War on Cash: Wash Post series on police seizures of millions of dollars in cash from Americans not charged with crimes

9/8/2014

The Washington Post has just published the first article of a three-part series (including videos and interactive maps) on the disturbing increase in civil forfeitures and cash seizures that are part of the “spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes.”

The Washington Post filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Justice to compile a database detailing 212,000 cash seizures since 1996 through the federal government’s largest asset forfeiture effort — the Equitable Sharing Program (aka the “Slush Fund for Law Enforcement”).

Here’s an excerpt below from today’s first article in the three-part series, “Stop and seize:Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes.” (Part 2 will appear Monday and Part 3 will be published on Tuesday.)

To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists.

The Post found:

There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.

Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases — 4,455 — where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.

Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.

Here’s more:

Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired.

The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposés and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11.

“Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money,” said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. “It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.”

What does the Justice Department have to say about the Washington Post series?

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on The Post’s overall findings.

MP: So here’s the situation in a nutshell. America’s shameful, expensive and immoral War on Drugs has expanded to now include a new war – the “War on Cash.”

source

hat tip: steve