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Prior to being pulled over and murdered this week, Castile had been stopped a whopping 52 times! All of these 'offenses' were non-criminal, had no victim, and were used to extract thousands from this poor man.
According to the Post, Castile was assessed at least $6,588 in fines and fees, although more than half of the total 86 violations were dismissed, court records show.
Castile was not a criminal. Not only was he not a criminal, Castile was an upstanding member of the community who now mourns his loss, yet he was targetted by police dozens of times.
On Thursday night, Minnesota state officials named Jeronimo Yanez as the officer who shot and killed Castile during the traffic stop near St. Paul. However, if Yanez wouldn't have stopped him, Castile likely could have been killed by any of the other 52 cops who had targetted him before or whoever would have targetted him after.
Let there be no doubt about it, the system of law enforcement in America preys on the poor and minorities. All the statistics show it, and politicians and police officers honest enough to see it hold no punches when pointing it out.
The majority of police work does not involve rescuing damsels in distress or foiling hostage situations. No, the modern day police officer is designed to extract revenue from the population through a series of immoral laws designed for that exact purpose.
Using the war on drugs as a facade to 'protect' society, the US government has laid waste to countless lives — including the police officers who enforce it. And, the majority of the time, minorities receive the bulk of the blow.
As former Congressman Ron Paul pointed out:
In fact, the State's drug war came to fruition specifically to criminalize hippies, seen as the radical left, and the black population — and by extension since, every non-caucasian group, as well as anyone opposing government.[Black peope] are tried and imprisoned disproportionately. They suffer the consequence of the death penalty disproportionately. Rich white people don't get the death penalty very often. And most of these are victimless crimes. Sometimes people can use drugs and get arrested three times and never committed a violent act and they can go to prison for life. I think there's discrimination in the system, but you have to address the drug war. I would say the judicial system is probably one of the worst places where prejudice and discrimination still exists in this country.
When police aren't kidnapping, caging, and killing people for possessing arbitrary substances deemed illegal by the state, in turn creating a criminal black market for them which drives up crime, they are out enforcing traffic laws. Traffic stops and the drug war go hand in hand."You want to know what this was really all about?"asked John Daniel Ehrlichman, President Nixon's counsel and domestic policy chief, of Dan Baum for a 1994 article in Harper's Magazine. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and black people with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Any number of arbitrary traffic infractions will lead to your extortion, arrest, imprisonment, or in the case of Philando Castile, death.
Policing for profit in the United States is the norm.
It has gotten so bad that the Canadian government has issued a public service announcement for its citizens warning them that American Road Pirates, aka police officers, may very well rob them upon entry into the US.
In the US, "298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008" according to a report by the Post.
According to the US Department of Justice, the value of asset forfeiture recoveries by US authorities from 1989-2010 was $12,667,612,066, increasing on average 19.5% per year.
In 2008, law enforcement took over $1.5 billion from the American public. While this number seems incredibly large, just a few years later, in 2014, that number tripled to nearly $4.5 billion.
When we examine these numbers, and their nearly exponential growth curve, it appears that police in America are getting really good at separating the citizen from their property — not just really good, criminally good.
To put this number into perspective, according to the FBI, victims of burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses in 2014.
That means that law enforcement in America has stolen $600,000,000 more from Americans than actual criminal burglars.
Some might try and say that this money and property is obviously "taken from criminals" in order to rationalize this theft on a massive scale. However, the government does not have to charge you with a crime, let alone convict you, to take your property and after they steal your property the burden of proof is on you to get it back.
In Philadelphia alone, more than $64 million in seized property has been taken in the last decade and 100% of it has gone into the pockets of cops, judges, and other bureaucrats with a hand in the treasure chest.
Consequently, none of the above cases include revenue generated from arbitrary traffic 'laws' for victimless crimes. The total number of people who receive speeding tickets only, is 41,000,000 a year with an average cost of $152.00 each. That is 1 in every 5 licensed drivers in the US.
Castile was only one of these millions of people who are targetted every single day.
The total number of speeding tickets paid each year $6,232,000,000 which breaks down to around $300,000 generated per police officer for speeding alone. Tack on seat belt violations, license plate lights, window tint, rolling stop signs, and expired state-mandated stickers and that number skyrockets.
Police departments need you to break traffic laws. Revenue generated from traffic tickets is not for your safety, it is necessary for the survival of police departments.
Unfortunately, the police officers who see this problem are in the minority. And, when they attempt to point it out, they are chastised for it. Until we end the drug war and policing for profit, we can expect things to get worse — and the tragedy in Dallas proves it.
I remember my younger days when I drove fast, and always had an older vehicle which typically meant a greater likelihood of vehicle violations. So I did get tickets every now and again, and those were always costly to me as I never made the big bucks. Having to pay for those violations was always painful to me.
Then there was the cost of growing up in San Francisco with it's expensive parking tickets which the city used as a tool for making money. That affected all working people equally. That was no master plan to siphon money from the poor. It was a plan to siphon money from everyone they could, and they still do that to this day only the price has gone sky high over the years. So I disagree with the premise of this story.