COPS CAN TAKE YOUR HOUSE AND CAR: Will DOJ’s Civil Forfeiture Reform Mean More Accountability?
SARAH STILLMAN, “The New Yorker”: Well, civil forfeiture is basically a tool for law enforcement to seize people’s property, their cash, their cars, other goods, and basically appropriate it if they believe that it has been used in the course of a crime.
Now, the problem with it is that often that’s been based on suspicion alone. So people don’t actually have to be proven guilty of a crime before their property is taken.
And the big news today is that Eric Holder basically announced that they were more or less ending a federal policy that had allowed local and state law enforcement agencies to take people’s goods, turn them over to the federal government for forfeiture, and then they would get to take a lot of that money back and use it for themselves.
…SARAH STILLMAN: …
So, these laws emerged from the 1980s. And they came out of, in many respects, a very good place, which is that people shouldn’t be able to profit from their crimes. But as they became this, this means of funding law enforcement, a lot of that spun out of control.
And I looked at a lot of places where, for instance, in Detroit, a bunch of kids were at a party at an art museum, a huge SWAT team raids the place, and they seized all of the young people’s cars, without ever actually going through real procedures in court to prove them guilty of anything.
So I think we’re at a moment when we’re really rethinking police militarization, and these issues are really intertwined.
More: Will DOJ’s Civil Forfeiture Reform Mean More Accountability?