Holder limits seized-asset sharing process that split billions with police
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I really don't understand how this practice persisted for so long next when we have the right to due process.
For people who think it only happened to drug dealers who were difficult to prosecute; it happened to my elderly parents.
My grandfather died suddenly in Georgia and we were the closest family at the time. My parents packed up their car in a hurry and started from Texas down I-10. In Mississippi they ran into a drunk driving checkpoint. They, being elderly conservative Republican business owners driving a luxury sedan that never conceived that the police would not be on their side, consented to a search of their car. The police found an antique revolver (my dad is an avid collector) locked in its case in the trunk. That plus the $800 he had in his wallet as travel money was enough to get them thrown in jail for the weekend and their property seized as suspected drug dealers.
$8000 in local lawyer fees later they got their car back but the antique gun had 'gone missing' along with the cash. Their lawyer said they were lucky to get the car back.
All it will take to fix our police problem is sufficient public will. There isn't any other barrier.
"Reform Asset Forfeiture!" - http://schedule.nhlibertyforum.com/event/de3f714a09d0089b2fc...
Prosecution: Xe stole my car and rent money and now I have no way to earn enough credits to buy my insulin and keep my apartment.
Defense: The offender was found travelling in an erratic and suspicious manner. As per the agreement made by travelling on Private Road Supranational's private road, the traveler is subject to searches of their person and vehicle if suspected of engaging in certain dangerous activities outlined in Section VI of the contract. In addition, any property suspected of use in a criminal or dangerous activity will automatically have its ownership transferred to Private Road Supranational, as detailed in Section V. Furthermore, we have no record of ever confiscating any of the offender's property.
Judge, brought to you by Lockheed Martin: This seems to be a pretty open and shut case.
(Many libertarians also see the government courts as last-gasp fallbacks and prefer private adjudication, but most that I've seen discuss the issue recognize the possibility of impasse in getting parties to agree on a private adjudicator, and see that some government involvement here may be essential.)
If you're really wealthy you have such good insurance that they negotiate sufficiently low compensation that you can in effect have anybody killed. And it's called feudalism. Or in early U.S. times, this was the American frontier, a.k.a. the wild west, and hired guns.
Libertarians think they have some new bright idea that's never been tried before to counter the fact we're ignorant violent primates. We want something enough, get pissed off enough, we become irrational. Having the irrational hire enforcers is old hat. And it leads to things like the gangs of New York, butchery in the streets, the warlords of Somalia.
These same libertarians are the first to propose both open and conceal carry (of guns) which are the #1 enemy of free speech and civil discourse. It says, "if you argue better than I do, I might just have to let my gun do the talking, so keep your mouth shut smarty pants." So I think libertarians are idiots and not to be trusted, especially if they're armed.
Because clearly the same cops you've been roundly criticizing as "highwaymen" elsewhere in the thread should have a monopoly on the possession of firearms.
I've got a better idea: you guys move to Somalia. I'm fine where I'm at.
it is great to send people to Somalia while sitting in US. Doing so in Somalia would have quite different result through "private enforcement" :)
Once you go beyond the political mainstream, alignment between individuals drops drastically. If you can't get anything you want by compromise, you don't have to compromise on anything.
You may be surprised by the number of varying and mutually incompatible ideas that different libertarians will have regarding any particular issue, each one insisting that their idea would totally work, if only conditions X, Y, and Z could be met.
Can someone clarify for me- I read the article, and it SEEMS to be saying "the feds will no longer be participating in this process, which will of course still be carried out by state and city police". It's more about where seized money gets allocated, than about limiting the actual seizures.
Is that right?
"One audit examined about $3.4 million in Equitable Sharing funds that the Oklahoma Highway Patrol spent from July 2009 to June 2012.
The audit found $1.9 million in unallowable and unsupported expenditures relating to salaries, overtime pay, construction, fees paid to contractors and the use of two Ford F-150 pickup trucks by non-law enforcement personnel."
Police departments may lobby for "agency keeps the proceeds" state laws, but because states usually are constitutionally required to balance their budgets, they are reluctant to move general fund things out to dedicated funds, and if the feds are moving in part due to public outcry over the practice, the same pressure out to be able to be brought on states if they start to consider mirroring the discontinued federal practice.
That is, the laws that were 'suspected' broken were federal laws, and properly the seized goods belonged to the feds. The feds then shared a large portion of that back to the state and local cops. They will no longer do so.
This removes a great deal of the incentive for locals to use federal laws for seizures.
Many states require seizures go into the state general fund, so there's no incentive there for cops to overstep, at least not financial incentives.
So in theory this should result in a pretty big reduction in unwarranted seizures.
At some point in the past 10 or 15 years, Minnesota (I think) passed a law barring police in that state from doing so.
The police didn't stop... they just filed it under the federal civil forfeiture program, took their 80% cut and it continued.
So stopping the federal program will let states fix this, when until now it was futile to try.
Under State rules, in almost all states, the money goes into the general fund. And there is due process to actually seize the asset. We're essentially removing the incentive from the police officers to pull people over. It does them no good to take your stuff if it just goes into one big pot that they'll never see again.
That said, I'm not finding it with a little searching and skimming. I do see gaming revenues restricted to education...
Drunk driving is a serious problem, no doubt about it, but stopping everyone on an interstate to talk with them is insane overreach.
I am surprised no one's figured out the problem of analyzing traffic camera data to flag people who are driving erratically so enforcement can be both more comprehensive and targeted. I'd be wary of that solution, too, but it is far better than stopping everyone.
Especially when they aren't really looking for drunks, but people like your father to victimize as police fundraiser.
Anything that monetizes police action will lead to massive abuse. It blows my mind people won't accept that. The cops and the unions aren't stupid. They want that money for salary, pensions, and toys. The politicians want that funding without having to raise taxes.
So now the electorate is literally being bullied and mugged by the police. I'm really starting to like the lame-duck version of Obama. His recent moves are very much needed: encouraging municipal fiber, workers leave rights, sanctioning Russia, immigration amnesty, etc.
I think it's overly diplomatic to call this action a police fundraiser. These were highwaymen. Note they aren't doing this to their locals, they know better and that's why they're on the interstate, they're doing it on behalf of the locals. The rot is with the town itself.
Either the insane overreach isn't effective, or DUI is a miraculously solved problem here.
Of course, it might've hurt that this was at a sane hour on an unremarkable Wednesday night.
I will bet they had a lot more resources for doing searches than they did sobriety checks for those who refused the search. The search would therefore seem fast, while you probably had an insane line waiting for a sobriety test. This is a town with significant corruption and nepotism problems, and is operating like a cartel itself.
This is just so wrong. It essentially denies there's any such thing as property rights.
Why not simply file judgement against ideas and imagination next?
They already do. Free speech is curbed in much of Europe and several are in jail for holding unpopular opinions.
Holocaust denial is already illegal in many places.
What is there not to fear about sharia law? Personally I'd be terrified of living under a legal system in which many of the basic rights I take for granted simply cease to exist, and in which my wife and any daughters I have are considered second-class citizens.
Because he's Muslim, see?
Until the early 1980s, it couldn't. Then we went nuts to protect little Timmy from Satan's Weed and nose powder.
Which is precisely the point.
A "property right" is an intangible thing where you can run to a court and say: "X took my Y." You can only assert this if you show ownership of Y. How civil asset forfeiture works is that if an officer has probable cause to believe that property is not lawfully yours, because it's the proceeds of illegal activity, he can seize it. If you contest the seizure, in court, the government has the burden of proof, by preponderance of the evidence, to show that the asset is subject to forfeiture. Preponderance of the evidence is the same burden of proof used in any civil case where the ownership of property is disputed.
The styling of the case, "Florida v. Wool Socks" has nothing to do with the "property being guilty." It's just how in rem proceedings are designated. Such a proceeding is simply one in which the lawful owner of some property is not a party. In the case of civil asset forfeiture the styling is used because the theory is that you're not the rightful owner of the property to begin with. Other contexts where it might be used is if you're enforcing a money judgment against someone who refuses to show up in court by attaching property he owns in your state. It's not that the "property is guilty" just that the case is about the property and the actual owner is absent.
There's a huge difference between ownership not changing when property itself is stolen, and the preposterous idea that ownership ceases to exist because an item was peacefully obtained using "proceeds of an illegal activity". (I'm not saying that you aren't parroting "logic" espoused by some court somewhere, I'm just pointing out that said court itself is essentially corrupt)
As for the original topic, call me when the perps are in jail. Until then, the "justice system" amounts to nothing more than another gang to be avoided.
"Corruption" refers to when a public entity doesn't follow its own rules. Following a self-consistent set of rules, the premises of which you reject, is not corruption.
Which is exactly what is happening here. In a just society, one is comforted by the belief that if they're stolen from, then the institutions of society will act against (or at least condemn) the perpetrator. In the modern US, the uniformed gangs act with little concern, and then legions of legal "scholars" compose reams of justification for how what occurred was "legitimate".
Either the justice system needs to be reformed and the uniformed thugs sent to jail, or the social contract continues to degrade and we end up with revolution and collapse.
No, the point of law is to provide notice of the way the ruler intends to apply power. (Which is, of course, also undermined by lack of clarity in meaning of the law, but in a different way.)
Distributed consensus is the point of democratic government, which is a newer thing than law.
When god's law changes, it classically means war, killing all the males above a certain age, marrying the women and girls off while changing their language and religion - i.e. cultural, and hence deity, decimation. So yeah, watch out for that one.
You can do morally corrupt things without breaking the law. Even laws can be morally corrupt.
It's more than that, based on my past reading of instances of abuse of this. If the officer believes that the property could in any way be related to a crime, it can be seized. That has nothing to do with whether or not it's lawfully yours. Pretty insane, and could cover basically anything.
In Philadelphia they seized houses because of $40 of heroin (son of the owners). And then have courtrooms where this stuff can be contested, but without a judge - only the prosecutor who was involved in the first place.
The most egregious part: No conviction for the crime is needed. Just a police report that says that illegal activity occured: http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-hous...
fuck, I don't care how its worded, its theft and theft by a government to big to give a fuck what you think. they have the police, they have the courts, and you have the right to shut up and eat it.
British admiralty law is the bane of the American legal system:
"Next to revenue (taxes) itself, the late extensions of the jurisdiction of the admiralty are our greatest grievance. The American Courts of Admiralty seem to be forming by degrees into a system that is to overturn our Constitution and to deprive us of our best inheritance, the laws of the land. It would be thought in England a dangerous innovation if the trial, of any matter on land was given to the admiralty."
-- Jackson v. Magnolia, 20 How. 296 315, 342 (U.S. 1852)
"Laws of the land" refers to English Common Law, and if that's what the battle was to save, it's already lost. We've already wrecked our own common law system pretty thoroughly with the proliferation of bodies of civil law. Legislators can't leave our court systems well-enough alone.
Is this anything to do with the Amistad case?
I've literally seen shakedowns in third world countries that weren't as bad as what the police have been doing in the US. They just take a bribe and move on, you'd still have your car and most of your wallet.
The acts of the police in the US make me wonder why they even joined the police force in the first place?
Also, the policy allows exceptions. So they could do it on a "case by case" basis, with individual departments and so on. And, if they did change the policy outright, well it hardly requires a press release.
I'm tentatively excited. But I cannot see anything in it for anyone with power. So I just don't see how this would become law.
>“Today, however, every state has either criminal or civil forfeiture laws, making the federal adoption process less necessary,” Holder’s statement said.
> ...police can continue to make seizures under their own state laws, the federal program was easy to use and required most of the proceeds from the seizures to go to local and state police departments.
In other words, no longer will your rights be violated vis-a-vis the forfeiture of assets - without proof of a crime - under Federal Law. Rather, local police will be violating rights and taking assets under State Law.
Reading between the lines (e.g. following the money), it is clear the State's are behind this change and not the outrage of law makers at the notion police forces are strong-arm robbing ordinary citizens. Whereas under the Federal law money goes direct to the police agency and under state laws the money goes to a State fund where presumably the State law makers can get their greedy little hands on the money.
Which is bad, because it directly incentivizes individual groups of cops to take as much as possible.
> and under state laws the money goes to a State fund
Which is good, because it removes the "personal benefit" aspect of the police taking assets.
> where presumably the State law makers can get their greedy little hands
Only if the police have an incentive to put it into their hands.
Fortunately, it's less attractive for local police now: a good number of states apparently have laws on the books that require the proceeds of asset seizure to go to the state's general fund (or in some cases something specific like the state education fund), rather than allowing police to pocket it for their own uses. The federal "sharing" program allowed police to skirt around this and keep the assets themselves. I suspect there will be far fewer instances of seizures once the police realize they aren't going to see any of it.
The reason local police have been using federal law to do this is that seizures under federal law belong to the feds, but federal law has a proceeds-sharing system which gives most of it back to the seizing agency, where state laws usually reserve seizure proceeds under state law to the state general fund. Without the agency-specific revenue enhancement provided by federal seizure rules, there is far less incentive for police to pursue seizure.
(That doesn't mean they won't still when they have other motivations, like "punishing" a target that they don't have sufficient evidence to criminally charge. But by removing the federal option, a powerful incentive for the use of seizure has also been removed.)
“It seems like a continual barrage against police,” said John W. Thompson, interim executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association. “I’m not saying there’s no wrongdoing, but there is wrongdoing in everything.”
This is the head of a police organisation basically saying stop picking on us because other people rob citizens too. By the way I am an American and left in the years after 9/11 because shit like this was starting to become more and more common. It was bad for me there because I had a strange accent - I was raised in London, and I am half black.
Before 9/11 conversations would be like "Where are you from? Oh, Europe! Why I you here? I've always heard wonderful things about the place?" Afterwards it turned to "WHERE ARE YOU FROM AND WHY ARE YOU HERE!?!
It was sad to see a lot of Americans I met go from a totally open, inquisitive nature to closed paranoia. Really makes me depressed about the future of my country.
FWIW it's generally gifted/granted to local police, though they do have to pay ownership costs.
Holder’s action comes as members of both parties in
Congress are working together to craft legislation to
overhaul civil asset forfeiture. Last Friday, Sens. Charles
E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), along with
Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and John Conyers
Jr. (D-Mich.), signed a letter calling on Holder to end
Equitable Sharing.
Virtually everything these past few years has been bipartisan, up to the point it became higher-profile and associated with Obama who (rightly or wrongly) is an incredibly polarizing figure.
It goes all the way back to Obamacare, which was solidly bipartisan (I mean in Congress, not merely in concept) and which Republicans in committee had a veto pen over, particularly in the Senate.
Until it fell directly into the spotlight and became too associated with Obama's platform.
This has happened over and over and over since 2008.
The federal laws that grants military surplus to local police is very, very generous. The sunk cost is next to nothing. Maintenance costs are pretty much it. The militarization of police continues even without this money.
Throughout his presidency, Obama has been constrained by a legislature he at best could only partially rely on -- his initial filibuster-proof Senate lasted less than three months as I recall. His initial approach was working with the Republic party, though that failed. He was then concerned with both midterm and his own re-election, with very narrow margins to preserve.
With his final mid-terms out of the way, he's in an interesting place: not empowered (his party controls neither house of Congress), but neither impotent. He has a Senate which can either filibuster or uphold a veto, he has veto authority himself, and can act to impose regulatory measures within his Executive authority. I predicted, and he seems to be acting, with great conviction since the last election than in the six years prior.
I anticipate another two years of this. Not smooth sailing, but far more decisive action.
[1] http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/AGassetforfetureorder.p...
From the OP here:
Holder’s action comes as members of both parties in Congress are working together to craft legislation to overhaul civil asset forfeiture. Last Friday, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), along with Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), signed a letter calling on Holder to end Equitable Sharing.
Grassley praised Holder’s decision on Friday.
“We’re going to have a fairer justice system because of it,” Grassley said. “The rule of law ought to protect innocent people and civil asset forfeiture hurt a lot of people.”
He said he planned to continue pressing for legislative reforms.
“I commend the department for this step and look forward to working with them on comprehensive forfeiture reform that protects Americans’ property rights,” Sensenbrenner said. “Equitable sharing has become a tool too often used to bypass state law. Forfeitures should be targeted and must have appropriate procedural protections.”
You mean how to keep politicians from stealing from their constituents? I have been asking statists for an answer to that question for a long time. Don't hold your breath. It's a flawed system and you just found the core issue that has no solution inside statism. If anyone disagrees with this statement, instead of down-voting please kindly point to an existing example of a State that has solved the problem of corrupt politicians.
Now that you found the core problem of statism, you owe yourself some reading. It's a fun journey. Good luck.
Edit: Of course not: it's a 'publish everything' model, so people can real time audit government behaviors. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency#Radical_Po... and http://www.davidbrin.com/radicaltransparency.html for some description.
edit: re: edit:
The point is that the call for transparency as a solution presupposes the whole "consent of the governed" idea, which is laughable. Consider accident of birth and majority tyranny.
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%208&...
The post about the documents (which you can search) and the data: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/01/1...
It aired just last year, but I don't remember the exact name of the broadcast.
So now that he doesn't need the backing of the LEO community, but wants to line up speaking engagements after he retires, he throws the people a bone.
Justice for all is such an complete illusion in this country and the worst part is the people who breathlessly defend police until suddenly one day they get an eye opener and then it is too late.
When you arrest this person, what happens to their assets that they've (assumingly) illegally obtained? The hundred thousand in drug money? The guns, high end electronics, luxury cars, etc?
You weaken the individual criminal and their gangs by taking their money away. It's far to easy to just pass those assets on to another person and they can simply assume the role. And after the person does their 5-10 years in prison should they be released back to what they had obtained through illegal activity?
When we grant law enforcement authority, we are extending them trust not to abuse it. They have failed to not abuse it, therefore the authority should be revoked. So yes, drug dealers should keep their money, so that random people don't get robbed by the police. If the police whine, tell them it's their own fault for abusing their power. (Of course this is idealistic garbage, the police are politically entrenched and rarely ever lose any power.)
Today however, the processes for property seizure occur almost independently from the procedures of the criminal justice system; seizures can occur without any guilty verdict, and there's no guarantee that property will be returned to innocent people.
There is no reasonable way to reconcile this with taking things from people on little to no evidence based on a lawsuit against the items rather than the owners.
I am not clear, but I suspect laws existed to confiscate ill gotten gains from convicted criminals before this forfeiture began in the 80s. RICO perhaps?
Regardless of inspiration or intention, this process is highly flawed and it's far past time to end seizures from people who have not even been charged with a crime.
The second major issue is distributing the money to individual police officers. This combined with the lack of due process creates far too much incentive and ability for crooked police officers to seize funds motivated by their own self interest.
Executive decisions such as this are a poor substitute for settled law.
Some states have already legislated to prohibit this, but the federal program allowed their own police forces to sidestep the prohibitions... effectively making it impossible to fix at the state level.
Don't get me wrong, Obama and Holder are both shitbags, but this makes them slightly less shitbaggish, even in my own eyes. Two or three more things like this, I might even be forced to change my opinion of them.