Um, you know they didn’t just look at him driving an expensive car and arrest him, right?
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When DWC (Driving While Cop) causes as many spurious detentions/beatings/arrests as DWB (Driving While Black), I’ll have some sympathy for the guy.
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Don’t get personal over your disagreement with me.
This is backwards logic. Value is subjective - how would they know how much he paid for it (or anything else) before the investigation? Maybe he bought it for $20k from his uncle. Maybe he saved his money for ten years to buy it for full price. Unless there is any other indication of wrongdoing, what a person buys or how much they spend on it are their own personal business. It’s easy to say in hindsight that he didn’t deserve financial privacy because it turned out that he was involved in illegal activity. There are other ways to establish whether or not that was the case.
But, as I mentioned before, it is not unlikely that we are reading an over-simplified account of the scenario. They might have had real clues which were less sensational.
Once again, nobody listens to Billy Joel:
Sergeant O’Leary is walkin’ the beat
At night he becomes a bartender
He works at Mister Cacciatore’s down on Sullivan Street
Across from the medical center
And he’s tradin’ in his Chevy for a Cadillac
You oughta know by now
And if he can’t drive
With a broken back
At least he can polish the fenders
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If you tell the IRS you’re making $20k a year, and they get wind that you bought a Ferrari, they will investigate you, and they will not feel bad about it.
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That’s certainly not true. They go buy the numbers, not by the name. It all depends upon what was paid for the Ferrari. They might be more inclined to investigate a $250k Pinto than a $20k Ferrari.
Then he’d owe income tax (if this were the US) on the gift of the remaining, not so subjective, $250,000 retail value of the car less the gift tax exemption of something like $15K.
All of these maybes you propose are things that an investigation looks into. Not so sure what your objection to the investigations are since they clarify all of the points you bring up.
You sound like a tea partier objecting to the estate tax - a tax they will never pay because almost no one ever does since it applies to estates valued over something like 5 million dollars, and even then only to the income above the threshold. It’s like you are imagining yourself driving a quarter of million dollar car to work on your police officer’s salary and don’t want to be hassled.
People granted extraordinary powers by the government should be subject to increased scrutiny for corruption. Sorry that’s just the way it needs to be. Cops have the power to kill people legally. It’s reasonable for them to be looked at with more scrutiny.
And, I should note, even a regular person such as myself would be looked at carefully by the IRS if I were to show up with a quarter of a million dollar car and no source of income for it. And police in the US routinely sieze amounts of cash without investigation or charges against the person ranging from petty cash to tens of thousands of dollars on the assumption that any cash they find on a person or in their car must be illicit proceeds, and people have to sue in civil court to get it back - that’s over the top. So I’m not really seeing your objections on moral grounds to this guy being investigated for driving a quarter of a million dollar car, and subject to arrest only after evidence a running a brothel, drug deals and massive crefit card fraud was found.
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You don’t know the total sum. For what we know, the Police might have found a couple of months of activity. The guy doesn’t look particularly bothered by the mugshot, maybe his real stash is still at large.
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You do seem to be putting a lot of will behind the ignorance you are clinging to. At what point IS it appropriate to investigate if a public servant is on the take?
It was reasonable to suspect something was up. It IS standard operating procedure. I don’t get your beef.
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Bargain. No, really.
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Given West Midlands’ notoriety for being bent as fuck, it was probably the egregious flaunting of wealth pissed them off. Might make outsiders take a look…
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His private behavior was illegal. Are you saying that as long as someone commits a crime in private, the police aren’t allowed to investigate?
From the linked article:
The crooked policeman's double life as a gangster was unveiled as a result of his decision to drive the Ferrari to Kings Heath police station. Colleagues became suspicious and West Midlands Police's counter-corruption unit began investigating.
The guy works as a police officer. Of course his colleagues and supervisors are going to start nosing around if they see suspicious activity…it’s part of the job description. If he had gotten that car by any legal means and had more than two brain cells to rub together, he would have made a point of telling his fellow officers exactly how he came to be in possession of a car worth that much. Instead, they were left wondering, which lead to investigation, which led to conviction.
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A $20k Ferrari is a Magnum-style 308GTB that you wouldn’t drive to work in anyway, because it would be broken all the time… 
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Well, the car is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, the accounts were being used to launder hundreds of thousands of pounds, of which he was just skimming some amount off the top. So it must have been going on for a while/to a larger scale than that just for him to have accumulated that much. The car could very easily represent the lion’s share of what he got out of the deal. (And given how dumb he apparently is, it probably does.)
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You could always buy an old MR2 and stick a Ferrari body kit on it.
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For six grand, I could have a GT6 AND a Scimitar…
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Well, yes, but what beautiful brokenness!
(anyway, I once owned an Allegro I paid thirty pounds for. I ain’t scared)
Back on topic now, promise!
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[quote=“popobawa4u, post:13, topic:49597”]
Owning something expensive in itself is not evidence of a crime.
[/quote] So you’re bothered by the idea of racecar profiling?
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That was my first car. Brown with a vinyl roof and a leaky fuel pump. Stylish … 
