tainted by cocaine" claim, but the implications of this conversation-stopping fact are far more mundane than we might initially presume. To put it another way, it's less shocking a fact than we first perceive it to be because the underlying assumption - that every bill bearing traces of cocaine got that way through having been used to inhale lines of cocaine - is false.
Contrary to our first thought upon encountering this interesting little fact, that trace amounts of cocaine turn up on approximately four of every five bills in circulation doesn't mean the now-contaminated currency was at one time used to snort coke or passed through the dope-laden paws of seedy characters. Rather, the drug is easily conveyed from one bill to another because cocaine in powdered form is extremely fine. (This point would have been much more difficult to explain prior to the anthrax mailings of 2001, but those deadly contaminations taught even the least drug-savvy among us how easily minute amounts of finely-milled substances can be transferred from one letter to another, even when the powder is contained within the envelope rather than lying on the surface.)
When a cocaine-contaminated bill is processed through a sorting or counting machine, traces of the drug are easily passed to other bills in the same batch. ATMs serve to spread tiny amounts of cocaine to nearly all the currency they distribute, as do the counting machines used in banks and casinos.
How widespread is the contamination? No one appears to have the definitive answer, as every study comes up with a different percentage. (For simplicity's sake, we'll say "four of five" throughout this article because that's the worst-case scenario, and the figure is representative of the results of some studies.)
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. Moreover, the machines themselves were often found to test positive, meaning that subsequent batches of cash fed through them would also pick up cocaine residue. Expert evidence given before a federal appeals court in 1995 showed that three out of four bills randomly examined in the Los Angeles area bore traces of the drug. In a 1997 study conducted at the Argonne National Laboratory, nearly four out of five one-dollar bills in Chicago suburbs were found to bear discernable traces of cocaine. In another study, more than 135 bills from seven U.S. cities were tested, and all but four were contaminated with traces of cocaine. These bills had been collected from restaurants, stores, and banks in cities from Milwaukee to Dallas.
A single bill used to snort cocaine or otherwise mingled with the drug can contaminate an entire cash drawer. When counting and sorting machines (which fan the bills, and thus the cocaine) are factored in, it's no wonder that so much of the currency now in circulation wouldn't pass any purity tests.
The average person need not fear that the money in his wallet will inadvertently get him high, or that the act of paying for his burger and fries at McDonald's will cause him to fail a random drug test. Only those whose jobs call upon them to handle an extremely large number of bills every day need worry that enough cocaine is getting on their hands to be detectable. Bank tellers or those who work in the soft count rooms of casinos, for instance, might need to consider the effects of this contamination, but not average folks - not even ones who occasionally carry a great deal of cash about their persons.
As to how much cocaine will be on a contaminated bill, the expert witness in that 1995 court case charted results from as small as a nanogram (one-billionth of a gram) to as much as a milligram (one-thousandth of a gram). The Argonne National Laboratory study revealed that the average contamination was 16 micrograms (which is 16 one-millionths of a gram). If you're not quite sure how much a gram of cocaine is, picture the head of a thumbtack.
These are very small amounts indeed, a fact that should be kept in mind as we speed off to share this startling new information about drugs on our money with friends and neighbors. This is not the latest, newest lurking danger to our health and welfare, nor is it an apocalyptic sign that drugs are taking over. Yes, drug use in our society is real, but it has yet to reach the proportions where four of every five bills in our wallets has been used to snort cocaine. That four of five bills might test positive only means that 80% of our paper money has at some time come into contact with contaminated bills or counting machines. It takes only one bill to contaminate hundreds or even thousands of others, so the number of bills that have actually come into direct contact with the drug trade is far smaller than we might first assume upon seeing that "four of five" claim marked as true.
We're a nation of laws. If there aren't any laws prohibiting the carrying of large amounts of cash then these two broke no laws. In that event the only laws broken were broken by the police.
Good point, What kind of narcotics did the dog hit on and how strong of a smell did he say?
I don't trust cops, lawyers or bankers. There are some exceptions but just a few.
60min. type show once. It told of some particular TX. county that
was bad to seize property, including cash because of the tainted
money.
The chief had gotton natl. attention over the matter, and when
challenged, it turned out the money in his pocket was "tainted" also.[B)]
I'm not saying these guys are squeaky clean, but why don't the cops in this case get off their a$$es, perform some old fashioned police work and PROVE what these guys are "allegedly" guilty of??
With all due respect Dheffley, I don't see what your post has to do with the topic.
In this case they do carry cash; with a withdrawl receipt from the bank off of their business account, a copy of their business license and the papers they faxed in to the auction compnay for their spot to bid on property. Unless I am mistaken, depending upon the amount withdrawn, the bank is required to inform the Treasury Dept about any substantial amount withdrawn. I am not sure of the amount...I think it used to be $10k, but that may have dropped after 9-11.
In todays world, it is not black and white any longer. There are shades of gray that we ask the LEOs to work within...they have to make tough choices. I do not feel that my life is in danger or that I will have things confiscated just because I am stopped (yes there are crooked cops just like in any business). If they ever do take anything, then I am smart enough to ensure that I get a receipt of the items seized, the date and time and the location of the stop and seizure as well as the name(s) of the officer(s) involved.
Guess this comes from all my years in the military and civilian EMS area...DOCUMENT THE HELL OUT OF EVERYTHING.
If they are citing a Federal drug law, then they must be accusing these two men of being drug dealers.
Gonna make a lawyer somewhere very happy.
Personally, I think a citizen should be able to do as he pleases with his own property, including carrying large amounts of cash around without having to worry about official interference.
But, that ain't the world we live in.
[^][^][^] 4 guys of middle eastern desent between the age of 18-35
in a mini van.
they pass through the state of TX. with 88k in cash, then- [;)].
I dunno David, give the voters what they ask for[:D][;)]
All of us that are fond of the 2nd should take note of these abuses to the 4th, and seek to defend it just as strongly. It is just as easy for one to say "there is no legitimate reason to travel with that much money" as it is to say "there is no legitimate reason to have a firearm".
Trouble is, you just can't do it, and anyone should know it. It's dumb on a number of levels. Fact is, most people carrying that much cash are up to no good, so the good people have to change their ways of doing things. I don't intend to blow up an airplane, but if I want to get on one, I have to be searched as though I do.
You don't like it, and I don't like it, but that's just the way it is.
Just why can't you do that? What is the law prohibiting someone from carrying $88k in cash? Your logic is flawed. You might as well say, "there are folks carrying guns that are up to no good, so all the good people need to quit carrying guns, too."
Comparing the scrutiny one is subjected to when boarding a commercial airline with a multitude of other people to that of a private citizen traveling in their own personally operated motor vehicle is also ludicrous. The circumstances are completely different. I would also be willing to bet that airport police have far fewer seizures of cash without cause than their non-airport brethren.
This happens ALL THE TIME.
It's reported to be a MULTI-million dollar crime spree, committed by cops.
When the bill was signed into law, it was so obvious to me that the law was a clear and blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America it would be overturned in short order. Didn't happen that way.
If your cash or property is confiscated under this law, you can start a civil proceeding to try to prove your cash or property was not involved in or intended to be used in a crime. If you are successful in proving a negative, you get your cash or property back.
My opinion is this law is still in force because roughly half of the population likes the law and most of the other half don't know about it.
He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.
there should be no laws then and no power whatsoever for the goverment to stop bad guys.
However, in our justice system we have the courts to solve these matters.
even though the police seized the money the government will still have to prove that the money was involved with drugs.
The government does NOT have to prove anything. The people are never CHARGED with any crime, thus no court, no proof necessary.
Unless YOU spend the time and BIG $$$ for lawyer fees, to challenge them in court, you will never get anything back.
Read up on the "Comprehensive Crime Control Act" that JamesRK pointed out.
Even if they get it back, they were deprived of their property for a year without cause.
All of us that are fond of the 2nd should take note of these abuses to the 4th, and seek to defend it just as strongly. It is just as easy for one to say "there is no legitimate reason to travel with that much money" as it is to say "there is no legitimate reason to have a firearm".
Having re-read the original post in this thread, it says that a narcotics-sniffing dog did find traces of the stuff although no actual drugs were found. May be a stretch by the LEO's but logically it has the APPEARANCE - at least - of possibly being a recently completed drug deal. Granted, innocent until proven guilty and all that but I'm sure that the bills are being run for serial numbers, etc. to see if they were used before in sting operations, undercover, are counterfeit, etc. So, they have a receipt for the dough and could get it back at some point.
I do question why, although not illegal per say, two men would need or want to pay cash for a house and travel with so much cash IF there were not some impropriety about to happen, even if it's just trying to avoid paying someone some kind of fee or tax that's required. A house is not a boat trailer or a used car or a swamp cooler.
I know some folks that travel to a very large gun show in the midwest carrying approximately that much cash, in addition to a sizeable amount of firearms inventory. When you drop $5-10K each on any portion of your purchases, you have to carry a large amount of cash to do much business. A speed trap outside of Tulsa on the right Sunday afternoon could generate a whole lot of cash for the local sheriff.