(Translated by https://www.hiragana.jp/)
Unreasonable Search and Seizure - nigelparry.com
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Unreasonable Search and Seizure


The Statue of Liberty as seen from Battery Park, lower Manhattan.

THURSDAY, MAY 22ND, 2008

I'm back in New York for eight days to try to retrieve my property from the police, who have seized it now for a total of 15 months.

In late December 2006, I had a post traumatic episode following years of over-focusing on war zone reporting—not unlike the episodes increasingly reported among returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Read my From Ramallah to Rikers Island series here]

During the brief episode, near the anniversary of a neighbor dying in a house fire, I believed my downstairs neighbor's house was on fire and tried to break her door down. Around the same time, I sent some dark letters to someone else, warning of impending doom. A mess.

I was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center on December 29th, where I stayed for nearly a month before two NYPD detectives turned up to arrest me on January 25th. I had been forewarned by staff at Bellevue that they were coming.

Working on the assumption that it's better to know than not know, I rang the detectives from the hospital, repeated the news I had heard, and asked them what I was being arrested for.

"Don't worry. We just want to ask you a few questions. No big deal."

"I've been told by my psychiatrist that you are coming to arrest me."

"Your psychiatrist is a fucking liar."

Yet come they did, with handcuffs and no desire to look me in the eye. After a month of medical incarceration, I was being processed straight back into the system without a taste of freedom or even a breath of fresh air. Well, maybe one.

Bellevue has two entrances—the back entrance where the business happens, ambulances coming and going, police cars and prison vans delivering or collecting detainees needing medical help—and a busy public entrance on the other side of the building that boasts a gigantic, atrium combination of mall lobby and hospital foyer.

Bellevue's Service Entrance. (Photo: uberzombie)

Bellevue Hospital's Mall-like Public Entrance. (Photo: lunchtimemama)

This was the crowded entrance through which they took me out to their car, handcuffed, through shoppers and people coming to visit relatives and friends in the open hospital wards. I was their prize. They needed a parade. They strutted like heros. They made no attempt to get out of anyone else's path. The people milling around reacted accordingly, scuttling out of our way and checking us out.

It was a perfect moment that encapsulated everything wrong with what was happening. A simple visual metaphor like a short, wordless scene from a movie that tells you all you need to know to set the next scene in context.

After a day spent being processed for arrest, I was passed through numerous, bedless jail cells for the next three days and nights, first in Manhattan's Tombs and later on Rikers Island.

Google Map of "Rikers Island Correctional Facility".




On January 28th, 2007, the day I passed through the last of many intake systems and finally fell exhausted on a mattress—locked deep inside the thick concrete walls of "The Rock"—the detectives raided my apartment in Harlem.

When I heard the news of the raid, at least a week later due to the difficulty of contacting people from inside Rikers, I knew there was nothing to fear on the level of whether they would find anything to support the charges against me. But I was very worried about what they had taken, when it would be returned to me, and in what damaged state. This fear later proved to be well-grounded.

It also just plain creeped me out to know that agents of the state—especially obvious bottom feeders like the two detectives—were going through my personal belongings, reading my e-mails, and looking at photos of my friends. It was violating.

There was nothing about the detectives that stood out as very different from the people they set up for judgment. It began with their "Your psychiatrist is a fucking liar" entry into the story, carried on through my day of watching and interacting with them and their colleagues before they handcuffed me and took me to the Tombs, and kept on going in the following weeks during which they interacted with friends of mine in a very disturbing manner.

From the last reports alone, although I have no way of knowing, it seems obvious that the two detectives did their best to stir up the fears of those pressing charges against me. They were going to make this case happen no matter what. They weren't just going to assume the worst, they set out from the start to try to make any evidence fit—somehow—to prove the worst.

Mostly, they didn't seem that smart. It did not appear to matter to them what reality or people who had known me for years had to say in objection, nor what the cost to any of the parties involved would be. Their greedy determination to make something out of nothing repeatedly surfaced, at times reaching cartoon-like levels.

In the 30th Precinct in Harlem, where I was held before being taken to the Tombs, all the cops had a drooling party over their $120,000 pay checks right in front of me, as I sat in a cage in the middle of their precinct office. I felt sorry for them.

Of course, the worst had indeed happened during the raid. The NYPD had seized both of my two computers (including a desktop computer with an internally-installed second, backup hard drive) and all of my camera equipment.

In other words, all of the equipment I use for work, which also represented all of my possessions with any monetary value. Along with all the data—computer graphic files and information I needed to be able to work.

The camera equipment alone was worth around $10,000 and was painfully and painstakingly assembled over the course of nine years of working for non-profits, in order to be able to offer those same organizations affordable, high quality, photographic services.

For the next 10 months, my lawyer would repeatedly raise my dire financial situation (and therefore my desperate need for the return of—literally—my only work tools) with the prosecuting Assistant District Attorney (ADA) from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

I certainly couldn't afford to replace them after being caged until my life exploded in a mess of unpaid bills, lost income, and lost ongoing contracts.

In jail, I had a dream that I was taken to an island, led inside a cave, and locked kneeling inside a tiny steel box, with my hands handcuffed behind my back. It was a vision of the powerlessness that had been forced on me and a perfect image of where I stood in relation to the life I maintained outside the walls. All control was taken from me—my bills, my pets, my home. All power is stripped from you in these situations. All power.

At the point I was finally released from jail at the end of February after a titanic struggle to get out, things were pretty life or death—with 6 figures of debt hanging over my head at the worst point of it all. I was exhausted. It took a while to be able to recommit to the battle of going after the work tools at a time when the raging war where I had just been was still echoing so loudly.

For weeks, there was just a window I looked out until everything slowed down again, as I intentionally practiced the opposite of hyper-vigilance. I also recovered a basic sense of privacy—one of our primary shields to be able to function comfortably in this world.

The District Attorney's Seal.
Regarding my work tools, the Assistant District Attorney responsible for my case alternated between ignoring my lawyer's phone calls and making vague "I'll look into it" promises, until finally notching up the shameful milestone of having done nothing to cooperate for an entire year.

My lawyer told me during one return to NYC for a court visit that "I feel as though the ADA is fucking with me on this case".

Debatably, this was a moot point—this far through the story.

When you are snatched from the streets, caged, and both literally and metaphorically shackled while your life outside unravels, the immediate psychological and financial damage and subsequent fallout is obviously already highly problematic in its own right.

On top of that you will have to deal with the social stigma of incarceration and the resulting loss of previously supportive social networks, jobs, accommodation, etc. Especially with any incarceration related to mental health issues.

As you start trying to get things done which used to pose no problem, you suddenly realize the world outside now views you through an additional layer of prejudice and awards you the matching respect.

You will also get to see this dynamic actively exploited by those in your life who have things to gain from your marginalization. It ends up being quite the education about how much relationships are worth when there is power around to seize.

Back to the story...

So, you get the point. It's Happy Hour in Bullshit City and—on top of all of it—the only tools I had access to, in order to make any money and thus have a fighting chance of surviving the widening financial cataclysm, were seized and held until it was way, way too late.

[See my Letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System on this site]

Fine. Investigate me. But why take the camera bodies or lenses? They are all empty shells. Anything theoretically incriminating would be in the films and data cards. Why not simply copy the data cards, confiscate any film, and we can all sign a big happy contract that states that we are all in agreement that Nigel Parry does indeed own 2 cameras and 3 lenses.

Along the same lines, what would have been so hard about copying the contents of my only laptop and desktop computers onto some police server and then returning the computers and data to me? Go ahead, fine, investigate. But after already holding me back until the harvest time for the next three months' rent and bills was long over, don't then also take away my plough and spade and leave me to starve.

It's not as if they would have any problem having to prove anything by confronting me with my fingerprints on those computers or anything so CSI. I'll be the first one in the room to say that they're mine. And that I want them back.

These precious things
Let them bleed
Let them wash away
These precious things
Let them break their hold over me
- Tori Amos

But—of course—the criminal justice system in the United States doesn't respect human rights and, in the case of property, the state seizes way more than the actual evidence needed. Which is obviously unreasonable considering the whole innocent until proven guilty thing, and doubly unreasonable considering the ubiquity of the technology required to implement a non-punishing alternative.

It's got to be way cheaper to pay for a terabyte of hard drive space than for a foot of space in a New York warehouse. Someone is clearly pocketing some money for their part in making sure that the unfit die on schedule.

They have warehouses of this "property" in every town—filled mostly with the possessions of the poor because it is mostly poor people who end up in jail. In these warehouses, they have collected huge piles of the clothes of the poor, giant stacks of the one or two books that the poor own, suitcases full of the plastic cups and spoons of the poor.

It's disturbing how petty the "property" that has been seized can be.

Police Property Offices are uncooperative coat check booths for the damned. What good can come of this? The criminal justice industry is poisoning the whole of our society by poisoning a not inconsiderable segment of it. 1 in 100 Americans are in jail.

The Manhattan District Attorney's office has literally been holding hostage—for over a year—my right to work freely (my work tools) and my right to travel freely (my passport), in total defiance of the United States' own, plain English, Fourth Amendment, which affirms that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."


While the second half of the Fourth Amendment goes on to talk about the necessity for search warrants, no sane lawyer would argue that this was merely a "Warrants Amendment". The all-important introductory paragraph, introduces searches and seizures as a general concept, and explicitly enjoins the state to ensure that they are not "unreasonable."

It was a year of barely surviving, a year of a very low quality of life, and a year in which I got to see every single one of the things I had been building for decades taken by others and dashed to the ground. Twenty years of work and half of my life erased. And no tools to rebuild.

I let photography go just like that. There were more important things to worry about. When I think of all the situations and people I would have photographed in my life, particularly those of people who are small in the eyes of the world, and are marginalized and overlooked by others, the message to them from those who unleashed the shadows on me is clear.

Go, continue to live, suffer and die invisibly.

I'm marking it up as one of the things that we all lost in the fire.

When we intentionally harm any person, by breaking them, we also break apart a piece of the world that both we and they are connected to.

That should be an obvious truth at the foundation of any healthy society and shouldn't read like a Zen proverb but it does; and it does because—at all levels of this culture—Consequence is rarely acknowledged.

You can see it in the government that hides flag-draped caskets and never sets its lies—long-ago revealed—straight.

You can watch it on the TV which advertises easy ways around our problems and feeds us news programs that routinely present human suffering through a lens that prevents us from effectively grasping the fact that much of that suffering is happening due to a direct consequence of our actions.

The Entertainment Industry, centrally positioned in this society, seems split between offering up either cartoon-like, bloodless violence with no consequences, or—its partner in crime—extremely graphic violence which serves to normalize itself through repetition and therefore dulls our general reaction to all forms of violence—even violence in the real world.

First they deceive us about the consequences of violence, then they get us used to the constant presence of violence in our lives, and finally they lie to us about why this nation is involved in violence elsewhere in the world.

All of these influences reinforce each other while we do nothing more active than watching TV.

These cultural electricity outlets, such as TV into which we plug in to recharge, undeniably channel some of the forces which we have seen collide over the last decade and become the main enabler for our entire generation to slide towards endless war.

Similarly, any court or correctional process has immediate, negative consequences for both innocent and guilty, including their wider social networks—negative consequences way beyond any sense of proportion to the assumed crime. And their system moves in geological time which intentionally enlarges the problem, in order to keep the maximum number of people employed—even as they wreck your current job, or career in their process.

Eventually, the emotion and finance-draining locust swarm of court dates would pass, to open up a small sense of space—a basic plateau from which I could start to focus on the other important things that needed attention. To mentally survive a series of legal proceedings, you need to recognize and accept that life is a series of baby steps towards freedom, and acknowledge that frustration at this process is a waste of even more precious time.

On the day the pointless proceedings officially concluded with "no criminal record"—November 26th, 2007—I was undeniably entitled to the return of my property by law.

The ADA himself, who had been a brand spanking new employee when I turned up in his court, had stated to my lawyer a few months earlier (in what was clearly the beginning of the end of the case) that, "I was new to the courts when I got this case. I've seen a lot of cases since then. Now I know that this was not a real harassment case".

Sun Country Airlines. Minneapolis-St. Paul to JFK in NYC and back again for just $203.
Despite all of this, the same ADA still only issued releases for my work tools on February 29th, 2008—over three months after the conclusion of the court proceedings and thirteen months after my property was initially seized.

Since the property release forms were made available on the last day of February 2008, it has taken until late May 2008 for me to afford to fly to New York City from Minnesota. Baby steps.

I landed in JFK on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008, once again accompanied by a 24/7 witness during my entire time in the city.


FRIDAY, MAY 23RD, 2008

Today, I go to visit my lawyer, to pick up the originals of the DA's release forms—essentially official authorizations from the Manhattan District Attorney to release my property.

At this point, I fully expect my stuff to be irretrievable, either lost or stolen, or scratched, erased, or otherwise damaged. I expect my property to arrive exactly as it was taken—a truckload of carcasses from a denied massacre, carried out under a false flag. All of this has come way too late for me to feel much comfort.

It's a really beautiful New York Spring day on the way to the Legal Aid Society in Lower Manhattan.

Foyer of the Legal Aid Society of New York, the last bastion of hope at the edge of the gates of hell.

In the foyer, my lawyer is looking relaxed when he hands me the folder of ten releases. After a quick meeting it's straight to nearby NYPD HQ at 1 Police Plaza to see if the magic beads that the shaman has been given will work.

Each District Attorney release is simply worded, and states:

"The Office of the District Attorney, County of New York, hereby states that it no longer needs as evidence the following property: Voucher Number: N123456. Item Number(s): All Items."

This is followed by a brief disclaimer about the above not being construed as a statement of whose property it legally is.

A Property Release form from the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

According to the website of the NYPD Property Office, which I read extensively before even daring to book the flight to New York, all one needs in order to retrieve their stuff is:

1. An Invoice Number — ie. the Property Voucher number, which is already included in the DA release forms. Presumably you could also get these from the precinct in which you were arrested.

2. Two forms of legal ID, at least one with a photo. I have two with photos.

3. The District Attorney's Release.

Compiled from this page on www.nyc.gov.


1 POLICE PLAZA

The window at the Manhattan Property Office at 1 Police Plaza.

Once inside 1 Police Plaza, I quickly learned that of the ten releases, one of the vouchers pertained to the Pearson Place property office in Queens, that four of the voucher numbers given could not be found, that "some of the property might still be up in the District Attorney's office" and that, of the voucher numbers that could be found, everything was marked as "Investigatory".


This crucial last part required them to fax over each property voucher to the arresting officer and wait for him to respond by fax stating that the items were no longer needed for investigation.

"This can take up to 12 days," said the Property Officer. "It's totally up to a number of things, whether the police officer receives it, whether he's on holiday or maternity leave, or whether he gets back to us quickly, or not."

She gave me her name and number to ring back on Tuesday, after the long weekend for Memorial Day in the U.S.

I had gone to New York with the lowest of expectations for property retrieval. At this point, even though I was only halfway through day two of eight, I was glad I had.

Directions to Pearson Place.
The Property Officer had also given me the address and telephone number of the Queens Property Office, home of at least one voucher number, which I rang while still in 1 Police Plaza and recounted the whole story to.

"Just the DA's release will be good enough", I was told.

"Good news for at least one out of ten", I thought.

I called my lawyer after the visit to tell him the overall story. He began leaving messages with the ADA regarding the missing property vouchers and detective releases needed, and messages with the detective's office asking him to respond to the property office.


FLASHBACK TO NOVEMBER 26TH, 2007

At the conclusion of my case and end of my court appearances on November 26th, 2007, property return was the first priority and hope for reprieve from what I knew was going to be an inevitable end of year crash and burn. I started the process immediately after the final court proceedings concluded. I still had a few days in town before my flight back to Minnesota.

Instead, I was given the run around, first by the DA's office who had me sit in an empty corridor for 45 minutes that afternoon only to be told, when it was suddenly and inscrutably "my turn", that I needed to phone the Harlem precinct and ask for the voucher numbers.

Then it was days of the run around from the Harlem Property Office, who did not once pick up the phone, even when transferred from the precinct's main switchboard, and who had no voicemail.

I wasn't going to be successful in November. I finally got through to someone in the Harlem office at least a month after I returned to Minnesota from New York.

The Property Officer at the Precinct acted as if this was the first time he'd had to answer basic questions relating to his job, and responded to my various questions such as "whether someone in state could pick up the stuff?" with statements like “you could try”, as if the answer was a Vatican secret rather than the subject of a regulation somewhere with a clear definition.

He told me that voucher numbers couldn't be given out over the phone and—the most problematic—that I would have to turn up in person to claim them.

The last statement proved to be nonsense, as it was my lawyer who finally got the voucher numbers, when he finally got the DA's releases on the last day of February 2008.


SATURDAY, MAY 24TH, TO MONDAY, MAY 26TH, 2008

After Friday's afternoon in 1 Police Plaza, I spent the next three days in the Bronx, hanging out with former Harlem neighbors Dorothy and Earl for the Memorial Weekend celebrations and in Manhattan, showing my friend from MN around a new city.

Gas prices during Memorial Day weekend, in the Bronx, NY.
No Cars Go. With gas prices so high, most people are spending Memorial Day at home.


The trees show Crotona Park in the Bronx, where we spent Memorial Weekend Sunday.
"The Bronx is like Harlem 20 years ago", Earl always says. It's true, even during the last two years I've seen the Bronx change.


A barbecue in a Bronx park, walks though to Central and Battery parks, hitting a few favorite but affordable restaurants around NYC, and doing some shopping for cheap clothes and shoes in the Bronx. We made it as fun as it could be.


TUESDAY MAY 27TH, 2008

Today, it was off to the Queens Property Office.

The Queens Property Office window.

The "property office" is, in fact, a warehouse corridor with a metal mesh-reinforced window at the end, where you can speak to someone.

The guy before us in line was given back his stuff—a ton of different notebooks, books, papers, even a plate and spoon—in a large, clear plastic bag marked with reference numbers.

The place had been really hard to find, turning out to be just to the left of the middle of nowhere. It would suck to have to carry a lot of stuff back to the subway.

"We'll need the bag back", the Property Officer told him.

From the ten vouchers I had, he found one that was listed as being with them.


"Oh, sorry, it's marked as 'Investigatory'. We'll need the detective to clear that. I'll see if I can ring him and speed this up."

So the information I'd been given during my Friday phone call with this office was false.

I explained that I would only be in town for two more days, until Thursday 29th, and that I had been trying to get back my property for over a year.

He gave me his name and a number to call tomorrow afternoon, "if I haven't called you first". He called almost a week later, days after I returned to Minnesota.

I phoned my lawyer after the visit to tell him the latest. He hadn't heard back from the detective. He had phoned a couple of times and was told that the detective wasn't in. He had also left another voicemail message for the ADA, who still hadn't responded to the Friday message.

The ADA also wouldn't have responded by the time I had to leave New York, two days later.


WEDNESDAY, MAY 28TH, 2008

Today, it was back to a Manhattan storage facility for yet another sort-through of those of my belongings that weren't looted by the police from my former apartment, to send some back to Minnesota.

The morgue-like storage units of Manhattan MiniStorage. Despite my aesthetic comments, the company is excellent. The facility is very secure, with a 24/7 guard booth, 'card access only' doors and elevators, and dry, well-lit, and secure storage areas.

Some of what I was sending was as basic as stationery. I was looking through a box during my last visit in November and started doing the math: Stapler $5. Staples $3. Scissors $6. Photo paper $10... I realised the small box I was looking at had over $300 worth of stuff in it.

There was no need to buy all this stuff yet another time, when the United States Post Office has flat rate $9.60 priority mail boxes. And there's room in my luggage for these DVDs. So it was worth it, to go through it all. Even if each time it's almost overwhelming.

I called both the Manhattan and Queens Property Offices on Wednesday. No responses from the detective, they both said. My lawyer was also still caught in limbo.

When I had rang the Manhattan Property Office and asked for the named officer who had given me her number, another woman came back on the phone and started screaming at me.

"Why are you asking for a specific person? Stop wasting our time. Anyone can answer your question."

I told her that during my visit last Friday, a Property Officer had written down her name and number. I had the piece of paper in her handwriting right in front of me.

"That never happened. That didn't happen. No, that didn't happen."


THURSDAY, MAY 29TH, 2008

Today was the last day I was in NYC. No responses from anyone by midday. The Queens Property office closes at 2:30pm, the Manhattan one at 4:30pm. My flight was at 8:50pm. It was too late for anything major to happen and I began to feel that the trip had been a total waste.

Then I remembered that the property clerk at the Queens office had given me a photocopy of the actual property voucher showing the items it represented which, for the first time, listed what was taken in detail.

Top of a Property Voucher.

It had two items listed:

Scan of the first property voucher I managed to retrieve from the Queens Property Office.

This was the first time since the raid 15 months ago that I had seen any actual details of what was taken. In this case, I recognized the second as a black CD/DVD carrying wallet I owned, the type where you have four pockets per page to slide in the disks.

I remembered that this folder held backed-up software, personal files (really old writing and scans), disks of client photos (think endless images of comedians/actors from arts organization clients mixed in with humorless images of water project pipes/orphaned children to adopt—from non-profit clients).

How disappointing that would have been for the drooling detectives to look through. On the bright side, now two sets of people in the world have been paid to look through those same photos, so at least the wheels of commerce have kept on getting greased and turning.

I'm pretty sure the yellow envelope was full of either blanks or more of the above. It's possible it was film screeners I was sent. I don't know. Maybe a wedding or something. All of what was taken was that asinine.

The District Attorney's Seal.
But it was good to finally have one tangible—if tiny—handle on part of it, and this photocopy was way more real than the raised white seal, fancy paper-wasting, official releases from the DA with only a voucher number and no useful detail.

I phoned the Manhattan Property Office, which held the mother-lode of my property, and asked if I could get copies of the original property vouchers. They didn't see why not.

I went down there, from the Bronx to the tip of Manhattan. I took a sheet of paper with everything I knew about each of the voucher numbers laid out in columns with the sources noted—from the notes they had made, the notes the Queens people had made, and which additionally pointed out two obvious discrepancies in the list of voucher numbers provided by the DA's office.

Waving this paper and taking no shit, I told them I had been trying to retrieve my property for 15 months, and I wanted photocopies of every single one of the property vouchers themselves because it was well past time to sort this out. I needed the copies to fix things with the DA and I wasn't going anywhere without them.

The whole presentation, complete with prop, abruptly ended the start of a brief "why should we?" speech by one of the property officers. That reflexively unhelpful bitch knew from the look in my eyes that it was probably just easier to let someone who gave a shit take this one.

I made them check the first blank they came up with on last Friday's visit—a voucher number that was out of sequence with the other nine, its first two digits reversed presumably through a typo. I asked them to look for the same number but with the same first two digits as all of the others. They found it.

There was also a skipped number in the sequence. I asked them to check the missed number. On that one they found nothing. But they looked.

And then I had it all in my hands. Two out of the ten no one could find, but I had the property voucher from Queens and now seven new ones from Manhattan.

It was a huge step forward. It was evidence of what was taken, and evidence that these things still existed.

VOUCHER 22
1 VHS Video Tape
1 Blank Check Nigel Parry
Misc. Miscellaneous Papers

VOUCHER 23
23 Computer CD's
8 Tapes, Micro Video Tapes
3 Flash Cards for Computer

VOUCHER 24
22 Rolls of Undeveloped Film

I am wondering if this means that I'll get them back developed for free? Could you add Photo CDs to the order, please? They're so convenient.

VOUCHER 25
Misc. Miscellaneous Papers
British Passports with the name Nigel Parry

VOUCHER 26
52 Assorted CD's for Computer in Yellow Envelope
59 Assorted CD's for Computer in Black Nylon Case

VOUCHER 27
Never Existed, apparently.

VOUCHER 28
1 Audio CD
Misc. Miscellaneous Paperwork/Papers/Pictures/Maps

VOUCHER 29
Misc. Miscellaneous Papers in Yellow Envelope
17 Photos, Miscellaneous in Yellow Envelope
1 Paperback Book (XXXXX)
1 Letter to C/V (XXXXX) in White Envelope W/Brochures fm Home Depot
1 CD (NIGEL PARRY)
1 Pink court paper

VOUCHER 30
No trace.

VOUCHER 31
1 Black Nylon Camera Case
2 Nikon Short Lenses for Camera
1 Nikon Camera Zoom Lens
1 Nikon 35MM Camera No Serial Number
1 Nikon 35MM Camera Serial #XXXXXXX
1 Battery Pack with 2 Batteries

VOUCHER 32
No trace.


So what is still missing in action? Hmm. Two computers, my cellphone, and some notebooks from my time in hospital containing a few not bad (hey, at least I thought so) drawings and paintings of EXIT signs.

What was all this focus on CDs/DVDs? All of the above are either labeled as software, are obviously publicly processed Photo CDs, client images and logos labeled with the organizations name, or data/music backups, eg. my master disk for my debut CD.

Can't they read? I guess there's going to have to be a Monkey Times article about exactly what they took when I get it all back. For sure that's going to be a three day comedy festival.

Some of was listed was funny. My favorite is the Home Depot brochures. Can I make a case for the vouchers they contained still being valid due to an act of the state?

And the copy of my debut CD. They could have downloaded one for free at thissideofparadise.org. I enjoyed the symbol of my CD about my time in the Middle East being "seized as evidence" because that's exactly what it was intended to be.

The "Paperback Book" listed above (where I have redacted a name in the voucher details with X's), was a book given to me by one of the people who filed charges against me, about them. Yo, I'll give you a book about me and then I'll prosecute you for it. Classy.

"Misc. Maps" I liked too. It was as if I had been plotting a bank job. After a brief moment, I'm pretty sure that I knew what these were. If I ever visited your home when I lived in New York, please know that the police probably have a crumpled, folded-up four times to fit in a pocket, color Google map of your location. Or of the office or bar we met at.

In February 2007, the time when I saw my apartment contents packed into a storage unit and I ran to a state 1,200 miles away, and on the various occasions I have had to go back to NY for court dates, I became progressively more systematic about sorting through all of it.

As I got deeper and deeper into the process, it was interesting to see what the police had not taken from my apartment. They were really half-assed.

There was a whole locked suitcase of personal papers—old articles and other scrapbook stuff—that was lying in the middle of my bedroom floor which was obviously never opened as the combination locks were still scrambled and the locks intact.

With all of their focus on film they left behind both a large metal cake tin lying in plain sight and containing about 40 MiniDV tapes of musical performances, art shows, comedians, and Miniature Pinscher porn, as well as an entire box with about 5,000 film negatives from the period I photographed in the Middle East.

If there's one thing worse than getting your home raided by jackbooted agents of the state, it's getting your home raided by inefficient jackbooted agents of the state. It negates the whole master race aspect of fascism and must really be hugely embarrassing for them.

And so I left New York this time, a couple more thousand dollars in debt (from both the cost of the trip and the time spent not earning money) with slightly more knowledge and documentation of what the NYPD actually has; and a rough understanding of what the next steps are.

But I still don't have any of my stuff.

My work tools were seized in an unnecessarily impacting way that left me unable to work to anywhere near the degree I could have done before, to say nothing of gigabytes of missing client data and unfinished projects that have either had to lie fallow or be recreated from scratch on inadequate equipment.

It has now been 16 months since my home was searched and my property was seized. It has been 6 months after the legal proceedings ended with a satisfactory whimper. It has been 3 months after the ADA finally granted property releases. And now, I'm dealing with his incorrect voucher information and a new set of gatekeepers.

As far as searches and seizures go, this one seems pretty "unreasonable" to me.


Webmasters wishing to link to this story can use the permalink at http://nigelparry.com/unreasonable-search-and-seizure/


ENDNOTE
On June 2nd, the day after this article was published, I received a call from the Queens Property Office saying that I could collect the contents of the voucher they had "any day".

On October 31st, 2008, 20 months after the police raid on my former home in New York City and the seizure of every single thing that I needed to make money and survive, I am heading for NYC to retrieve my property. A couple of weeks ago, I heard that most of it is now available for pickup. I'm not even bothering to cross my fingers at this point. Of course, the mother-lode, my laptop and desktop computers that were my only work tools, are still "lost" by the State of New York.

I travelled to New York in November and was able to retrieve some of my property. My desktop computer is broken and all the files I own are inaccessible. As late as January 26th, 2009, some of my property, including my laptop computer is still missing.

Related Links
  • From Ramallah to Rikers Island: A New Journal Series by Nigel Parry from the World's Largest Penal Colony, published April 1st, 2008.
  • A letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System, Nigel Parry, 15 May 2008.
  • One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 - PDF format Pew Reseach Report on U.S. incarceration rates. The U.S. has more people incarcerated than 36 European countries put together. In 1987, for every dollar spent on higher education, 32 cents were spent on corrections. In 2007, for every dollar spent on higher education, 60 cents were spent on corrections. While there may not be a direct choice to spend a dollar on one area rather than another, a dollar spent in one is unavailable to the other.

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    more from this section

    • Letter to the BBC about refusing to broadcast the DEC's Gaza Appeal (Thursday, January 29th, 2009)

    • Mass Arrests and the Heffelfinger-Luger Report (Tuesday, January 27th, 2009)

    • Postcards of Hangings, Thoughts on Gaza (Saturday, January 17th, 2009)

    • Initial Reactions to the Heffelfinger-Luger RNC Commission Report (Friday, January 16th, 2009)

    • Submission to the RNC Public Review Safety Commission (Monday, November 17th, 2008)

    • Unreasonable Search and Seizure (Sunday, June 1st, 2008)

    • From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 1) (Tuesday, April 1st, 2008)


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    • Letter to the BBC about refusing to broadcast the DEC's Gaza Appeal (Thursday, January 29th, 2009)

    • Mass Arrests and the Heffelfinger-Luger Report (Tuesday, January 27th, 2009)

    • Postcards of Hangings, Thoughts on Gaza (Saturday, January 17th, 2009)

    • Initial Reactions to the Heffelfinger-Luger RNC Commission Report (Friday, January 16th, 2009)

    • Submission to the RNC Public Review Safety Commission (Monday, November 17th, 2008)

    • Unreasonable Search and Seizure (Sunday, June 1st, 2008)

    • From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 1) (Tuesday, April 1st, 2008)


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