They rob people in Canadian County, Oklahoma. The police do. They prey on itinerant motorists passing through on Interstate 40.
For example, they robbed Nang Thai and Weichuan Liu, of New Mexico, of $141,500 in April 2021. The pair were en route to closing a cash deal to buy 10 acres of farmland. They were pulled over for driving a BMW while Vietnamese.
The cops tore apart the car. They didn’t find any guns, drugs, or contraband; only the money, which they took. Thai and Weichuan weren’t arrested or charged with any crime.
This isn’t the first small-town police department to get its funding by robbing travelers. See previous stories on this blog here, here, here, and here. I also did a story about how some Oklahoma cops use electronic technology to empty cash cards in people’s pockets here. I wrote then, “You shouldn’t set foot in Oklahoma.” Nothing’s changed since then.
And let’s be clear about this, too: It’s racist. These thieving cops target minorities.
“So far this year, local law enforcement agencies confiscated more than $1.3 million from people driving through Canadian County …. At least 58 percent of the 31 cash seizures involved minorities only – with Asian people making up 23 percent, Black 19 percent and Hispanic 16 percent …. The high percentage of minorities subjected to cash seizures in Canadian County is not a new trend. The nonprofit investigative news site Oklahoma Watch found that 60 percent of the cash seizures in Canadian County between 2010 and 2015 involved minorities,”
NBC News reported here.
Stealing from outsiders is a tempting, and often-used, method of funding cash-strapped police departments in rural communities with small tax bases. They don’t take only cash; they also grab cars, boats, RVs, anything of value. In some states, including Oklahoma, they don’t have to convict anyone of a crime, or even charge them; the state laws let them seize cash and property on mere suspicion. And “suspicion” is whatever the cop on the scene wants it to be.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see this encourages kidnapping and hostage-taking. On the barest of pretexts, a subject is arrested and transported to jail, his vehicle is seized, and he’s held there until he agrees to sign a document surrendering the seized property to the police. If anybody but the cops did this, it would be called an extortion racket, and the perpetrators would go to prison for it.
Some states, including Washington, have tightened their forfeiture laws so a criminal conviction is required to keep seized property, and require that forfeited property be turned over to the state. This eliminates, or at least greatly reduces, this kind of police corruption by removing the profit incentive. Oklahoma is one of the states that has enacted no reforms whatsoever and continues to allow this corrupt police practice to flourish. As I wrote previously, avoid that state at all costs; don’t set foot in Oklahoma. It’s a den of thieves.
A final note: The local sheriff, Chris West, wasn’t in Oklahoma supervising his deputies on January 6, 2021. On that date, he was in Washington D.C. showing support for Donald Trump.
Photos: Above, Sheriff West; below, one of his combat vehicles. For his department’s rating by “Police Scorecard,” go here.
