You: The city is stealing my car without probable cause in an attempt to extort money from me.<p>City DA: No they&#x27;re not.<p>What&#x27;s your recourse here?  Call the FBI or federal prosecutor and report an organized crime syndicate being run by corrupt law enforcement professionals?  Because... isn&#x27;t that what this is?<p>Is there any onus, or even incentive, for them to listen and investigate?  Is the <i>only</i> way to redress the problems a civil lawsuit against the City citing Bivens and various appellate court principles like malicious prosecution?  Because grand theft auto, extortion, racketeering, and fabrication of evidence &#x2F; perjury are not civil offenses, and conservative readings of the concept of &#x27;standing&#x27;, as I understand it, make it rather difficult to challenge the authors of a failed &#x2F; withdrawn prosecution in order to get at the legal principles which triggered it.<p>Concepts like this one, as well as things like civil asset forfeiture, are so clearly in direct violation of the Constitution that at some point, it&#x27;s not legitimate to shelter enforcers under cover of &quot;just following orders&quot;.  We still have laws (Constitutional and common), and Peabody, Minnesota doesn&#x27;t have the right to do things like put all the gay residents to death by legislative fiat &amp; judicial compliance;  If you found this occurring, you wouldn&#x27;t need to <i>file a lawsuit</i> alleging that a <i>constitutional overreach</i> has been committed and demanding merely <i>that the policy cease to be in effect</i>.  Instead, you would get some overriding authority, like the state police or the FBI, to run in with SWAT teams and arrest and prosecute every last person peripherally attached to the Peabody legislature or judiciary or law enforcement.  For murder.<p>No amount of &#x27;adopting selective prosecution based on what we can win, since the courts recognized a valid affirmative defence&#x27; or &#x27;changing training programs to be more in line with civil rights&#x27; or &#x27;firing&#x2F;reprimanding the officers involved and settling a civil suit&#x27; makes killing the gay population of Peabody less of a crime, and no amount of lawsuit would be required to get that recognized.