The Washington Post broke a story wide-open this morning that is bigger than Watergate. I had to check news source after news source before finding anything that confirmed it. I found it by opening up the Washington Post itself. – Ray
SPECIAL REPORT FROM RAY: AMERICA’S POLICE SCANDAL ABOUT TO GO VIRAL
A free service of Jesus Christ is Lord Ministries
News written and delivered by Ray Mossholder
Sunday, September 07, 2014
Hello America. Hello world.
From the headquarters of reachmorenow.com in Fort Worth, Texas, this is Ray Mossholder and this is the news.
The Washington Post has broken a story wide-open this morning that is bigger than Watergate but appears to have nothing to do with President Obama. I had to check news source after news source before finding anything that confirmed it. I found it by opening up the Washington Post itself. This is a story that, unless it gets shoved under the government rug, will have repercussions that could easily be of tsunami portions. What is surprising is that so many drivers have been robbed and America is just finding out about it. I want to thank my forever friend Dan Hurt for leading me to this story that will ripple across America for many many years.
Americans are being robbed in record number, this time not from the White House but from the United States police. I will cover this story as thoroughly as I can. This will be a special report.
When I was a boy one of the jokes that got told then told and told was very short. My buddies would ask, “What’s a penny made of?” And someone else would answer, “Dirty Cop per.” Especially today, I thought about that joke and it is no longer funny.
When we use the term “police force” we don’t mean police who strong-arm innocent people. But that’s exactly what’s been happening all across America, according to the Washington Post. It is the story of the shakedown of the century. And it involves every form of the police – from state to local. Please remember what I share the story that not all policeman are involved. But so many of them are that they quickly are going to need to build another prison just to hold them all.
And this is not some new scandal that began under Barack Obama’s watch. It goes back to 9/11 – September 11, 2001. The horror of 9/11 brought orders from headquarters, not just police headquarters, but from George W. Bush in the White House. His reasoning was excellent – train the police all across America to get much more investigative with everyone. The killers of 9/11 had literally literally slipped through their fingers
Immediately The Department Of Homeland Security and the Justice Department spent millions of dollars to train police nationwide. Evidently they did too good a job. The police learned not only how to look for terrorists, they learned to terrorize drivers with their car search scams that included taking all the cash the driver had in the car or in their wallet or purse with the excuse that they were looking for drugs or terrorist materials. It was literal highway robbery and it has continued through today. Hundreds of millions of dollars have made policeman and all in their stations richer than Kings.
You may be asking by now why you’re not seeing this story on the news channels today or hearing it over the radio. The answer is simple. Everyone who is anyone in the newscast industry takes Saturday and Sunday off. There is such a scarcity of news that I’m glad I have several more than fifty news sources to gather the stories they have taken time to share. But a story this big requires weekday anchors that will break it tomorrow. In many ways because it is Sunday, reachmorenow.com and The Washington Post are giving you an exclusive.
Realize, thousands of people have had to win court cases that often took more than a year to get their money back while spending a great deal of money to lawyers. Not only that but fighting a policeman in a courtroom feels dangerous and sometimes is.
Along about 2002, private firms sprung up to teach police their tactics. One of these firms that you should hear a lot about in the future known as Black Asphalt Networking and Notification System that empowered police nationwide to gather all kinds of personal information from those they stopped, including their Social Security numbers, addresses, and identifying tattoos. In spite of warnings from the state and federal authorities that what they were doing could violate privacy laws and be unconstitutional, police across America forms networks were this information was freely shared.
What The Washington Times calls a “subculture of road officers” actually began competing to see who could take the largest amount of “money and contraband.” Afterward they bragged about how much they took and shared what the Post called “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some cities and towns that were hurting financially often received donations of stolen money from the police, not knowing where the money originally came from.
Ron Hain, a Deputy from Kain County, Illinois, wrote under a pseudonym in a self published book, “All of our hometowns are sitting on a tax– liberating gold mine. Hain’s book joyfully recommends “turning our police forces into modern-day Robin Hoods.” Hain is marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading police training firm in Guthrie, Oklahoma. This group also founded Black Asphalt.
According to both state and federal civil law, it is totally legal for the police to see anyone’s cash. It is called “Equitable Sharing,” a law established by the Justice Department several years ago. The unusual thing about Equitable Sharing is that the money can be seized without any criminal charges being involved. Then the former owner of the money has to prove their possessions were legally acquired.
Journalists have written about Equitable Sharing and it’s dangerous and there are then countless Congressional hearings about it that I’ve never reached any other conclusion. However, in all of that, no one on the federal level has pursued an investigation of the federal government or the private training companies that encourage police officers to take the money and run. Again, this has been going for twelve years, ever since 9/11.
Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Florida, said “Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling one million dollars in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money. It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.” Overton was once the overseer of a federal drug task force in South Florida.
The Washington Post has crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s before today’s exposé. Just one of the things they did was to examine a database of hundreds of thousands of federal court cases, and the obtained internal records from training firms, and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists.
Under the Equitable Sharing Program since 2001 police have seized 2.5 billion dollars without serving any warrants or charging the previous owner of any crime at all. The government sent back about 1.7 million dollars to the agencies for their use. Police simply say they thought all that money must have been crime related.
States that are immediately implicated include Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, plus the District of Columbia, but it certainly doesn’t end there.
Also implicated are the New York City police; Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office; Los Angeles police; Houston, Texas, Police Department; Wayne County Sheriff’s office in Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri, County police; Douglas County Sheriff’s office in Nebraska; Anaheim Police, California; Atlanta, Georgia, Police Department; North Miami Beach, Florida, Police; Laredo, Texas, Police; Pomona, California, Police; Amtrak, Pennsylvania, Police; Chicago, Illinois Police; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Police; St. Charles, Missouri, County Sheriff’s office; Las Vegas, Nevada, Metropolitan Police; Baltimore, Maryland, Police; Baltimore, Maryland County Police; San Diego, California, Police; Jefferson County, Alabama, Sheriff’s office; DeKalb County, Georgia, Police; Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police; San Diego, California, County Sheriff’s office; and City of Phoenix, Arizona, Police. There are many more. And none of that includes any of the statewide agencies or task forces and only includes local agencies who received more than 250,000 dollars. The source for all of that is The Washington Post.
The Post found:
There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 with no warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion dollars. State and local authorities kept more than 1.7 billion dollars of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received 800 million dollars. Half of the seizures were below 8,800 dollars.
Only a six of the seizures were legally challenge in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41% of the cases – 4,455 – where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return the money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40% of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.
Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. TheWashingtonPost found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20% or more of their annual budgets since 2008.
Agencies with police known that the participating in the Black Asphalt Intelligence Network had seen a 32% jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow–trained officers reported more than 427 million dollars in cash seizures during a highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police officers have belonging to Black Asphalt, according to the same company.
State law enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of the Black Asphalt network because of concerns that might not be a legal law enforcement tool. A federal prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law enforcement information, and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But officials at Justice And Homeland Security continued to use it.
Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr after learning of The Washington Post exposé said he had no comment. But he did say that the department has a compliance review process in place for the Equitable Sharing Program and attorneys for federal agencies must review the seizures before they are “adopted” for inclusion in the program.
The Justice Department data released to The Washington Post does not contain information about race. Carr said the department prohibits racial profiling but in 400 Federal Court cases examined by the Post where people who challenged the seizures and received some money back, the majority were black, Hispanic or another minority.
There are many examples of what happened to people caught in this scandalous police behavior. Here are just three:
A 55-year-old American restaurateur from Georgia was stopped by police for a minor speeding violation on Interstate 10 in Alabama. He was held for nearly 2 hours. He had money from his relatives intended for buying a Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He got back his money – 75,000 dollars – but only after spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer and losing the restaurant deal.
The African-American owner of a small barbecue restaurant – The Smoking Roosters, in Staunton, Virginia. Mandred Stuart, age 35, was shocked when police seized 17,500 dollars from him when he made a minor infraction on Interstate 66 in Fairfax, Virginia. He demanded a jury trial because the government said they would only give him half of the money taken. He did finally get his money back, but while waiting for a lengthy wait to get to court, he lost his barbecue restaurant because he didn’t have the cash to pay his overhead.
Stuart said, “I paid taxes on that money. I worked for that money. Why should I give them my money?”
Here’s the third one: a 40-year-old Hispanic carpenter from New Jersey was stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia for having tinted windows. As the police approached him they said he appeared nervous, but he consented to a have him search his car. The police took his eighteen thousand dollars that he had on him so that he could buy a used car. He had to spend a couple thousand dollars to hire a lawyer so that he could get his own money back.
Steven Peterson, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration agent who arranged highway interdiction training through a company called the 4:20 Group, so the way that police officers used to make a name for themselves was being part of a huge drug bust. All that changed when agency leaders realized that cash seizures could easily get them through lean financial times.
“They saw this as a way to provide equipment and training for their guys,” Peterson said. “If you seized large amounts of cash, that’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
There is more to this awful story and I’ll be sharing it in Part Two tomorrow. But for now, here’s the thought for today:
***************************
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
For every sin, Satan will gladly supply an excuse for it.
****************************
Please feel free to leave a comment in the comment box at the end of this newscast.
If you liked my sharing of this report, click the “LIKE” button so I’ll know it.
If you want to be notified when the next newscast is published click the “SUBSCRIBE” button on the video.
So until the next newscast this is Ray Mossholder, praying for you my friend. Have a miraculous day!
AMERICAS NATIONAL POLICE SCANDAL ABOUT TO GO VIRAL