Radley Balko posted about a woman in Wayne County who broke no laws yet had to pay $1,400 to get her car back when police seized it "after they mistook Vaughn’s co-worker for a prostitute."
From a Detroit News article:
The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.Obama’s Justice Department supports state asset forfeiture laws, says Balko:
It’s worth noting that Obama’s Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren’t obligated to. Though the solicitor general’s office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins—the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.How police departs abuse asset forfeiture laws to steal money from poor peopleTaking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.
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I love how the government supports asset forfeiture. It's a bit like a thief being in favor of unlocked doors.
I live in a city where cops and public servants from the "Department of Revenue" scour low income neighborhoods in the dead of night looking for any and every possible automobile infraction. I lived in such an area and received tickets for such infractions as "Cracked tail-light structure" (it wasn't cracked) and "expired city sticker" (a week before it expired). It's commonplace to shake-down these neighborhoods because the people either pay up front out of fear, or don't pay and end up with a "boot" on their car which leads to a tow 48 hours later which can run you upwards of a grand.
Are the streets safer? Is it any easier to navigate the city? Are the roads more accessible to all? Nope.
This is kind of shocking to learn, but "innocent until proven guilty" in the US means they can't legally imprison you without a conviction. But they can take your property.
I know some attorneys who work forfeiture cases, and they laughed while I tried to grock that. "Yeah, that surprises everybody."
i feel for the victims of this kind of theft.
i had a traffic ticket that i had to put up $500 for. i wont get into details but it was NOT a moving violation.
so i put up the money and demand a court date.
3 weeks later i go to court. no cop. note from cop saying he couldn't make it. judge asks if i object to a continuance. i do. my objection is noted but overruled.
2 weeks later i go back to court. no cop again. case dismissed. yay. they say i'll get my money back in 4-6 weeks.
11 weeks later it shows up in the mail.
in the end i was out $500 for 16 weeks, and lost 4 hours of paid time off, plus another couple hours of my free time.
why i have to submit 'bail' for a non moving violation infraction is beyond me. why they don't give me back MY money the same day the case is dismissed is also beyond me. i imagine they make a tidy sum off the interest of all the bail they hold in the mean time.
assholes, the whole lot of them.
I'd like to think the recent shenanigans of the Justice Department, echoing and reinforcing Bush era dogma, is a result of the "sleepers" left behind by the previous administration - continuing to dole out federal legal responses that contradict what the Big O would do. make enough noise and maybe these louts will get kicked down the stairs and into the streets where they belong. If I'm wrong then the current administration is just as much of wretched hive of scum and villainy as the previous douchebags who haunted those halls.
It's only "asset" forfeiture when it happens to rich people.
It wouldn't take much to support a charge of racketeering.
It's the same as it ever was.
A similiar thing happened to me, albeit not to the tune of 14 hundred dollars. I was pulled over for a seatbelt violation, and after much waiting in the car the officer informed me my car was flagged as stolen and I would have to be arrested, and the car towed. It was all very amiable and it amounted to a DMV error, but I had to pay over 300 bucks in impound/towing fees.
Trends like this are incredibly worrysome for law enforcement. When you "incentivize" officers and departments with performance based quotas and make them "more responsible" for their own funding streams.... These are the results.
For a while now larger police departments have been less about serving their community, and more their own needs - such as producing skewed evidence for tougher laws to allow broader (lazier) policing. Consorting laws are a good example of this, and specifyinv key groups they are to apply to.
Of course it often falls to the individual patrol / officer, but common sense is being beaten out of recruits in favour of towing the line. People who show independant thought are targeted and eradicated from the recruiting process. Clearly not wanted.
"This is kind of shocking to learn, but "innocent until proven guilty" in the US means they can't legally imprison you without a conviction.
No, but they can still throw you in jail for no reason whatsoever. This happened to me, and my boss posted bail. She talked to the DA, the DA tracked down the paperwork, read it, and promptly tore it up and threw it away. I was free to go, because I didn't do anything. The bail was already posted, though, so they didn't give it back and I had to pay my boss back. For doing absolutely nothing. When it comes to forfeiture and fees, there is absolutely no justice whatsoever and it doesn't surprise me that they are taking in more and more.
No kidding. Police towing policy is particularly harsh against homeless people. People who live in vehicles in San Francisco are targeted for towing if they don't move and re-park every few days, and sometimes even if they do. It breaks up groups of people who would otherwise be able to hang together for safety, and it deprives people of *all* their assets when there's a tow and the owner can't pay the corruptly high fees to recover it.
Poor people's property rights deserve more attention. Including from conservatives. Maybe especially from conservatives.
Taxation without representation. For the new millennium that is. The weasels that we have in office are only concerned with staying in office. Not creating a better society. Thus, they are loathe to raise or create new taxes. But they have to pay for the ever increasing cost of doing government business (pay-raise's, office renovations, their moats, at least in Britain, etc etc...), so they are left with the only option available to them. Start writing tickets for everything. Here in Toronto, the cops regularly go on 'safety' blitzes. Which is their way to saying that anyone doing 5 kph or more is going to get ass raped. They pull over ten or fifteen cars at a time and have a team of cops working on it. Which only makes sense, crime rates have been dropping steadily for decades now. So there isn't really that much for the cops to do besides raise money for the city and province. Its as though they keep hiring more cops just so they can write more tickets and fighting crime doesn't even come into the equation.
It must be really frustrating for cops nowadays, they go into it all bright eyed and bushy-tailed. Thinking that they are going to be making a difference and taking down bad guys like Crokett and Tubbs. Then they wind up spending most of their time writing tickets, doing paper work and showing up to court to make sure those tickets generate money. Meanwhile, real criminals are two blocks away selling drugs in Dundas square with no one around to stop them. It goes a long way towards explaining why they get so fucked up about the least little thing and tasing ten year old girls. Or beating up old ladies because they talk back too much.
It is so disingenuous to blame the President for every single tiny decision of various Government departments, as if he is the micro manager-in-chief. I can just see Obama in the war room debating the surge in Afghanistan and then taking a call about how best to rob poor people in order to support some local police department's budgets.
*THIS JUST IN* Just because you don't like President Obama or something doesn't make him the origin of every gripe you have in the world. Good job not putting the blame on your local corrupt police department, the people who are really screwing you over.
I like President Obama, much better than I liked his predecessor. But that whole hope and change spiel he had was a crock of shit. He's pretty much Bush-lite. No Tortures brought to justice, escalating the war, same wiretapping going on, movie industry flacks working directly for him to bring new DRM into play, etc etc...
Democrats and Republicans, more than at any time in their history, are just two sides of the same coin.
Scuse me, but Wayne County is in Michigan (namely Detroit and surrounding area), not Illinois.
yet one more reason to avoid Detroit.
It's worth mentioning that jaytkay's comment is only the tip of the iceberg. The Bill of Rights itself and Constitutional protections, in general, apply ONLY to criminal cases and not civil ones. Asset forfeiture is only one of a wide variety of assaults on citizens and their property that are completely legal in civil proceedings. At very least let's not forget that if you are sued in civil court you have no right to a court-appointed attorney so poor people can have their lives destroyed simply because they lack the ability to obtain representation. While loss of your freedom in a criminal case is serious business, the loss of everything else in a civil matter runs a pretty damned close second.
"Here in Toronto, the cops regularly go on 'safety' blitzes."
And they searched 6,000 random houses and apartments looking for evidence in a missing persons case. People who exercised their right to deny police entry without a warrant were warned they'd be put under surveillance and maybe subject to a search warrant.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/mariam/article/723531--6-000-homes-canvassed-for-mariam-clues
"Hi there, just want to take a look in your kitchen to make sure you haven't been committing any crimes, Mmmkay?"
The story of Donald P. Scott of Los Angeles is one of the most egregious in the annals of forfeiture. The Police and the Parks Service plotted to get his property, and in their action, shot him dead.
Sorry, it's a wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_P._Scott
Also fear.org (Forfeiture Endangers American Rights) runs their website on forfeiture, with victim stories,statistics, and a is a gathering point for resources.
The Sheriff of Nottingham lives!
@doublethink:
A similar thing happened to my wife too, she had car trouble and the police stopped by, found that our car WAS-NOT reported stolen so they impounded it so they could continue to check if it was going to be reported stolen sometime in the future and tossed her in jail for a day.
You can say the words to the tune of the Thanksgiving day massacre if ya want.
I think N.W.A. said it best, Fuck tha Police!
Would it have killed you to spell out "departments" in the headline?
I must've re-read it a dozen times before I realized "departs" wasn't a verb, but an abbreviation. Yeah, I'm slow sometimes.
if florida they are require to serve notice in a timely fashion. And usually, all it takes is for you to file an appeal and they release to you your stuff.
I assume that this is common knowledge, but just in case it is not, please recall that the current state of our asset forfeiture law exists because of the drug war. The original rational that led the Supreme Court to allow this (in my opinion) blatantly unconstitutional sort of behavior was that drug dealers represented too great of a threat to society to rely on due process. Just remember this when you are tallying the pros and cons of drug prohibition.
Yeah - what nutjob said. It took me a second or three to figure out it wasn't 'departs' as in 'leaves' or 'goes away'.
'Depts.' would have done it, too. First time I ever saw 'departs' used as a shortened form of departments.
I hope we get a handle on this type of abuse soon. It will only get harder as the government gets larger and hungrier. There will be more incentive to have police and prosecutors "self fund" in order to allow the rest of the budget to continue uncut.
Let this kind seizure become ordinary, and pretty soon you won't like the guys who show up wanting to become cops.
Dump these forfeiture laws, the red light cameras, and any other activity where we entangle police or prosecutorial self interest with the awesome power of the justice system.