WaPo | Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”
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.”
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.
- Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said.
- State law enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of the Black Asphalt network because of concerns that it might not be a legal law enforcement tool. A federal prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law enforcement information and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But officials at Justice and Homeland Security continued to use it.
Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on
The Post’s overall findings. But he said the department has a compliance
review process in place for the Equitable Sharing Program and attorneys
for federal agencies must review the seizures before they are “adopted”
for inclusion in the program.
