What if I told you they were the same thing?
This is another of these weird American idiosyncrasies that is just not a thing elsewhere in the developed world. (Or at least not on a comparable scale)
I’d guess it’s a product of police departments in the USA being very localised, with even small towns sometimes having directly elected sheriffs or the mayor controlling the local police. In the UK and other European countries police forces tend to have much more national oversight and organisation.
Probably also something to do with how police forces are funded in the US gives them more incentive to acquire money directly.
This is the only thing I could find that talks about the difference. https://www.quora.com/What-other-countries-have-laws-similar-to-the-Civil-Asset-Forfeiture-laws-in-the-US (Seems like the main difference is in other places you can only take assets after a conviction, )
I’m increasingly convinced that the much greater popularity of libertarianism in the US compared to other countries is not due to the cultural things people normally talk about, but because the American government is just weirdly and uniquely bad.
Huh.
BTW, it’s not exactly about control, but funding. Tiny Town just doesn’t have much of a tax base, and the tax base gets to directly vote on the budget in a lot of small towns, so it’s hard to increase the taxes for education and police budgets. Filling budget shortfalls by essentially robbing passing travelers and the least popular citizens can be a popular method of keeping the lights on at the station, especially when it means more money in every property owners’ pocket.
I think probably a lot of it is, the United States is less of a country than most (all?) other developed/First World countries, in that there’s a LOT more regional and local control, and deep seated resistance to changing that for multiple reasons, including full out religious paranoia, and lack of faith in the federal government to be competent.
Here in Canada, asset forfeiture has been a pretty serious problem in BC and Ontario, for basically the same reason: it’s a way to increase revenues without being perceived as raising taxes. BC and Ontario also have recently had the most corrupt provincial governments in the country, which may have something to do with it. BC’s just had a change of government, and I’ll be interested to see if they deal with this or if it simply doesn’t affect enough of the voting base to bother them. I don”t have much hope of Ontario dealing with it, since if they go out it’ll be the Tories replacing them, and the Tories as a rule are much more committed to looking pro-police and anti-criminal than they are to small government.
In some US states civil asset forfeiture is prohibited, and so are speeding ticket quotas for cops. I haven’t been able to figure out how this might be reproduced in other states.
As for the origins, I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to density WRT infrastructure. Not only do we have exodus from cities depriving them of revenue, but the suburbs are pretty sparse, requiring more concrete/pipe/powerlines per resident.
