Rare News Desk
You might be innocent until proven guilty, but your assets aren’t.
Videos by Rare
Under current law, police are allowed to seize property based on nothing more than suspicion. In July, Rare contributor Bonnie Kristian called it “The biggest threat to private property you’ve never even heard of.”
The New York Times ran the headline Sunday “Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize.” In that story, video shows Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., telling a rather disturbing story of police targeting a man for arrest because of the car he was driving.
“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” Connelly said. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’”
Police ended up arresting this man as soon as he got to his car on the way out of a bar and seized possession of the vehicle, although he was not yet in control of the vehicle, or drunk driving. They had jumped the gun. Connelly explained that the vehicle would have gone to auction and the proceeds would have trickled down to the department, even more evidence that there is incentive for police to seize first and ask questions later.
One can easily see how ‘if something looks suspicious and it’s on the wish list then it is suspicious’ could exist under this framework.
Why would police want to jump at the chance at seizing? The New York Times explains that the practice is lucrative.
The practice, expanded during the war on drugs in the 1980s, has become a staple of law enforcement agencies because it helps finance their work. It is difficult to tell how much has been seized by state and local law enforcement, but under a Justice Department program, the value of assets seized has ballooned to $4.3 billion in the 2012 fiscal year from $407 million in 2001. Much of that money is shared with local police forces.
Besides being lucrative, it has gone unquestioned and unnoticed for some time, making it safe as well.
Consider this damning excerpt from the Times article:
In defense of the practice, Gary Bergman, a prosecutor with the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said civil forfeiture had been distorted in news reports. “All they hear is the woman was left on the side of the road and the police drove off with her car and her money, no connection to drugs,” he told other prosecutors at the session.
“I’m not saying that that doesn’t happen — it does. It should not. But they never hear about all the people that get stopped with the drugs in their cars, in their houses, the manufacturing operations we see, all the useful things we do with the money, the equipment, vehicles. They don’t hear about that.”
We should downplay the negative effects of civil asset forfeiture because it works sometimes?
Again, Bonnie Kristian summed up the unconstitutionality of asset forfeiture operations:
Civil asset forfeiture is basically a law which allows a police officer who finds you “suspicious” to just take your stuff.
Once your property has been confiscated, the burden of proof is on you, not the police, to show that you didn’t get it from any criminal activity. Even if you personally are cleared of all charges, that may not matter.
Fortunately, liberty-minded politicians like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are shifting the microscope to activities like this one.
Paul has introduced the FAIR Act, which, in his words, “would change federal law and protect the rights of property owners by requiring that the government prove its case with clear and convincing evidence before forfeiting seized property.”
“The federal government has made it far too easy for government agencies to take and profit from the property of those who have not been convicted of a crime,” Paul added in his op-ed on the subject. “The FAIR Act will ensure that government agencies no longer profit from taking the property of U.S. citizens without due process, while maintaining the ability of courts to order the surrender of proceeds of crime.”
