When cops become robbers
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently issued new guidelines to prevent local and state police from using federal law to seize private property without a warrant or proof of a crime. But it’s a little early to be celebrating the end of civil forfeiture abuse.
Most U.S. states have their own civil forfeiture statutes, as do seven Canadian provinces, which means that in most of North America, police are still free to take people’s property — their homes, their cars, their cash — without even charging them with a crime, let alone proving one beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
It is difficult to think of a better example of how little will change thanks to the DOJ’s guidelines than a Virginia bust and seizure reported on recently by The Washington Post.
A high-stakes game of poker was taking place in the basement of a private home in a well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C., when a SWAT team dressed in black and armed with assault rifles charged in and seized tens of thousands of dollars from the shocked players. Illegal gambling, you see. The players, who were unarmed and understandably alarmed by the sudden appearance of officers pointing semi-automatic weapons at their faces and yelling at them not to move, co-operated fully.
While several of the players were charged, they eventually agreed to the deal that prosecutors offered them. It involved the expunging of the illegal gambling charges, so long as the players kept a clean record for six months.
The only small catch was that police would keep 40% of the cash they seized, though they would not comment on how the money would be spent. If the situation in Virginia is anything like the one in Ontario, chances are that the cash will be put back into the police department, in the form of nifty new departmental equipment and toys, such as ATVs, GPS tracking devices and surveillance cameras.
Ontario has also chosen to use some of the money it has acquired through civil forfeiture on what it described in a response to a freedom of information request as, “binoculars used to mon- itor & identify vandals in action.” For some reason, this amuses me as much as it depresses me.
The problem, of course, is not with ATVs or cameras or binoculars in and of themselves, but with the dangerous incentives that are created when the same people who are charged with seizing private property — the police — stand to benefit from the value of whatever they acquire.
We have so far not seen quite as brazen and unrelenting civil forfeiture abuses in Canada as have been typical in the United States. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that things are getting worse here, even as Americans are very slowly starting to demand that civil forfeiture powers be reined in. In Ontario, an Orillia couple named the Reillys stand to lose the two boarding houses they own even though they are not charged with any crime.
In fact, they haven’t even had their trial yet, but the judge has already ordered that their properties be sold. It’s almost as though the Reillys are being punished for their good deeds: They tried to provide housing for the disadvantaged and often drove their tenants, many of whom suffered from addictions, to detox centres or self-help meetings. Now Ontario says that because some tenants apparently used and/or sold illegal drugs in the building, the rent the Reillys received was “proceeds of crime.” Ergo, the property must be handed over to the attorney general to be sold for cash.
There is hope when the anger at the injustices caused by civil forfeiture is so widespread that the U.S. DOJ feels it must act. But there is still a long way to go when harmless poker players and tender-hearted landlords are targeted not for what they’ve done, but for what they have.
It creates dangerous incentives when the people charged with seizing private property (the police) stand to benefit from the value of whatever they acquire