FEDS HELP LOCAL POLICE AGENCIES TIGHTEN THEIR GRIP ON ASSET SEIZURES

Civil asset forfeiture is the most infamous game in law enforcement. While
in its pure form, seizing the luxury cars, boats, homes and cash of drug
dealers can be a useful tool in taking profit out of crime, in the real
world far too many police and sheriff's offices use it to finance and
enrich their operations, leading to startling abuses.

Go through newspaper archives across the country and you'll find
investigative pieces going back more than a decade documenting problems
with police departments' taking people's stuff for their own use, often
without even bothering to charge the owner with a crime.

No one is immune. Pro basketball player Corie Blount was a victim in 1998,
when he was pulled over in Ohio on Christmas Eve for having tinted windows
and no front license plate. His car was searched after a drug-sniffing dog
indicated probable cause.

No drugs were found, but the Ohio State Highway Patrol discovered $19,000.
Though there was no evidence of criminality, the money was taken and turned
over to the Drug Enforcement Administration for seizure. It took months of
negotiations with the federal government to finally get the money returned.

In the aftermath of this and other such scandals, state legislatures and
even Congress have made some attempts at reform, but law enforcement has
vehemently resisted the only real reform: taking the profit motive out of
seizures by not letting police keep the dough.

Slapping their fingers from the cookie jar is the only way to protect
against abuse.

In Utah, a popular voter-passed initiative in 2000 sent all proceeds from
asset seizures to an education fund. Since then, local police agencies and
prosecutors have done everything possible to stymie the measure, from going
to court to challenge the initiative's constitutionality (they lost), to
simply ignoring it and keeping the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Finally, in June, a court ordered the money into the school fund.

Responding to the ruling, Salt Lake County District Attorney David Yocom
echoed the sentiments of other officials by predicting the end of local
forfeitures. "Doing forfeitures is way down the line in my priorities,"
Yocom told The Associated Press.

If police and prosecutors don't get to keep the money, if it goes instead
to public education or something equally worthy, they are not going to
bother with seizures?

Funny, I thought forfeitures were done for a law enforcement purpose, as a
way to prevent criminals from living large on their lucre, as a
disincentive to crime. Now, it turns out, it is all about who gets the
money. Well, fancy that.

And this is where the federal government steps in. Numerous states have
enacted laws diverting some or all of asset-seizure profits into a state
general fund or other specialized fund. This is what legislatures do --
they develop funding priorities for state revenues. But for nearly 20
years, the federal government has colluded with local law enforcement to
skirt state law and put the money back into the pockets of the seizing agency.

Under the process known as adoption, the Justice Department actively
encourages local policing agencies to turn over their seized assets. The
department will then do the forfeiture and return 80 percent of seizure
proceeds to the local agency. So, for a mere 20 percent off the top, any
pesky state laws can be circumvented. (Utah's initiative was actually
written to eliminate adoptions, but policing agencies are still sending
seizures to the federal government, rather than the state education fund.)

Thanks to a wonderful series by reporter Karen Dillon at the Kansas City
Star (www.kcstar.com/projects/drugforfeit), we know something of the extent
of the avarice. For example, she writes that in Wisconsin, where forfeited
money goes into an education fund, only $16,906 was sent to the fund in the
year ending June 1999. In six months of the same year, $1.5 million in
seizures was sent by local law enforcement to the federal government.

Michael O'Hear, professor of law at Marquette University Law School and an
expert on forfeiture issues, says this equitable sharing or adoption
process is how the federal government gooses local law enforcement to crack
down on drug trafficking.

"When equitable sharing got set up in the mid-1980s," O'Hear says, "there
was this huge burst of activity by local police doing drug enforcement.
Whether it's unsavory or not, it does seem to be true that local police
departments have been very influenced by the existence of financial
incentives to do drug enforcement."

In fiscal year 2002, the Justice Department returned $188 million to state
and local police agencies. All this money drives local law enforcement to
find any way to get a piece, even if it means bypassing state due-process
rules. Some states require a conviction before assets can be forfeited, and
other states don't allow police to seize a primary residence, but none of
those rules exist under federal forfeiture, so local law enforcement simply
sends the seizure cases there.

This unscrupulous pact has been going on for years, but few politicians,
state or federal, have been willing to challenge it. Police and prosecutors
have a grip so tight on this money that no one and nothing -- not even the
law -- can seem to pry it loose.