Civil asset forfeiture is generally used under this premise - that having large sums of cash suggests some criminal intent.
But of course, that only makes sense on the surface if you're out in public with it. (There are of course, many reasons you would have a large sum of cash in public other than drug deals.)
Seizing cash which is in a safe deposit box is a few steps further, which raises the hairs on the back of my neck. What is next? Having more money in your bank than the police believe you should have?
Yes, an "Unexplained Wealth Order" in the UK. If you appear to have too much wealth you can be obliged to explain how you lawfully acquired it on pain of seizure.
The UWO must target an individual who is either: Politically exposed (e.g. (ex)leaders and senior officials of a country and their families) or Reasonably Believed to be involved in Serious Crime (e.g. bank robbers) and whose wealth lacks an apparent explanation. If the target either can't or won't explain their wealth it may be seized.
UWOs are supposed to be reformed to make them work even when you've paid lawyers to make the apparent ownership very opaque. Right now if you're benefiting from an opaque "trust" arrangement maybe spanning several countries it may be impossible to show how that wealth is really "yours" legally, without the co-operation you would have been required to show as part of the UWO.
In practice it often happens, as I understand it, that the UWO target decides the best way out is to just hand over the wealth, because the real answer to "Why do you have this wealth?" is "I did a bunch of crimes" and that is a confession of crime, for which you might do prison time, and either they don't trust lawyers or the lawyers they hired couldn't come up with another story that would hold water.
Sadly the current (Tory) and former (Tory, Tory, and Tory back many years now) UK governments have been much better at talking up their commitment to transparency than at actually taking any steps to prevent the UK (and especially London) functioning as a laundromat and dormitory for crooks to wash their dirty money and sleep comfortably knowing the people they stole from can't reach them...
I guess that's strictly "better" than the nearly-zero-recourse civil forfeiture travesty we have here in the US, but... still not great.
Is it unreasonable that law enforcement asks how did you aquire an amount of money that is greater than you could ever earn in your lifetime?
it's nearly the same mechanism as what was used against alcapone to jail him for inocme tax evasion -> he had access to absurd amount of wealth, and there is no way the could have aquired it legally.
Triggering the investigation is fine and reasonable.
Confiscating the wealth without evidence of a crime is the issue.
Civil Asset Forfeiture in the US is regularly confiscating not tens of millions of dollars, but mere thousands of dollars for the simple reason of it being in cash. And this case is even worse - the cash was not on anyone's person out in public, but in a safe deposit box, not doing anything in particular.
Sometimes the case is never brought to trial [1]; in other cases the owner of the assets is never even charged with a crime [2]. When the forfeiture creates a financial burden [3] or the asset has the potential for depreciation [3], the accused may have even a financial incentive to settle rather than go to trial.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31446215
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588268
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365463
[4] https://cre.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/37_2_3_Federal_Fo...
I'd much rather live in a place where that dang mobster that "no one can touch" gets a little rich and evades the law (until that day he doesn't), than to live in a dystopian totalitarian mega-state (e.g. China).
> Is it unreasonable that law enforcement asks how did you aquire an amount of money that is greater than you could ever earn in your lifetime?
Yes, very much so. It's very, very, incredibly dangerous to fall into the trap of allowing a system that asks someone to prove their innocence and that is exactly what your question is asking.
> it's nearly the same mechanism as what was used against alcapone to jail him for income (sic) tax evasion
Nearly the same is not the same. In other words, it'd be OK to check that the $10,000,000 dollar bank account owner did pay taxes on it. If not, well, ooof. But also, how do we know he had a $10M bank account in the first place? That info had better be obtained legally too.
Scenario:
John Doe has 10 million dollars appear in his bank account. No evidence that it was obtained legally and no evidence that any taxes were ever paid.
Option IRS/Alcapone - he goes to jail for Tax evasion
Option 'Unexplained Wealth Order' - UK government seizes assets because they should it could not be obtained legally. He is still free and out and about
If anything the option you are advocating is "worse" as in it is harsher.
Actually, it wasn't that Capone had "an absurd amount of wealth," the amount was irrelevant. Just ask J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and others who weren't put in jail for being "too wealthy." It was because Capone didn't pay taxes on that income
In fact, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) treats "illegal" income[0] exactly the same way it treats "legal" income for tax purposes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_illegal_income_in_...
The presumption of innocence does not mean you're entitled to obstruct investigators. "But you haven't proved that I'm guilty" also doesn't work to stop detectives entering your home with a search warrant.
I'm ok with having large amounts of cash with no obvious legitimate source triggering an investigation, but that's not what's happening.
They just sneak past it by not actually sentencing you of a crime.
It's more like "we see a lot of smoke coming out of your house, satisfy us there isn't a fire or we're coming in with the hoses". Viewing that through the "innocent until proven guilty" lens is like trying to argue the fire crew have to stay outside until they see actual flames
For example, if a bank detects an anomaly, they report it. What they DO NOT do is transfer the suspicious funds to a police bank account.
Swiss banks ain't what they used to be. Cayman islands too.
that is how Al Capone was taken down, isn't it? That is the reason government pushes you to use banks by in particular attacking even very modest cash piles. And you do have that $10K bank transaction limit triggering law enforcement check.
Even the Joker wont take on the IRS.
Even the stuff which is from criminal activity.
https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17
That is, presumably, someone else's problem if you report money received from money laundering or bribes.
So when we legalized marijuana, most of the possible infractions have sentences up to 14 years and that’s no coincidence.
Bringing marijuana across a border? Up to 14 years!
Making an extract? Up to 14 years!
Sharing with a minor? Up to 14 years!
(vs actually triggering any sort of law enforcement check on that particular transaction)
"FINTRAC analyzes approximately 19 million transactions per year. In 2017, FINTRAC made 2,000 disclosures to police forces." according to Wikipedia.
The police? Shit, this is exactly what the youth are demanding now. Wealth confiscation is all the rage with Gen Z and younger millenials.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're not for smaller government though, right?
I am happy with the concept of 'small government', but typically folks who use it dont mean what I think it should mean.
They are happy to spend a lot of my tax money on the prosecutor that will charge me for jaywalking, but want to cut spending on the public defence attorney that will defend me from the very same 'small government' they advocate.
They tend to invoke 'small government should not interfere' when I ask whether a companies should be able to screw me over, but they want 'full force of the law' when I do anything they dislike.
Because otherwise I can answer the same way you did and say that my experience is the people who complain the most about us burdening future generations with debt are the same ones demanding expensive far-reaching government programs for everything under the sun.
Originally I expressed no opinion about national debt, I merely point out hypocracy of making demands of future generation, but acting angry and righteous when those generations make requests of us.
also I spesifically stated that I do not buy into ideology typically attached to 'small government'.
also the premise that the only way to deal with national debt is to have smaller government is wrong, we could have higher taxes or print money
Lastly the idea that smaller government is more efficient or cheaper is wrong too - industries where the government is the only buyer, like prisons, tend to do terribly when they are given to the private sector - it creates insentive for corruption and fraud and is actually harder to manage as a market than it is for a government to run them directly. In every meteic, from recisevism to in prison murder rate, private prisons do worse.
And even if you want to buy the most expensive gram of coke, remember that money likely has more literal shit on it than cocaine. There's a reason food service staff is trained to always wash your hands after handling money.
"... to always wash their hands ...", I presume?
The average is much higher at 29 mcg, so each gram is a far more reasonable $35k. But the variability is enormous. Choose the right bills and it'll cost you just under $8k (and a fortune in acetonitrile, but you can recover that!).
"Results demonstrated that "92% of the bills were positive for cocaine with a mean amount of 28.75 ± 139.07 micrograms per bill"
I assume a fair portion of the variability is in the bill amount, so the $35k dream is unreachable and the eight thousand bills likely requires mostly hundreds.
Can I get the one with the negative 110 micrograms in it?
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/this-is-exactly-how-of...
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-police-b...
> some cops jokingly refer to the dogs as "probable cause on four legs.
> And there are powerful incentives not to change how things are done, says Andy Falco, a former police K9 handler who now trains dogs and works as an expert witness for defense attorneys.
> "All [police departments] care about is how many cars you're pulling over, how much money is being seized because your dog alerted," he says, referring to departments that use civil asset forfeiture to keep money and other property found in cars after a K9 alerts to the scent of drugs.
> "They go, 'It's easy! All I gotta do is walk my dog around, and look for him to change his behavior slightly, and then we can go inside and sometimes we'll find a million dollars and then we can seize it!'"
> "There's been cars that my dog's hit on... and just because there wasn't a product in it, doesn't mean the dog can't smell it," says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer
Not like the judge can ask the dog what happened.
For example, this is not a murder, somehow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc&t=190s
Does it go back into circulation at that point?
The government will deposit the face value of the currency as opposed to its collectible value. So someone who stored an old $1,000 bill doesn’t get the actual value of the bill (probably twice that on collectibles market)
> PINE LAWN, Missouri - Curtis Smith Senior wants his $1000 bill back. He carried the rare one-grand note in his pocket for 20 years. It was seized by police in the St. Louis suburb of Pine Lawn, when Smith was arrested during a traffic stop. Officials gave Smith a check last April in return, but he wants his really big bill. Now, the one-grand bill is in the City Hall safe of the mayor - who considers it novelty. Collectors say the bank note is worth much more than its face value. The $1000 bill was last printed in 1934 and was taken out of circulation in 1969. Officials say Smith can have the bill back, once it's no longer considered evidence. But they say he'll have to pay for it.
While it isn't available to borrow, here's what the search text of https://archive.org/details/banknotereport32n6krau/page/n11/... reports:
> The article was from the Jan. 24 edition of the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, written by Heather Ratcliffe. It said that Pine Lawn, Mo., police had allowed Mayor Adrian Wright to “trade” $1,000 of his own money for a $1,000 note seized from Curtis Smith, who had been arrested on suspicion of dealing drugs and being intoxicated at the wheel of his pickup truck. Prosecutors did not file drug charges and ordered the money returned. Pine Lawn officials initially offered to pay Smith by check. They returned the-$ 1,000 note after a reporter inquired about the situation. Smith had carried the note around in his pocket for years as a novelty to show friends.
But that's the government's problem. Either they will have to pay the collectable value to the collector (if the property is to be returned to them) or not pay anything to the collector.
Well, it's also a "destruction of historical artifacts" problem.
Yeah presumably except any bills that may be too damaged/dirty/contaminated, which is the same for any cash, in which case it gets destroyed.
I recall one story where the lawyer asked the judge for a dollar tested it and it came back positive. Quote at the time was Something like 97% of all money has been exposed to drugs.
This is my memory of events, so take with grain of salt.
I think the only reason this hasn't completely blown up in their face is they did manage to nab some shady characters, but the ends don't justify the means.