http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/11/music-videos-drugs-whatever-the-dea-will The man, Joseph Rivers, 22, was traveling from Michigan to Los Angeles by train with $18,000 in cash to pay for a music video. In Albuquerque, DEA agents boarded the train and started asking people questions. They got to Rivers, who told him he was going to shoot a music video and agreed to let them search his stuff. That, as police abuse observers know full well, was going to be a mistake. Joline Guiterrez Krueger of the Albuquerque Journal was alerted to what happened by a contact who also happened to be on the train and ended up helping Rivers when he was left with nothing: Rivers was the only passenger singled out for a search by DEA agents and the only black person on his portion of the train, [attorney Michael] Pancer said. In one of the bags, the agent found the cash, still in the Michigan bank envelope. "I even allowed him to call my mother, a military veteran and (hospital) coordinator, to corroborate my story," Rivers said. "Even with all of this, the officers decided to take my money because he stated that he believed that the money was involved in some type of narcotic activity." Rivers was left penniless, his dream deferred. "These officers took everything that I had worked so hard to save and even money that was given to me by family that believed in me," Rivers said in his email. "I told (the DEA agents) I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money. They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that." Land of the free??????
Is that really all you got out of this article? I find the fact that law enforcement can steal money from American citizens without cause to be very disturbing. But since you brought up race, yes, the U.S. Department of Justice found that cold consent encounters are “more often associated with racial profiling than contacts based on previously acquired information.” In one incident, DEA agents cold-stopped an African-American woman at an airport and allegedly subjected her to “aggressive and humiliating questioning”; the woman was a Pentagon lawyer and travelling on government business. The fight against this injustice shouldn't be an us against our fellow citizens based on race. It should be about us (citizens) against corrupt and unfair police action.
I'm not familiar with how often these agents perform such checks on trains. So, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I'm asking myself, "how did these agents know to board this train and search this person?" The NSA must've gave them a heads up. On another note, someone help me understand how these agencies are operating since they are operating on unconstitutional grounds anyway.
Don't blame me, I'm not the one who injected race into the story. Anyway, it seemed important for the writer of the story to mention it and I noticed.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/forfeiture#sthash.DDdmsySn.dpbs The numbers are staggering. The DEA likes trains. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles...ion-handing-over-amtrak-passenger-information. Amtrak is providing federal drug police in Albuquerque with ticketing information about passengers - and Amtrak police get 10 percent of any cash seized from suspected drug couriers at the Downtown station.
Thank you for sharing these links. As I was reading the content, I couldn't help but think "organized crime syndicates". The worse thing is they are bypassing the constitution with warped legal language, but still the legalese is no match for the plain worded 4th-6th amendments (at least), yet they carry on. The train reading was interesting, but it raised more questions for me. For example, the agents needed to cross reference the passenger list with other data sources to get their targets. Either that or it's a smokescreen so they can run some other routine check.
