Attorney General Holder limits civil seizure process that splits billions of dollars with local and state police. Today we are a better country, a less hypocritical country, a less dangerous country.
Today we reaffirm the foundational American tenet of innocent until proven guilty.
No one can be trusted with unchecked power, the power to coerce, the temptation of easy money. Not me, not you. Without checks, we walk the streets as thugs, using power and fear and the system to dehumanize citizens, to affirm that while all are created equal, not all will be treated as equals.
Today's move reaffirms our corp principles, corrects corrupt practices of the power-state against the individual, and helps ameliorate damaging perceptions (by those individuals against the power-state).
If police departments cannot fulfill their duties without stealing from citizens, then we either need to realign their duties or raise the necessary taxes to support them.
I am sure this will be twisted, will be spun; claiming that we are a weaker and a more dangerous country when police lose the legal right to steal. But protecting citizen rights is a form of courage, not a weakness. Danger is the inherent reality of a people who accept security over freedom, who give up their rights to those paternalistically wishing to keep us from harm. In contrast, we are collectively more secure when we embrace freedom over safety, when we remove the cynicism birthed in unjust search and seizures. We are secure when we no longer provide the motivation of revenge, bitterness, and fear to those who may do us harm. In destroying those our enforcement agencies believe may do us harm, we validate a dozen other's reasons to do so.
For my entire adult life, our governments (federal, state, local) have marched steadfast towards a controlled state, and we have traded perceived security for our personal freedoms. We live in a world our forefathers would barely recognize, not because of the gains of technology or other shiny objects, but by the loss of our personal freedoms and the individual responsibilities born by them.
This small but real step encourages me like very little I've seen in the public sphere of late.
tGbtg