(ANTIMEDIA) Civil asset forfeiture, the process by which government agents can steal cash and other property from Americans without so much as charging them with a crime, has drawn sharp criticism in recent years. Though President Donald Trump encouraged the practice during a meeting of law enforcement agents in February, many Americans are fed up.
In 2014, alone, government agents confiscated $4.5 billion from Americans. Many of these victims are not even charged with a crime before the government robs them. Though there have been some efforts to curb the invasive practice, it is still alive and well.
Case in point: WCSJ Radio, based out of Illinois, posted to Facebook on Thursday about a “bust” by Illinois State Troopers and the Grundy County Sheriff’s Department – assisted by the DEA — that yielded $60,000 in cash. According to “law enforcement sources,” the stop was part of a larger drug investigation. The money was taken after the driver of the vehicle, in an apparent gesture of good faith, gave the officers consent to search his car.
Aside from the monumental failure that is the war on drugs in general, the most telling part of WCSJ’s post was the last two lines:
“Two DEA agents arrived at the scene and took possession of the money. No drugs were found during the stop.”
No drugs were found during the stop. And yet federal agents still stole tens of thousands of dollars from an individual who was not charged with a crime or proven to be doing anything illegal in any court of law. Though the picture accompanying the post showed a proud cop with a police dog (the canine was clearly unaware of the crime his owners were committing), the injustice of the non-existent “bust” was not lost on the internet.
Over a thousand comments streamed into the WCSJ post to shame the officers for stealing. We previously embedded some of these comments only to find they had been removed — including one from a cop supporter who still disapproved of the officers’ behavior:
Instead, we decided to grab screenshots of the comments that hadn’t been deleted yet — and they’re still glorious.
Some called a spade a spade:
Others focused on American principles and how the cops had violated them:
Though some attempted to condone the cops’ actions, the resistance was out in force:
Other commenters just engaged in some good old-fashioned trolling and sarcasm:
One summed up America’s hypocritical moral exemptions for cops:
Many waxed philosophical, pointing out government’s inherent corruption and questioning their authority altogether:
As the Trump administration and lawmakers cater to cops — and officers continue to get away with theft and murder — there is at least some hope to be found in the mounting opposition to this paradigm, evident in the reaction to this latest example of police overreach.
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