Radley Balko posted about a woman in Wayne County who broke no laws yet had to pay $1,400 to get her car back when police seized it “after they mistook Vaughn’s co-worker for a prostitute.”
From a Detroit News article:
The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.
Obama’s Justice Department supports state asset forfeiture laws, says Balko:
It’s worth noting that Obama’s Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren’t obligated to. Though the solicitor general’s office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins–the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.
Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.
How police departs abuse asset forfeiture laws to steal money from poor people