Two California law enforcement notes, confessed shakedowns
Topics: Drug War
05 Dec 2007
From: Ervan Darnell
The state attorney general reports that the state confiscated $28M via
asset forfeiture in 2004 [1]. That's money seized without trial, and
given to the police in large measure. The propaganda machine behind
justifying such an outrage is so good the state brags about this amount
of graft instead of hiding it. Though I am surprised the number is not
much higher. I wonder what the real number is versus the reported one?
------
I ran onto this while looking up some data on what crimes count as
"sexual offender" status. The State website [2] conveniently fails to
mention what crimes actually count. In some cases such a trivial
'crime' as indecent exposure counts (and of course all sorts of
consensual teenage sex acts count), but I was double checking in
California. Also, I saw a semi-reliable report that people convicted of
consensual adult gay sex before Lawrence v. Texas are still listed as
sexual offenders (trying to confirm that, CA undid that status only in
'97 [3], but I'm not sure about other states). Well, if the government
insists on declaring everyone a sexual offender, eventually even the
sheeple will catch on that it's just an excuse to control people the
rest of their lives.
I mention this because the whole of the state website is one shameless
bit of propaganda. But it's an interesting study in government power as
it combines the folly of the left (that sex isn't about sex) with the
folly of the right (that everyone should be in jail all of the time) to
produce a popular program that's flawed in every direction. This
especially caught my eye:
> * Sexual gratification is often not a primary motivation for a rape
> offender. *
>
> True. While some offenders do seek sexual gratification from the act,
> sexual gratification is often not a primary motivation for a rape
> offender. Power, control, and anger are more likely to be the primary
> motivators.
I think of Steven Pinker's chapter in The Blank Slate on this very
issue. He completely disassembled it from numerous angles. One of his
points is that rapists usually target the most fertile women. That's
not about power or anger. That's all about the selfish gene. Of
course, there are lots of exceptions as sex drives cover the map, but to
pick those out is to miss the point. But, the right hates any thought
of evolution and the left likes to see sex as a political class rather
than biology.
[1] http://ag.ca.gov/publications/2004_af/af.pdf
[2] http://www.meganslaw.ca.gov/
[3]
http://www.aclunc.org/news/press_releases/individuals_convicted_for_consensual_gay_sex_before_1976_to_be_dropped_from_sex_offender_registry.shtml
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