Judge: NYC Seizing Thousands of Cars Without Warrants Is Unconstitutional

http://www.amny.com/news/taxi-and-limousine-commission-seizing-of-cars-is-unconstitutional-federal-judge-rules-1.10911628

by bane • 11 years ago

278 101 11 years ago

amny.com

pbreit• 11 years ago

Is this an Uber thing? I didn't see it mentioned.

_delirium• 11 years ago

This is a much older fight in NYC than Uber. They're probably involved in a good number of the cars in question in recent years, but a back-and-forth over to what extent to tolerate vs. crack down on unlicensed taxi services has been going on for decades. The general category is often called by the somewhat racist term "gypsy cabs".

talmand5• 11 years ago

Why is that a racist term?

To be honest, I had never heard the term until recently when I heard it used on a TV show.

spectralblu• 11 years ago

Uber wasn't explicitly mentioned, but it just sounds like the TLC is overly trigger happy in seizing cars, presumably because of the uptake in services like Lyft and Uber who in the TLC's eyes are skirting around the law.

gharbad• 11 years ago

By "skirting around" do you mean "blatantly flouting"? Because that's the truth of it..

Uber, Lyft, et al are just central dispatch for gypsy cabs. I don't see any reason they shouldn't get massive fines or seized vehicles in all locales they operate.

bsder2• 11 years ago

What's the deal with all the Forbes links redirecting to welcome? How do I stop this?

I tried checking the "Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page" box in Firefox, but it doesn't appear to be stopping it.

Presumably too many people are starting to use things like "Google Sent Me".

ukd1• 11 years ago

Can we just ban submissions from sites like this?

bcoates• 11 years ago

Here's a better, less Forbesy article that loads for me:

http://www.amny.com/news/taxi-and-limousine-commission-seizi...

crisnoble• 11 years ago

Ghostery counts 57 trackers. How many different ways are there to count sheep anyways?

dang3• 11 years ago

It's not that easy. First, which sites are "sites like this" varies from user to user. Second, in the majority of cases it's possible to read the article, just annoying. Third, HN optimizes for good articles, and good articles do appear on sites like this.

It's not a great situation but I don't think the alternative would be better for HN.

notwhereyouare2• 11 years ago

ad block. It makes the page completely blank if you have it enabled

bsder2• 11 years ago

But how are they doing the redirect in such a way that it overrides my choice to not allow them? And how can I stop it?

If I visit a link, I don't want them to be able to arbitrarily forward me to another link without my permission, thanks.

stephengillie• 11 years ago

This is Forbes signalling to me that they no longer wish to be relevant to me.

briandear2• 11 years ago

Lol. Forbes stopped being relevant years ago.

guessbest• 11 years ago

I just opened it twice. That seems to have solved the problem.

msravi• 11 years ago

Yes. The first time you click, it returns a blank page (with an adblocker). The second time you click, the article's contents can be seen. Has happened to me on all the Forbes articles posted here.

avoutthere• 11 years ago

Wow, how was this ever legal to begin with?

jff• 11 years ago

The authoritarians that run NYC are tremendously contemptuous of the common man. See: anything Bloomberg has ever done.

TallGuyShort• 11 years ago

Stop and frisk something something...

zyxley• 11 years ago

It wasn't. The people doing it just pretended it was.

Falkon1313• 11 years ago

It was legal because in the king's eyes, the colonists weren't really citizens, they were just subjects, and therefore subject to search and seizure on a whim. That was one of the reasons we had a revolution.

There was also a brief period between 1789-1791 where it wasn't explicitly clear that it was illegal, but that was resolved by amending the constitution.

thoman23• 11 years ago

So the government should not arbitrarily seize property from its own citizenry? I'm sure they will take that under advisement.

AdmiralAsshat• 11 years ago

Is the lack of any page displaying with adblocking turned on intentional, or is it simply bad design?

barkingcat• 11 years ago

It means you're using a bad ad blocker. Using uBlock origin it displays fine.

notwhereyouare2• 11 years ago

I had to disable my uBlock Origin in order to see the page

zaroth2• 11 years ago

I agree 100% this is a perfect example of where we the people rely entirely on the judiciary to provide a remedy. That such an obviously illegal practice could continue for years unfortunately does not reflect well on any thoughts of swift justice.

It should be possible to get a temporary restraining order against the city in cases like this within days of the first contested case. It should be easy to demonstrate there is no imminent harm of telling the city, you have to stop doing this until we decide it's OK or not, and quite the opposite, cars are an essential and significant asset, and this policy placed a potentially massive burden on the citizens it effected.

In one of the examples, by the time the victim prevailed against the illegal seizure backed by zero evidence or investigation of any kind, they had already sold off his car, and offered nothing in return. A pretty large part of the population doesn't have a spare $2,000 in cash to get their own car back while the city makes them prove in front of a Kangaroo Court that they were driving their own family to the airport... Missing from the article -- is there any hope of any kind of restitution? Can the victims now pursue a civil case against the city?

mtgx2• 11 years ago

This is why the US needs a Constitutional Court so badly to vet bills after they get signed by the president, like other countries have. Then you wouldn't get stuck with unconstitutional laws for many years or even decades, letting them abuse an entire generation of people.

Now the replies will go like "but the US has an adversarial justice system!". Yeah. Except for that whole three decades old secret FISA court that is in charge of spying. No adversary there.

adventured• 11 years ago

Having either an adversarial system or constitutional court doesn't stop a government from using its power to do illegal, immoral, secretive, or plainly unconstitutional things.

Historically, and across pretty much every nation that has ever existed, governments have routinely chosen to disobey their own laws, do terrible things in secret, and so on.

I also fail to see how a constitutional court prevents FISA from existing if you have executive orders and national security doctrine (the two things that made FISA and the NSA spying possible). You'd need to throw out a lot of things to make a constitutional court work. As it is, national security doctrine would simply bypass a constitutional court check when it comes to creating FISA. You would have to try to elevate it above all possible counter considerations, and good luck with that.

dannysu• 11 years ago

I was getting redirected to http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/ if I clicked the link on HN.

If I copy & paste the link to a new tab, then it worked for me.

bsimpson• 11 years ago

If I turn off Ghostery, the link loads for me.

They are probably trying to dissuade ad blocking. It might work better for them if they told you what was happening (instead of just sending you to a blank page).

scintill76• 11 years ago

Or, it just breaks in a way they didn't intend or know about. I've had both Ghostery and HTTPS Everywhere subtly break things, in cases where the author probably wouldn't bother to target those users. I guess we're kind of asking for it, running a client that doesn't comply with standards...

Jerry2• 11 years ago

If I copy & paste the link to a new tab, then it worked for me.

It worked because you opened it the second time. First time you open it, it places a cookie on your machine so it doesn't show you a redirection second time you open a link on Forbes.

So the solution is to just open it in tabs twice... and close the first tab.

dools• 11 years ago

Just another example of how prohibiting human behaviour instead of regulating leads to over zealous police and undue burden on law abiding citizens.

They should take a page out of London's book and allow minicabs to operate.

aswanson• 11 years ago

Why is the regular news reading more and more like my Onion RSS feed? I have a feeling things were always this absurd, if not more so, but the idiocy gets amplified now by the channels being so connected.

themartorana• 11 years ago

Ignorance is, in fact, bliss, sometimes.

Arnt2• 11 years ago

Sounds like a contorted way of saying "I click the clickbait" ;)

mlrtime• 11 years ago

you might like /r/nottheonion

grecy• 11 years ago

“‘Probable cause’ is not a talismanic phrase that can be waved like a wand to justify the seizure of any property without a warrant”

Does that apply to civil forfeiture as well? Sounds like it should.

mtgx2• 11 years ago

For some reason, Courts so far have agreed to buy the government's whole twisted logic that "things can be guilty of crimes", and under that twisted logic it seems to make sense to do that.

liquidise• 11 years ago

Very true. I am still awaiting the day this is extrapolated to gun rights and watch the hypocrisies rain.

maehwasu• 11 years ago

And once again, the nice thing about living in not America is that bribes are significantly cheaper.

timtas• 11 years ago

Yet another reason why I've stopped using plural pronouns to refer to the state at any level.

peeters• 11 years ago

I think the most interesting, or scary, part of all of this is the justification for this warrantless search and seizure: to stop Uber from operating in the city. Usually the government has to invoke public safety to try to justify removing individual rights. Now they can just invoke the taxi lobby I guess.

dandare• 11 years ago

This is on of the things that fascinates me about the US. Such blatant injustice would be unthinkable in the Europe.

talmand5• 11 years ago

Nah, I'm sure Europe has their own flavors of injustice against its people. It's just the nature of governments.

bzbarsky• 11 years ago

It would? http://www.webpronews.com/french-police-told-to-seize-uber-c... begs to differ, after about 30 seconds of googling.

mapt2• 11 years ago

You: The city is stealing my car without probable cause in an attempt to extort money from me.

City DA: No they're not.

What's your recourse here? Call the FBI or federal prosecutor and report an organized crime syndicate being run by corrupt law enforcement professionals? Because... isn't that what this is?

Is there any onus, or even incentive, for them to listen and investigate? Is the only way to redress the problems a civil lawsuit against the City citing Bivens and various appellate court principles like malicious prosecution? Because grand theft auto, extortion, racketeering, and fabrication of evidence / perjury are not civil offenses, and conservative readings of the concept of 'standing', as I understand it, make it rather difficult to challenge the authors of a failed / withdrawn prosecution in order to get at the legal principles which triggered it.

Concepts like this one, as well as things like civil asset forfeiture, are so clearly in direct violation of the Constitution that at some point, it's not legitimate to shelter enforcers under cover of "just following orders". We still have laws (Constitutional and common), and Peabody, Minnesota doesn't have the right to do things like put all the gay residents to death by legislative fiat & judicial compliance; If you found this occurring, you wouldn't need to file a lawsuit alleging that a constitutional overreach has been committed and demanding merely that the policy cease to be in effect. Instead, you would get some overriding authority, like the state police or the FBI, to run in with SWAT teams and arrest and prosecute every last person peripherally attached to the Peabody legislature or judiciary or law enforcement. For murder.

No amount of 'adopting selective prosecution based on what we can win, since the courts recognized a valid affirmative defence' or 'changing training programs to be more in line with civil rights' or 'firing/reprimanding the officers involved and settling a civil suit' makes killing the gay population of Peabody less of a crime, and no amount of lawsuit would be required to get that recognized.

zaroth2• 11 years ago

Wish more people would simply call it what it is. If we can't even do that, certainly we'll never see an actual prosecution.

The name of a thing is important, and calling it exactly 'grand theft auto, extortion, racketeering, and fabrication of evidence / perjury' versus something like 'civil asset forfeiture' or in this case, not even that, it's a glorified falsified parking ticket!

I mean, how did this actually play out in court? "So, Your Honor, you're not going to believe what happened. I was going to drop my niece at the airport and these thugs pulled me out of the car, showed me a badge, impounded my car, and now want me to sign a document and pay them a stack of cash to get it back." Prosecutor, "Actually, we employ 170 people to do this, and we've done it 21,000 times".

The article they quote saying it's a corrupt money-making scheme for the city was an interesting read: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140724/long-island-city/ta...

mapt2• 11 years ago

"“They’re stopping cars without legal justification all the time,” said Kaeckmeister, who in the past year has gone to two tribunal hearings to testify before a judge that his superiors forced him to seize a car when he didn’t have the evidence to do so."

His superiors pressured him to steal a car by threatening to fire him, and to fabricate evidence, perjure himself, and file false police reports in order to hold it for ransom without legal basis. It shouldn't make a difference whether he's in the traffic enforcement business or the puppy breeding business, the same actions are a clear crime regardless of his background; He wasn't even under duress by the definition of that word used in the courts, though perhaps whistleblower protections apply (if they still exist).

Dude's just confessed, before a judge, to a massive profit-seeking criminal conspiracy over and above what was authorized by local legislature. Arrest somebody.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

You: The city is stealing my car without probable cause in an attempt to extort money from me.
City DA: No they're not.
What's your recourse here?

File a civil lawsuit for the violation of Constitutional rights, to wit, the right against being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process.

Report to the State and federal government for potential public civil and criminal action by those governments against the local government/officials involved.

Work to organize members of the public for political action against the responsible local government/officials.

Etc.

Concepts like this one, as well as things like civil asset forfeiture, are so clearly in direct violation of the Constitution

Civil asset forfeiture in general is not in direct violation of the Constitution. There may be a valid argument that some of the ways it is currently employed are in violation of the Constitution, though even that is a weaker case than that some of the ways it is employed are just bad policy.

We still have laws (Constitutional and common), and Peabody, Minnesota doesn't have the right to do things like put all the gay residents to death by legislative fiat & judicial compliance; If you found this occurring, you wouldn't need to file a lawsuit alleging that a constitutional overreach has been committed and demanding merely that the policy cease to be in effect. Instead, you would get some overriding authority, like the state police or the FBI, to run in with SWAT teams and arrest and prosecute every last person peripherally attached to the Peabody legislature or judiciary or law enforcement. For murder.

Or, not. Law enforcement agencies have the power to enforce the laws, but they generally have no obligation to enforce them, and quite often real and significant violations are fought with civil lawsuits by those affected rather than direct intervention and criminal prosecution by enforcement agencies. Even in cases where the general problem is one that enforcement agencies are interested in -- the civil rights movement provides numerous examples, where all kinds of serious violations by local and state officials were addressed, some by higher (particularly federal) law enforcement action, some by private civil lawsuits, some by political mobilizing and action, and many by combinations of those methods.

chrismcb• 11 years ago

Can you explain how civil asset forfeiture is not unconstitutional? Your property is taken without due process. You can get it back, if you go to court. The due process happens after it is taken.

c223• 11 years ago

This is a stupid grammar nitpick I only offer in the hopes that you find it useful for your writing. No dismissal of your arguments or denigration of your character is intended.

I think you want the word "affected" in your second paragraph. Effects are the result of causation, whereas affect refers to the causation. The citizens were affected by the effects of this policy.

ricksplat4• 11 years ago

You actually wrote two paragraphs to tell somebody they misspelled with an 'e' instead of an 'a'

c223• 11 years ago

I'm sure we've all wasted keystrokes on stupider things.

RHSeeger• 11 years ago

Contrary to the opinions of others, I appreciated your post. While a nitpick, you provided the both the correction and a good way to remember which word is used in which situation. As someone who has to stop to consider which one to use sometimes, I appreciate the extra effort.

david-given• 11 years ago

You may be interested to know --- well, I find it interesting --- that there are lesser known meanings of 'affect' and 'effect' which are the other way round. You can effect a change, where 'effect' a verb. And people can have an affect, where 'affect' is a noun largely synonymous to 'mood'.

I believe it's even possible to affect affects by effecting an affect effect, in effect. English is weird.

(Linguistic tangents are best tangents!)

dang3• 11 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384716 and marked it off-topic.

(As often happens, the root comment wasn't so bad, but the subthread is terrible.)

briandear2• 11 years ago

Has anyone ever died because of an unlicensed limo? Is it really a threat to public safety? If consenting adults agree to a transaction, I am not sure how that's the government's business. However, if an unlicensed vehicle was portraying itself as a licensed vehicle, then you have a fraud issue, not a public safety one.

_Codemonkeyism• 11 years ago

Some countries require health checks on drivers so they don't act as super spreaders.

MrApathy• 11 years ago

Some years back NYC [1] (under Mayor Giuliani) instituted a policy whereby drivers suspected of driving while intoxicated would have their vehicles seized by the police. Unlike unlicensed limos, DWI is a real public safety problem.

The problem with what NYC did, however, was that a driver could be found not guilty of DWI and still have his car seized. There were many complaints regarding due process, uneven applications, etc., and eventually the city abandoned this policy.

I mention this not because I sympathize with drunk drivers (I don't), but because it's not the first time the city has done something like this.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/24/nyregion/drive-drunk-lose-...

studentrob• 11 years ago

Marvin in pulp fiction maybe? Just kidding.

Who knows. It does seem like an easy way to get away with such a crime. In the past it may have been a legit safety concern.

Now with uber it seems safe. Police can track the location of the car, driver and passenger.

Probably has something to do with collecting tax money too. Licensed means it is easier to track taxes. Uber doesn't need the traditional licenses for reporting taxes

Judge: NYC Seizing Thousands of Cars Without Warrants Is Unconstitutional

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