"Chris is a very aggressive young deputy," Hanson said.
Investigators don't know if they will be able to connect the money to a drug operation, Hanson said, but the important work already has been done.
"The big thing is he grabbed 69 (thousand dollars) and took it away from them," Hanson said of the money seized. "That's going right straight to the heart of the matter."
This is a good followup to the discussion about Romans 13 and the legitimacy of the authority wielded by the state. Before I go on, there's one point that is important to remember about the story behind this quoted text: the police had no evidence or basis to assume that that money was in anyway connected to a crime, nor was it seized as part of a court conviction.
Theft by any other name (asset forfeiture) is still theft. The system of asset forfeiture laws easily intersects in many cases with the area that some say the state institutionalizes, through its laws, that which is evil. There can be no legitimate debate that taking money from someone who has committed no crime is pure theft, and what this deputy did was to commit what amounted to armed robbery.
For many Christians, this is another aspect of Romans 13 that is just no real to them. It is the fact that many less severe moral issues get swept under the rug by such excuses as "I was just doing my job," "you don't like the law, blame the politicians," and "I just enforce the law." You would probably be hard-pressed to find even a quarter of a percent of police who would buy this line of thought if the law mandated that they go out and murder or rape people they suspect of a crime because their consciences could not ignore the fact that something to that effect can never be legitimized by law.
It probably never even occurred to this deputy that he had no moral authority to seize that cash, and that he would have had no mercy for someone who wasn't a police officer who did the same thing in, let's say, a traffic accident to "cover the cost of the damage done to them." He'd call shenanigans on that argument, and rightly so. You can't just go taking property away from someone because you believe that they have done something wrong, and that's something that most civilized people from all backgrounds would agree about.
The heart of the matter here is that a grand theft was committed under the guise of lawful authority. You can call it whatever you want, but the deputy no more deserves his gun and badge than an armed robber deserves his liberty. If there were justice in the system, this deputy would be sharing a cell with the armed robber right now, and the police chief would be humbly returning the money in person to its rightful owner.
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