Re: Fairfax County police BMW
Posted by:
Retired Police Officer
()
Date: May 23, 2005 09:48PM
Seriously, this is bad news folks. The last thing you want to do is to start encouraging police offices to seize cars, guns, money, etc. so they can personally benefit from the "spoils of war" Regardless of that the person did to justify having their property seized, its always a bad idea to "pay off" the force that convicted them. This creates an environment where certain officers will seek out people with nice cars, big houses, money, nice clothes, etc., forge evidence, exagerate crimes, lie under oath, DESTROY eveidence that might prove someone innocent and ultimately to wrongly convict people. This is absolutely NOT what you want a police force to do, and yet this is what is going to happen.
Its simple, you seize something, you don't see it anymore as a police office: PERIOD. It doesn't get repainted, you don't get to drive it around, no one gets to play with it, and it doesn't get kicked back to the force as in this case. Anything else WILL and ALWAYS HAS led to corruption. This is a simple historical fact, its happened in hundreds of police departments, all over the U.S. and world - and the Fairfax Police Department is no different or immune to its effects. This is why the larger more experienced police forces have policies against this. A police officer, a police department, agency - hell NO government agency should personally benefit from the misfortunates of someone found guilty of a crime. That always lead to more crime, from the force itself.
This is a very very bad sign for Fairfax County. Your police force is on a downward slide into corruption.