By "bank" do you mean one of those "customer experience centers" which offers the usual teller services and on-site card replacements, and has maybe 1 or 2 people working as tellers but none of them are loan-officers, and instead of a vault they have a convenience-store-style safe?
"Real bank" branches do still exist - but they aren't as commonplace as they used to be. My nearest one for my credit-union is a good 45 minute drive away, ugh.
My local BofA offers it, and then somehow needed to close the branch for a few years during the pandemic. Was really inconvenient to access the box in a locked, unstaffed branch.
If you look into those, they aren't really safety deposit boxes. The bank isn't obliged to actually protect the contents or to reimburse you if something happens.
It's in a bomb-proof vault with tremendous amounts of on-call security and police. The second a bank alarm goes off it's swarmed with cops, well before anyone could ever open the vault. There is zero practical way to rob a closed bank vault unless there was also, like, a zombie apocalypse happening and the cops were all otherwise occupied
Chase in San Francisco told me that one factor is a handful of deposit box users who come into their branch multiple times/day to access their box. That’s a huge burden on their staff’s time.
Should not be that hard to put a cost on that. Charge X per access. Make X big enough to be worth the bother. If you worry that it will alienate the users who only need access rarely make the first Y accesses per month or year free.
It doesn’t take a lot of deliberation to realize the obvious reason, which is that this is a very clear 4th amendment violation which can then serve as suitable precedent for (or even have a chilling effect on) future instances where law enforcement may decide to abuse their powers.
It’s quite obvious that not all cases on the same topic are equally easy to argue.
There's another obvious reason, which is that rich people have resources.
When cops steal from ordinary people, they rarely have the resources to fight it even if they hadn't just been robbed. So then the case never makes it to an appeals court for the media to cover it.
Or it does make it to court, because they're not actually poor, they're actually drug dealers with money to hire lawyers, but the courts are vaguely aware of this and then side with the police even if what the police did was entirely scandalous and unjust, because the victims are drug dealers. Which is how we get many terrible precedents.
So it's a rare opportunity when the police target some Beverly Hills high society chaps because it makes the people who would rather burn the constitution than let a drug dealer keep their money turn around and ask what stops this from being used against someone like themselves. And when they realize the answer is nothing, that's when you can often get a good precedent set.
"go to the mattresses" is a reference to The Godfather book and film, means "go to war" or something like that. The fighters would sleep together in poorly appointed safehouses that would just have a bunch of mattresses on the floor.
That’s not at all a good description of what happened here.
The safety deposit box company was pretty clearly a criminal enterprise, it marketed itself to drug dealers and so on. A few random rich people might have wandered in but it was a fairly unique company.
The point here is that this shouldn’t fucking matter. The government should have to prove its case anyways by having individualized probable cause and a warrant for each and every safe deposit box, and going on a fishing expedition is patently unconstitutional.
> The warrant authorizing the raid expressly forbade federal agents from engaging in a "criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety [sic] deposit boxes."
and then
> Under typical FBI procedure, the boxes should have been taken into custody until they could be returned to their rightful owners. But those "supplemental instructions" drawn up by the special agent in charge of the operation told agents to be on the lookout for cash stored inside the safe-deposit boxes and to note "anything which suggests the cash may be criminal proceeds."
So no judge was involved in the decision to seize cash. It was an agent on the site who came up with supplemental instructions. There are a million reasons this should be illegal.
Especially since they can apparently keep anything they find if they suspect it's the proceeds of crime, right? (they don't need a successful conviction to forfeit the goods, as I remember, just the suspicion). Which seems crazy to me as a foreigner. As TFA points out, it allows cops to behave as robbers legally.
