No Drugs, No Crime And Just Pennies For School -- How Police Use Civil Asset Forfeiture

[Sherman A1]

This story is part of a collaborative-reporting initiative supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. All stories can be found here: https://taken.pulitzercenter.org/

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.

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.

Many of the seizures occur along corridors that carry drugs east to big cities and cash back west. The Interstate-44 corridor through southern Missouri, Interstate 70 through St. 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.

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/no-drugs-no-crime-and-just-pennies-school-how-police-use-civil-asset-forfeiture

[lostnfound]

1. Interesting Holder / Obama vs Sessions / Trump comparison

It would be poetry if forfeiture were used against the trump / GOP mob crime family. Did you use your plane, mr. Trump? And that Tower you owned that you used for a meeting? ...

Holder reform; Sessions retrenchment

Obama Attorney General Eric Holder reformed the Federal Equitable sharing program in 2015 to require criminal charges or warrants before federal adoptions of forfeited property in many cases.

But after President Trump’s election, chances for reform evaporated. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed Holder. He said, “Our law-enforcement partners will tell you, and, as President Trump knows well, asset forfeitures is a key tool that helps law enforcement defund organized crime, take back ill-gotten gains and prevent new crimes from being committed, and it weakens the criminals and the cartels.”

Trump underlined his administration’s opposition to civil asset reform when a Texas sheriff complained to him at a White House meeting in 2017 that an unnamed state senator in Texas wanted to require a conviction before money could be forfeited, according to a Texas Tribune report.
....

“Who’s the state senator?” Trump shot back. “Want to give his name? We’ll destroy his career.”