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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16838 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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  • The repairs cost $20k, not a single cent of which was paid by the officers, who also kept $400 of his cash

Good ol civil asset forfeiture, allowing cops to just steal from innocent people without any evidence for decades.

Cops will steal your money, they'll steal your RV, they'll steal the computers at your computer shop, they'll steal the funds for your medical clinic, they'll steal a teen's phone and sell it at one of those kiosks, they'll steal your horses even.

Fulton County, Georgia, seized seven horses from Brandon "Brannu" Fulton in 2017 after he was charged with animal cruelty. (The identical last name here is an unfortunate coincidence for the sake of clarity, but we will persevere.) Those charges were later dropped. But the government still declined to return the animals to Fulton—long ago dubbed Atlanta's Urban Cowboy after his affinity for riding into town on horseback—nor would it compensate him for their value. One of those horses, he said, is worth $35,000.

Law enforcement are thieves, because of course they are when you not only allow the theft but incentivize it by allowing them or the departments to keep the shit they take. Luckily many of those cases do eventually get ruled against, but "eventually you might get your money that was stolen back after paying a lot to fight in court" is a bit of a cold comfort. And that's not even guaranteed.

It wasn't civil asset forfeiture. It was an evidentiary seizure pursuant to a lawfully issued warrant.

I have a lot of nostalgia for my parents' politics, but in retrospect their love of civil asset forfeiture, clearly sold to them through conservative outlets as part of the war on drugs package, was a weird and embarrassing outlier. They were generally quite fond of constitutional and liberal principles, but it's like they didn't notice or didn't care in this case that the legal mechanism they were celebrating was a blatant endrun around them. They just thought it was based that wealth was flowing directly and freely from organized crime to law enforcement.

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