Charles and Phelps counties seize about $1 million a year, mostly by taking in cash in highway stops where no state criminal charges are filed and no drugs seized. No drugs, no charges: In Missouri, St.New Mexico abolished state asset forfeiture, but local police still seize property under dubious local laws. Ninety percent of Kentucky law-enforcement agencies didn’t report required seizure information from 2013-17. The District of Columbia didn’t produce required reports for the three years after passage of a 2015 law. Reforms unenforced: Many state reform laws haven’t been enforced.Channeling money through that federal program washes away state reform requirements. State reforms circumvented: More than half the states have passed forfeiture-reform laws in the past five years, yet police circumvent many of the reforms through the federal Equitable Sharing loophole.
The same thing happens in Indiana, Maine, Maryland, North Carolina, South Dakota, Ohio and Vermont. But by using the federal Equitable Sharing loophole, law enforcement holds onto almost all of the money.
LIBERAL CRIME SQUAD 2017 FREE
The practice skirts the Fourth Amendment's guarantee that Americans are free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and it provides a potentially corrupting incentive for police to circumvent the law to fund their departments.Īn unusual alliance of libertarians and liberals - from the ACLU to Cato and the Koch brothers - says civil asset forfeiture often amounts to highway robbery. The fiction is that property can be a “criminal.” Police can seize property they think is connected to a crime, even if they don’t charge the owner of the property with a crime - just as navies seized pirate ships in colonial days. Charles County and the network of interstates that connect in Illinois across from the Gateway Arch are prime locations for asset forfeiture and drug traffic.Ĭivil asset forfeiture is a controversial law-enforcement tactic that is based on a legal fiction dating back to the days of the pirates. The Interstate-44 corridor through southern Missouri, Interstate 70 through St. Many of the seizures occur along corridors that carry drugs east to big cities and cash back west. Most of the money seized by this civil asset-forfeiture process returns to the law-enforcement agencies that seized it, providing funds for a variety of law-enforcement needs and desires, including exercise equipment, squad cars, jails, military equipment and even a margarita maker. In the past two decades, the federal government took in $36.5 billion in assets police seized from people on America’s roads and in its poorer neighborhoods, many of whom never were charged with a crime or shown to have drugs.