The city goverment in St. Louis is a complete mess. The rule of law barely exists and honest decent people basically avoid involvement. I moved to Madison Wisconsin and am much happier.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/0A9D35B488018A768625748E0014C436?OpenDocument

All the from the PD that also brought us the World Series Ticket scandle.

I have to agree with Phelps that there is such an obvious set of perverse incentives and lure to corruption (the police gets to keep what it takes from citizens) that it irks me there is almost no awareness of this as an issue.

A bit of Googling shows that the daughter in question is facing “unrelated” charges for having stolen valuables and a credit card from her mother & stepfather, as well as drug and child endangerment.

The more complicated story, which the article only hints at, is probably something like this:

- Daughter exploited apparent connection to dad to get cheap cars to finance drug habit; police chief dad not told.
- Police chief dad learns about this at some point, tries to cover it up.
- When the full horror of the situation is exposed, police chief dad gets thrown under the bus by resentful fellow officers.
- Reflexive police “courtesy” (corruption) nevertheless had previously led to no charges for daughter on DUI.

So the net-net: it probably wasn’t a straight-up bribe, it was likely a shakedown by the daughter under the apparent authority of dad, but it was facilitated by a pervasive atmosphere of “back scratching” corruption.

Still not a pretty picture.

I haven’t seen any movement on this in a long time, though there was once a fairly high-level bi-partisan effort to reform the system (from then-House majority leader Republican Henry Hyde and Democrat John Conyers – reading Hyde’s 1995 _Forfeiting Our Property Rights_ is what made me aware of how widespread the problem is).

It seems like the obvious approach should be to remove the “in rem” aspect of the process. That is, maybe there is legitimate cause for LE to seize property that is a result of direct profit from criminal activity. But, that seizure must be absolutely contingent on the property owner being convicted of the crime which lead to the profit. Otherwise legal property cannot initially be seized without making an arrest and cannot be held for more than a few days without an indictment. (Even then, there has to be a reasonable time limit on – and hardship remedy for – seizures where the owner won’t go to trial for a long time.) Finally, no conviction means the property must be returned and reasonable compensation made for damages and lost income directly resulting from the seizure, withOUT the owner needing to sue the government to get it.