Asset forfeiture is just theft

I mean...yes. The US police department has stacked the cards in their favor, and as with every organization that believes they can act with impunity, abuse all of their power to the maximum extent they can. When they want to rob you, they call it a fancy police word to make it seem legitimate. When they wrongfully kill you, they call it Qualified Immunity, which makes them exempt from punishment.

It's organized crime at the absolute highest level. Police behave similarly to mobsters in Scorsese films.

Which makes police just thieves. Not that it's a new conclusion for many of us.

Civil asset forfeiture gets a lot of well-deserved comparisons to highwaymen-behavior and outright armed robbery under the shield of law. However, let's get a bit more kafkaesque. Civil Forfeiture is generally connected to at least some sort of due process that ends up in court, if challenged. But in a huge number of cases - the DHS Inspector General released a scathing report a few months ago that indicate $1.2-2.8 billion dollars worth of property and cash was forfeited administratively, not civilly, between 2014 and 2018. This covers only DHS, as DOJ-affiliated agencies also have authority to do this, albeit under a different law. The IG report is here: https://www.oversight.gov/report/dhs/dhs-inconsistently-impl...

Administrative forfeiture actions do not end up in court, it's possible that you may not even realize that your property was seized or for what reason, or if you are aware, you may have been given instructions to challenge/claim the property that was essentially gibberish. You might try to reach the relevant agency, send in your claim/petition and hear nothing back. However, most insidiously, it was apparently not uncommon for the agency, after having determined that the owner of the property was innocent and the cash or property should be returned, nevertheless use waivers and other tactics to cause enough of a hassle so that they can negotiate a settlement for a portion of whatever was in question, usually cash. At this point, DHS already refers to the petitioner as "innocent owner". They just want a cut of money that they had no legal claim to anymore, and essentially purely through the fact that they are able to hold onto it and there's no meaningful judicial review of a great deal of administrative actions, you may have to pay a... bribe? Ransom? Either way, your property is held hostage until you pay up although the agency you are dealing with have already decided that you are innocent.

How the federal system of civil/admin forfeiture interplays with the state version is also quite interesting, because the federal equitable sharing program effectively acts as a backdoor to any state-level reform of the practice by not only funnelling money directly to police departments but also task forces or other similar ad hoc interagency entities that really don't have all of the characteristics of a formal police department. Last year the DOJ half of the operation divvied out $320 million to police departments and task forces, keeping the majority of the money they seized for themselves of course. All this really adds up to the simple notion that if you really want to get started with defunding the police, merely stopping them from being able to seek forfeiture in cases where no corresponding criminal charges can be brought with the evidence available. This simple act of stopping literal modern highwaymen would effectively cut $320 million into police budgets across the country. Unfortunately, permanent change requires congressional action so, no breaths were held in anticipation of actual substantive changes on the legal side.

My favorite stat of the year: There is now more civil asset forfeiture (government robbery) than actual robberies in the US by value.

There would be a lot of mental gymnastics involved to call it anything else.