7 ms·

The Problem with Civil Asset Forfeiture (2016)

129 points by TaurenHunter 3y ago

actionfromafar 3y ago
Wouldn't much of the perverse incentive be fixed if the assets were transferred to some other organization, such as the central state or federal budget.
- handoflixue 3y ago
  How would you stop that from being re-invested back into the police force? If a state knows that they get $50 million from assets seized by the police, there's a very strong incentive for them to approve that $25 million budget increase the police force requested. The article also suggests that the law is just inherently unjust: "Objects do not commit crimes: people do." Also: "Since civil forfeiture requires less evidence and offers fewer protections than criminal forfeiture, the former is more vulnerable to abuse than the latter."
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    As for your first paragraph, the feedback loop will be much longer both in time (state budgets) and in distance - the risk of the proceeds ever directly benefitting the sheriff, officer or precinct is very low. As for the second argument, I agree, it can be used to harass people.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Punitive fines, that is, those which are meant to create a change in behavior rather than compensate for a loss, should be destroyed. If an entity is fined $10 million, collect the money and "destroy" it. The money supply decreases by $10 million and everyone is ever so slightly wealthier at the expense of the offending party. Note that this is separate from fines meant to compensate a victim for their loss and suffering. It's only for the punitive function of a fine.
    - bloak 3y ago
      I'm not sure there's much difference, in theory or in practice, between destroying money and giving it to the government! That sounds a bit anti-government but really I just meant that the money raised from fines isn't a significant part of the government's total budget so it's unlikely to have much influence on policy. Voters would pay more attention to the fines themselves than to anything that could be achieved with the money raised from them.
      - onionisafruit 3y ago
        It might not be a significant portion of “the government’s” money, but it can be a significant portion of a local government’s money. Think of speed trap towns.
        actionfromafar 3y ago
        Speed trap fines should also definitely go to the state coffers, not to any one PD. Speed traps should discourage speeding in critical places, not be "financially gerrymandered" in mis-designed intersections to optimize revenue for a starved PD. IMHO it's weird that the police even has something to do with speed traps, those should be handled by Transportation Department or some such.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Mm. On the other hand, governments get to print money if they want to, and they have reason to. This might work, but I suspect mostly it would be a complex way of doing nothing, thanks to the literal-money-printing option.
    - badcppdev 3y ago
      Just on a tangent here I'm just wondering about the accounting process and mental gymnastics required to "destroy" money in the modern world with digital transfers, etc. Can you have a process where a bank balance is decreased without transferring the money somewhere else? Do you have to buy cash and then burn it?
  - tjpnz 3y ago
    What happens when they discover the forfeited assets are timeshare condos?
  - ItsMonkk 3y ago
    Looks like a perfect opportunity for a citizen's dividend. Anything that is taken is put into a pot. After a certain time all of that is given back equal to all citizens.
    - genocidicbunny 3y ago
      Which is a terrible idea if you consider it for more but a moment. Makes it very easy to abuse a minority population, because now not only does the majority just get to abuse them, they get to profit off it too. Sure, the minority group might get back some of what was taken, but it won't even be close to equitable compensation for what was actually taken.
- phkahler 3y ago
  No. Whomever benefits from it will find a way to incentives the people who actually do it.
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  This already happens sometimes. The local PD will seize money, 'transfer' it to the the state or federal government, and then claim "Well, we can't give you the money back, we don't have it anymore. You'll have to sue the other guys instead." And of course frequently in such situations the state or the feds will say that you have no standing to sue them, since they didn't take your money, so you have to sue the PD. Enjoy being pulled over every other week by your local PD because you _dared_ to even challenge them legally. It doesn't really matter where the assets end up. The perverse incentive is that the assets can be trivially seized with no consequences at very little cost to the power structures doing the seizing. What is the incentive for a person or group to stop stealing when there is no possibility for any negative consequences to them? Morals, ethics? There are plenty of people in positions of power who would get a kick out of causing someone else pain and suffering because they're bored.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    TIs the decision of where to send the money made on a per-case basis by the local PD? If so, that sounds like just one more option to seize for profit or harass if the case is too weak. I still think if the only option is to transfer, the general incentive structure is improved. Stealing with profit motive plus harassment is worse than stealing just for harassment. I also think in general, to effect change, to campaign for a single thing, easily explained, is the most successful approach.
    - genocidicbunny 3y ago
      > I also think in general, to effect change, to campaign for a single thing, easily explained, is the most successful approach. What part of 'You can't take people's stuff without first proving it should be taken, in a court of law' is hard to comprehend? There's no need to over-complicate the argument that this is blatant state-sanctioned robbery and deprivation of property without due process.
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    The funds usually go into a slush fund that benefits the PD while not being under its direct control. Removing the financial incentive for law enforcement to abuse CAF would be an improvement. You'd need to ban any bonus to individual officers for CAF, and make sure 0 funds make their way bank to the PD (i.e. no budget increases for CAF activities). But I think it would a better idea and more effective to eliminate Civil Asset forfeiture and only allow Criminal asset forfeiture. If you think the funds are illegal, charge someone and prove it.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  That just shifts the incentive up thee governance hierarchy a little bit. The only way to remove it would be to prevent the government from both benefitting from it in any way, or controlling who else benefits from it. Something like donating the proceeds to randomly chosen 501c3s. The same perverse incentive exists for all other government issued financial penalties as well, they're just seen as less unjust.
- SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
  That upplays the financial incentives and downplays the psychological incentives. Cops seize stuff not only to have the money or shiny stuff, but also for the rare trill of punishing "bad people". In their job it is extremely rare to get the "job accomplished" endorphins, they see too many "bad people" (either real criminals or perceived as so by the cop) go free. So they create scenarios in their head about how the person is a criminal and then get the immediate endorphins for punishing the "criminal", restoring cosmic balance to their world. It is the old "do action -> get endorphins" mechanism, and if allowed cops will continue doing it even if you remove the direct monetary incentive.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  no. law of unintended consequences. the time this transfer is formalized, the powers that be will start reporting on it. And when something is reported on and makes someone promoted, you can bet it will be pursued aggresively
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
supernova87a 3y ago
Just to provide a contrary (or tempering?) opinion about the broader context -- Civil asset forfeiture seems to be loved so much on Reddit as some kind of evil boogeyman that's coming for each of us, by corrupt police forces stopping you just when you happen to carry cash around from selling your car, or things like that. It's talked about as if people were getting struck by lighting or bitten by sharks every minute in the US. But the actual cases of this tool/legal mechanism being used are incredibly rare. The paper linked doesn't even go into any stats on how often this happens. It talks about this in isolation as a legal oddity to be fixed. And, sure, it may be worthy of fixing. But in the popular understanding (admittedly, a specialized, weird-threats-in-our-country understanding) this remains a topic that, like many other things, has harsh and extreme or unfair sounding impacts on people but is actually extremely rare. But it grabs headlines among a certain class of internet news readers. You're statistically not going to face this in reality in your lifetime.
- batch12 3y ago
  I hate ragebait and fear mongering (fearbait?) too. Playing devil's advocate, how do you get enough people to care without the manipulation?
- woodruffw 3y ago
  From a quick look online: federal CAF has gone from ~$100m/year in the 1980s to ~$4B/year by the mid-2010s. It’s hard to find more recent numbers that don’t combine federal and state forfeiture, but the general trendline is positive. That alone makes it a reasonable target of public interest, especially against the backdrop of larger civil liberty changes in the US. (Besides, “it won’t happen to you” is not a good argument. It’s very unlikely that a cop is going to shoot me for looking suspicious, but I have a civic interest in other people not being victimized.)
  - aqme28 3y ago
    $4B/year is more than all the jewelry and precious metals stolen each year[1]. Should we not care about jewel thieves? [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/252440/property-stolen-and-recovered-in-the-us-by-type-and-value/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/252440/property-stolen-a...
TacticalCoder 3y ago
That's from 2016 and AFAIK the law regarding civil asset forfeiture changed a bit (for the better) since then in the US.
- yardie 3y ago
  That's only at the federal level. State and local law enforcement are free to carry on as usual.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Check your local laws. Many state and local law enforcement was relying on the federal laws because their local laws didn't allow this already (or did but in restricted from and so using the federal laws was the easy option). But many is not all and I have no idea what state you might live in.
efitz 3y ago
The problem with civil asset forfeiture is that it’s theft and it’s unconstitutional (violates due process and arguably is a “taking”).
- sackfield 3y ago
  How does it survive? Is it that there hasn't been a big enough legal challenge against it?
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Because cops get to drive around in sports cars repainted black and white. Every Corvette squad car you've ever seen out on the highway is one of those. I'd bet money that some large fraction of the world's largest television screens reside within police station break rooms, too. Police unions don't play around either. If a politician were to play hardball, some small town or another would just go without a police force at all until it cried uncle, anyone at the state level trying it would simply see insane amounts of cash dumped on their rivals' campaigns and lose, and Congress can't even muster up the ambition to pass feel-good-do-nothing resolutions on its best day, not even one of which we've had since either of us became adults.
    - whythre 3y ago
      You act like this is just city level. That would still be a relatively easy fix. But federal organizations like the FBI routinely benefit from asset forfeiture. People traveling with large amounts of cash for any reason are a common target. And if you think TVs are are something, imagine the hauls from a large scale federal bust.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        > But federal organizations like the FBI routinely benefit from asset forfeiture. Oh, but that's a little different. Worse of course, not different for the better. As states do prohibit asset forfeiture, the FBI can dangle it back in front of the locals with their "sharing" program. It's the federal government interfering with state sovereignty to undermine it. They've soft-federalized every single municipal police department and every sheriff's office in one fell swoop.
data_monkey 3y ago
The expression "this is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind. Like their FISA powers, spying on communications of journalists with surveillance powers, political abuses within the IRS, etc the government has massively abused asset forfeiture as well and we should return to a liberty centric mindset. No forfeiture without conviction by a jury. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." The government has proven they aren't angels we can trust.
- kazinator 3y ago
  We obviously can have nice things if we just join the police force. Other people's nice things.
RecycledEle 3y ago
Due p
RecycledEle 3y ago
Due process does not mean that, in theory, you could sue to get a trial, but that in practice you can not afford to.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  Procedural Due Process does, substantive due process does not.
giantg2 3y ago
The problem is stretching, and often exceeding, the protections of the system to achieve some "good". They push things into civil court since you lack protections there, such as no right to an attorney and ex parte hearing. Can't prove a crime was committed - civil asset forfeiture. Can prove conspiracy or threats - red flag laws. TX abortion law, CA proposed gun law based on TX abortion law, etc. We'll see plenty more of this.
apapapa 3y ago
Evidence laundering is probably as bad as this.

129 points by TaurenHunter 3y ago

Wouldn't much of the perverse incentive be fixed if the assets were transferred to some other organization, such as the central state or federal budget.

handoflixue 3y ago
How would you stop that from being re-invested back into the police force? If a state knows that they get $50 million from assets seized by the police, there's a very strong incentive for them to approve that $25 million budget increase the police force requested. The article also suggests that the law is just inherently unjust: "Objects do not commit crimes: people do." Also: "Since civil forfeiture requires less evidence and offers fewer protections than criminal forfeiture, the former is more vulnerable to abuse than the latter."
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  As for your first paragraph, the feedback loop will be much longer both in time (state budgets) and in distance - the risk of the proceeds ever directly benefitting the sheriff, officer or precinct is very low. As for the second argument, I agree, it can be used to harass people.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Punitive fines, that is, those which are meant to create a change in behavior rather than compensate for a loss, should be destroyed. If an entity is fined $10 million, collect the money and "destroy" it. The money supply decreases by $10 million and everyone is ever so slightly wealthier at the expense of the offending party. Note that this is separate from fines meant to compensate a victim for their loss and suffering. It's only for the punitive function of a fine.
  - bloak 3y ago
    I'm not sure there's much difference, in theory or in practice, between destroying money and giving it to the government! That sounds a bit anti-government but really I just meant that the money raised from fines isn't a significant part of the government's total budget so it's unlikely to have much influence on policy. Voters would pay more attention to the fines themselves than to anything that could be achieved with the money raised from them.
    - onionisafruit 3y ago
      It might not be a significant portion of “the government’s” money, but it can be a significant portion of a local government’s money. Think of speed trap towns.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        Speed trap fines should also definitely go to the state coffers, not to any one PD. Speed traps should discourage speeding in critical places, not be "financially gerrymandered" in mis-designed intersections to optimize revenue for a starved PD. IMHO it's weird that the police even has something to do with speed traps, those should be handled by Transportation Department or some such.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Mm. On the other hand, governments get to print money if they want to, and they have reason to. This might work, but I suspect mostly it would be a complex way of doing nothing, thanks to the literal-money-printing option.
  - badcppdev 3y ago
    Just on a tangent here I'm just wondering about the accounting process and mental gymnastics required to "destroy" money in the modern world with digital transfers, etc. Can you have a process where a bank balance is decreased without transferring the money somewhere else? Do you have to buy cash and then burn it?
- tjpnz 3y ago
  What happens when they discover the forfeited assets are timeshare condos?
- ItsMonkk 3y ago
  Looks like a perfect opportunity for a citizen's dividend. Anything that is taken is put into a pot. After a certain time all of that is given back equal to all citizens.
  - genocidicbunny 3y ago
    Which is a terrible idea if you consider it for more but a moment. Makes it very easy to abuse a minority population, because now not only does the majority just get to abuse them, they get to profit off it too. Sure, the minority group might get back some of what was taken, but it won't even be close to equitable compensation for what was actually taken.
phkahler 3y ago
No. Whomever benefits from it will find a way to incentives the people who actually do it.
genocidicbunny 3y ago
This already happens sometimes. The local PD will seize money, 'transfer' it to the the state or federal government, and then claim "Well, we can't give you the money back, we don't have it anymore. You'll have to sue the other guys instead." And of course frequently in such situations the state or the feds will say that you have no standing to sue them, since they didn't take your money, so you have to sue the PD. Enjoy being pulled over every other week by your local PD because you _dared_ to even challenge them legally. It doesn't really matter where the assets end up. The perverse incentive is that the assets can be trivially seized with no consequences at very little cost to the power structures doing the seizing. What is the incentive for a person or group to stop stealing when there is no possibility for any negative consequences to them? Morals, ethics? There are plenty of people in positions of power who would get a kick out of causing someone else pain and suffering because they're bored.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  TIs the decision of where to send the money made on a per-case basis by the local PD? If so, that sounds like just one more option to seize for profit or harass if the case is too weak. I still think if the only option is to transfer, the general incentive structure is improved. Stealing with profit motive plus harassment is worse than stealing just for harassment. I also think in general, to effect change, to campaign for a single thing, easily explained, is the most successful approach.
  - genocidicbunny 3y ago
    > I also think in general, to effect change, to campaign for a single thing, easily explained, is the most successful approach. What part of 'You can't take people's stuff without first proving it should be taken, in a court of law' is hard to comprehend? There's no need to over-complicate the argument that this is blatant state-sanctioned robbery and deprivation of property without due process.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  The funds usually go into a slush fund that benefits the PD while not being under its direct control. Removing the financial incentive for law enforcement to abuse CAF would be an improvement. You'd need to ban any bonus to individual officers for CAF, and make sure 0 funds make their way bank to the PD (i.e. no budget increases for CAF activities). But I think it would a better idea and more effective to eliminate Civil Asset forfeiture and only allow Criminal asset forfeiture. If you think the funds are illegal, charge someone and prove it.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
That just shifts the incentive up thee governance hierarchy a little bit. The only way to remove it would be to prevent the government from both benefitting from it in any way, or controlling who else benefits from it. Something like donating the proceeds to randomly chosen 501c3s. The same perverse incentive exists for all other government issued financial penalties as well, they're just seen as less unjust.
SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
That upplays the financial incentives and downplays the psychological incentives. Cops seize stuff not only to have the money or shiny stuff, but also for the rare trill of punishing "bad people". In their job it is extremely rare to get the "job accomplished" endorphins, they see too many "bad people" (either real criminals or perceived as so by the cop) go free. So they create scenarios in their head about how the person is a criminal and then get the immediate endorphins for punishing the "criminal", restoring cosmic balance to their world. It is the old "do action -> get endorphins" mechanism, and if allowed cops will continue doing it even if you remove the direct monetary incentive.
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
no. law of unintended consequences. the time this transfer is formalized, the powers that be will start reporting on it. And when something is reported on and makes someone promoted, you can bet it will be pursued aggresively

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

supernova87a 3y ago

Just to provide a contrary (or tempering?) opinion about the broader context -- Civil asset forfeiture seems to be loved so much on Reddit as some kind of evil boogeyman that's coming for each of us, by corrupt police forces stopping you just when you happen to carry cash around from selling your car, or things like that. It's talked about as if people were getting struck by lighting or bitten by sharks every minute in the US. But the actual cases of this tool/legal mechanism being used are incredibly rare. The paper linked doesn't even go into any stats on how often this happens. It talks about this in isolation as a legal oddity to be fixed. And, sure, it may be worthy of fixing. But in the popular understanding (admittedly, a specialized, weird-threats-in-our-country understanding) this remains a topic that, like many other things, has harsh and extreme or unfair sounding impacts on people but is actually extremely rare. But it grabs headlines among a certain class of internet news readers. You're statistically not going to face this in reality in your lifetime.

batch12 3y ago
I hate ragebait and fear mongering (fearbait?) too. Playing devil's advocate, how do you get enough people to care without the manipulation?
woodruffw 3y ago
From a quick look online: federal CAF has gone from ~$100m/year in the 1980s to ~$4B/year by the mid-2010s. It’s hard to find more recent numbers that don’t combine federal and state forfeiture, but the general trendline is positive. That alone makes it a reasonable target of public interest, especially against the backdrop of larger civil liberty changes in the US. (Besides, “it won’t happen to you” is not a good argument. It’s very unlikely that a cop is going to shoot me for looking suspicious, but I have a civic interest in other people not being victimized.)
- aqme28 3y ago
  $4B/year is more than all the jewelry and precious metals stolen each year[1]. Should we not care about jewel thieves? [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/252440/property-stolen-and-recovered-in-the-us-by-type-and-value/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/252440/property-stolen-a...

TacticalCoder 3y ago

That's from 2016 and AFAIK the law regarding civil asset forfeiture changed a bit (for the better) since then in the US.

yardie 3y ago
That's only at the federal level. State and local law enforcement are free to carry on as usual.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Check your local laws. Many state and local law enforcement was relying on the federal laws because their local laws didn't allow this already (or did but in restricted from and so using the federal laws was the easy option). But many is not all and I have no idea what state you might live in.

efitz 3y ago

The problem with civil asset forfeiture is that it’s theft and it’s unconstitutional (violates due process and arguably is a “taking”).

sackfield 3y ago
How does it survive? Is it that there hasn't been a big enough legal challenge against it?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Because cops get to drive around in sports cars repainted black and white. Every Corvette squad car you've ever seen out on the highway is one of those. I'd bet money that some large fraction of the world's largest television screens reside within police station break rooms, too. Police unions don't play around either. If a politician were to play hardball, some small town or another would just go without a police force at all until it cried uncle, anyone at the state level trying it would simply see insane amounts of cash dumped on their rivals' campaigns and lose, and Congress can't even muster up the ambition to pass feel-good-do-nothing resolutions on its best day, not even one of which we've had since either of us became adults.
  - whythre 3y ago
    You act like this is just city level. That would still be a relatively easy fix. But federal organizations like the FBI routinely benefit from asset forfeiture. People traveling with large amounts of cash for any reason are a common target. And if you think TVs are are something, imagine the hauls from a large scale federal bust.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      > But federal organizations like the FBI routinely benefit from asset forfeiture. Oh, but that's a little different. Worse of course, not different for the better. As states do prohibit asset forfeiture, the FBI can dangle it back in front of the locals with their "sharing" program. It's the federal government interfering with state sovereignty to undermine it. They've soft-federalized every single municipal police department and every sheriff's office in one fell swoop.

data_monkey 3y ago

The expression "this is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind. Like their FISA powers, spying on communications of journalists with surveillance powers, political abuses within the IRS, etc the government has massively abused asset forfeiture as well and we should return to a liberty centric mindset. No forfeiture without conviction by a jury. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." The government has proven they aren't angels we can trust.

kazinator 3y ago
We obviously can have nice things if we just join the police force. Other people's nice things.

RecycledEle 3y ago

Due p

RecycledEle 3y ago

Due process does not mean that, in theory, you could sue to get a trial, but that in practice you can not afford to.

patmorgan23 3y ago
Procedural Due Process does, substantive due process does not.

giantg2 3y ago

The problem is stretching, and often exceeding, the protections of the system to achieve some "good". They push things into civil court since you lack protections there, such as no right to an attorney and ex parte hearing. Can't prove a crime was committed - civil asset forfeiture. Can prove conspiracy or threats - red flag laws. TX abortion law, CA proposed gun law based on TX abortion law, etc. We'll see plenty more of this.

apapapa 3y ago

Evidence laundering is probably as bad as this.