The result is an understandable distrust of law enforcement -- so much so that young African-American men go out of their way to avoid any contact with the police.
"Because local law enforcement depends so much on these revenues, there's just immense pressure to find some way around this, to seize property anyway," said David Pimentel, an associate law professor at the University of Idaho who has written about the legal issues surrounding civil forfeiture.
Some might argue that it is just too hard for the government to monitor invasions of privacy, especially when law enforcement itself collects so much information.
Never before have the traditionally independent military and law enforcement organizations worked so much in concert, sharing information and expertise as Al Qaeda tries to reconstitute itself in Pakistan.
And law enforcement lied, lied, lied, so much so that we started distributing daily "Law Enforcement Lie of the Day" videos to all state legislators and political reporters in the state.
"There's no law enforcement, and there's so much drama now just getting through the day here, that most people can't worry about such things," lamented Yasmine El Dorghamy, the exasperated editor of Al Rawi, Egypt's heritage review.
But he pointed out that reading faces for counterintelligence has different objectives than law enforcement: "It's not so much about detecting lies as it is about noticing hot spots," which are flickering indications of strong emotions.
He's the director of the Pre-Crime law enforcement unit that causes so much trouble in Steven Spielberg's atmospheric new thriller, "Minority Report," a muscular and dense exercise of skill and verve.
In the past the marginal cost of law enforcement rose steadily, because so much depended on physical presence and gumshoe labor.
Over the past 10 years, Democrats and Republicans have piled on so much enforcement that now we spend more on immigration and than we do on the FBI, ATF and other federal law enforcement efforts-combined, according to former Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization, Doris Meissner.
