Hacker Cinema
Rebel Ridge
2024 · Film · 131 min
Directed by Jeremy Saulnier
A former Marine confronts corruption in a small town when local law enforcement unjustly seizes the bag of cash he needs to post his cousin's bail.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
The movie, Rebel Ridge, does a decent job showing just how bad this can be in a small town. It's not exactly realistic for how the former Marine depicted chose to try to resolve the situation... It does give room to consider just how corrupt it can all be. Consider if you live in a town with only one bank. Clearly the bank and the police have a relationship and in a small town, odds are they all know each other quite well. Say someone withdraws money from the bank. Then the teller sort of rats you out to law enforcement or someone adjacent to law enforcement. They manufacture an excuse to pull you over just as was done in this Nevada story. The movie Rebel Ridge goes into the difficulty in even getting your money back in the first place. At one point they explain a large part of the police departments funding comes from this. Then again, it isn't just small police departments getting kick backs, it's everyone involved to run up the cost for someone who had their money stolen.
At some point, civil forfeiture laws will lay the foundation for having any amount of cash being a sort of assumption of criminality. Consider too that smaller banks and even large banks have reserve requirements but not enough to cover all of the deposits. When most money exists in digital form in a database somewhere, over time, the concept of real paper money gets that assumption of wrong doing. Almost like it is the financial equivalent of "you must have something to hide, or else you would be using your credit card".
Check out the film "Rebel Ridge" on Netflix if you haven't seen it. Complete fiction but the story is kicked off / revolves around civi forfeiture (and it's a pretty good watch!)
By the way, there is an excellent film called Rebel Ridge now on Netflix where the basic premise is about small town police abusing the practice of civil asset forfeiture.
Good action movie, I enjoyed it! [1].
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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Ridge