Police Become the Real Looters

After weeks of protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the country was thrown into an important dialogue about police reform. Massive protests have forced ending qualified immunity, halting military transfers to police stations, disbanding police unions, and even reconsidering police budgets to rapidly become top legislative priorities.

However, the conversation has not always remained on the topic of reform. Many bad-faith actors who would like to distract from such conversations, focused instead on looting taking place during the mass demonstrations. And although the Black Lives Matter protest leaders condemned the practice, many in the media and Congress refused to talk about anything else.

So let’s talk about looting. Through civil asset forfeiture, the police have been the biggest culprits, anyway.

The process known as civil asset forfeiture allows police officers “to lawfully seize personal property from those under suspicion of committing — or helping to commit — a crime. The threshold for this practice requires only the notion of probable cause, which is considered sufficient if there is “reasonable ground for belief of guilt.”

That is, you can have your property taken from you without ever being charged with a crime.

This process is unconstitutional, and should be abolished, along with qualified immunity, military transfers, and the rest of the reform legislation, as, while harmful to everyone’s civil liberties, disproportionately affects minority communities.

Consider a few examples of how this practice has been implemented against civilians across the United States.

Last year Missouri police officers coerced at least 39 motorists into signing $2.3 million is personal assets without convictions. In March of this year, Michigan’s attorney general charged Macomb County Prosecutor with felony embezzlement of asset forfeiture funds. January 2020 saw the DEA seize a 79-year old Pittsburg man’s life savings because it was deemed suspicious to travel with large amounts of cash. And Indiana wants to seize your $42,000 car for going 5 mph over the speeding limit.

The list goes on, but some places are particularly bad.

Between the years 2012 and 2017, Reason’s CJ Ciaramella showed the Chicago police department seized $150 million worth of personal property without conviction 23,065 times— the vast majority of those instances occurring in predominantly black neighborhoods. What’s more, in Chicago’s particular case, police were found to have taken everything from cashiers checks to Xbox controllers, and a total of nearly 6,000 vehicles—which seriously disrupts people’s daily life.

This is true looting.

Ciaramella goes on to write that the “average estimated value of a seizure was $4,553, while the median value was $1,049 about three-quarters of all seizures were cash, not property.” The state of Illinois notoriously maintains prosecutors and police that keep up to 90% of all asset forfeiture in state revenue, and if you observe all assets between 2005 and 2015, the number jumps to a net worth of $319 million.

So the police departments and federal agencies like the DEA are taking in revenue to fund their programs, and black people are being forced to provide it.

This should enrage any American who cares at all about racial injustices and property rights. Moreover, this practice deserves the seriousness not many have historically taken it.

But instead many, including our own Justice Department, defend the practice as important for crime prevention. However, civil asset forfeiture has been shown to have little to no impact on fighting crime. Instead, it provides dubious profit motives to manufacture crime, as most of the property they loot from the citizens they are supposed to serve and protect lines the department’s own pockets.

What’s more, there’s hardly any way to seek justice. About 9 in 10 cases of civil asset forfeiture never make it to court, due largely to the insurmountable costs of legal action (atop the costs individuals incurred from property seizure already).

It’s obvious that action to ban this practice — this professional looting — is needed to protect vulnerable communities and stop facilitating injustices. In our current moment, it’s more important than ever to prevent bad policing. Abolishing civil asset forfeiture takes a step in that direction.

Anthony DiMauro is a writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in the Orange County Register, Real Clear, The National Interest and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @AnthonyMDiMauro.

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