Policing for profit seizes onward
Money-hungry cops are angry about the forfeiture reform that Attorney General Eric Holder announced last Friday, which suggests its a move in the right direction.
Civil forfeiture allows the government to take peoples assets without accusing them of a crime. Yet, contrary to initial press reports, Holders new policy represents a modest change to the rules governing the practice.
Civil forfeiture is fundamentally at odds with our judicial system and notions of fairness, two former directors of the Justice Departments Asset Forfeiture Office observed in a Washington Post op-ed piece last fall.
Civil-forfeiture laws presume someones personal property to be tainted, placing the burden of proving it innocent on the owner.
Holder didnt address that central issue, which is beyond his power. Rather, he modified the Justice Departments Equitable Sharing Program, which lets police and prosecutors use federal law to dodge state restrictions on forfeiture.
Holders order deals only with adoption cases, where local agencies seize property on their own and ask the Justice Department to pursue forfeiture under federal law, which requires less evidence and lets cops keep a bigger share of the loot than many state laws do.
According to a 2012 report from the Government Accountability Office, adoptions made up about 17 percent of all equitable sharing payments in 2010.
During the past six years, the DOJ says, adoptions accounted for roughly 3 percent of the value of forfeitures in the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program.
The programs reports to Congress indicate that equitable-sharing payments to state and local agencies accounted for about 22 percent of deposits during those six years which means adoptions represented less than 14 percent of equitable sharing.
In other words, the new DOJ policy leaves the Equitable Sharing Program mostly untouched.
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Policing for profit seizes onward