Police Can Just Take Your Money, Car and Other Property — and Good Luck Getting It Back

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/police-can-just-take-your-money-car-and-other-property-and-good-luck-getting-it-back




Alda Gentile was driving back home to New York from Florida, after having viewed condos with her son and grandson ahead of a potential move. She had $11,000 in cash with her, which she brought in order to make a deposit on her new place. As she drove through Georgia, she was stopped for speeding, and upon hearing that she was carrying such a large sum of cash (which is legal, by the way), state troopers questioned her on the side of the road for a total of six hours. In the end she was sent on her way—without the cash, which the officers kept.

Gentile’s case is an extreme example, but such occurrences happen on a smaller, broader scale across the country every year. Civil asset forfeiture is one of those arcane statutes you never hear about until it screws you. It’s a legal fiction spun up hundreds of years ago to give the state the power to convict a person’s property of a crime, or at least, implicate its involvement in the committing of a crime. When that happened, the property was to be legally seized by the state.

That made sense in the 18th century, when the government invoked the law to legally claim loot left behind by pirates who escaped into the blue horizon of the Atlantic. Today, however, the police are the ones who confiscate property, and they’re usually the ones who end up keeping it. The most ridiculous thing about civil asset forfeiture’s modern form is that police use it to confiscate a person’s things even if that person is never convicted of, or even charged with, a crime.

The statute is portrayed by law enforcement as a way of crippling the narcotics trade by letting agencies keep pieces of the infrastructure of large-scale drug operations — and sometimes, civil asset forfeiture does that. But more often than not, it’s used by law enforcement to take from ordinary people who’ve committed no crime. The results are precincts made richer by hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, and insidious incentives for police to apprehend people not in the interest of public welfare but out of something like the profit motive.