Are police using civil asset forfeiture to generate revenue? Police dept's. keep up to 80% of forfeiture proceeds.

Civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It's a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair.

Wisconsin is one of four states (along with Illinois, Kentucky, and Oregon) that prohibits bail bondsmen. So bail must be paid either in cash, with a registered check, cashier's check or credit card. In fact, Donna Kuchler, a Wisconsin criminal defense attorney based in Waukesha, said police aren't allowed to insist on cash.

Civil asset forfeiture is based on the premise that a piece of property -- a car, a pile of cash, a house -- can be guilty of a crime. Laws vary from state to state, but generally, law enforcement officials can seize property if they can show any connection between the property and illegal activity. It is then up to the owner of the property to prove in court that he owns it or earned it legitimately. It doesn't require a property owner to actually be convicted of a crime. In fact, most people who lose property to civil asset forfeiture are never charged.

The laws were created to go after the ill-gotten gains of big-time dealers, but critics say they've since become a way for police departments to generate revenue -- often by targeting lower-level offenders. In 2010, the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian law firm, rated the forfeiture laws in all 50 states, assigning higher grades to states with fairer policies. The firm gave Wisconsin a "C." When there's less than $2,000 at stake, law enforcement agencies in the state get to keep 70 percent of what they take. If more than $2,000 is taken, departments can keep half.

But in all states, police agencies can contact the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), making the case federal, and under federal law, local police departments can keep up to 80 percent of forfeiture proceeds, with the rest going to the Department of Justice. The institute reports that between 2000 and 2008, police agencies in Wisconsin took in $50 million from this "equitable sharing" program with the federal government. According to Williams, the DEA recently filed a claim on Zamora's money in federal court, to take possession of the money through federal civil asset forfeiture laws.

But even in the odd world of asset forfeiture, the seizure of bail money because of a drug-dog alert raises other concerns. In addition to increasing skepticism over the use of drug-sniffing dogs, studies have consistently shown that most U.S. currency contains traces of cocaine. In a 1994 ruling, for example, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals cited studies showing that 75 percent of U.S. currency in Los Angeles included traces of narcotics. In 2009, researchers at the University of Massachusetts analyzed 234 bills collected from 18 cities, and found that 90 percent contained traces of cocaine. A 2008 study published in the Trends in Analytical Chemistry came to similar conclusions, as have studies by the Federal Reserve and the Argonne National Laboratory.
Zamora says he was referring to the common presence of drugs on money when he told his girlfriend, "of course the money is dirty." "I had talked to my attorney about how all money has some drugs on it," Zamora says. "So I was trying to tell her what to say if they told her a dog alerted to it. That she was supposed to say, 'Of course the money is dirty -- all money is dirty.'"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/20/asset-forfeiture-wisconsin-bail-confiscated_n_1522328.html?goback=%2Egde_1829117_member_117120395

http://www.economist.com/node/16219747?story_id=16219747

Policing For Profit: “I absolutely would not believe that this could happen in America”
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/policing-for-profit-i-absolutely-would-not-believe-that-this-could-happen-in-america_05182012


Policing For Profit by the Institute For Justice:
The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture May 2010 report.
http://www.ij.org/images/pdf_folder/other_pubs/assetforfeituretoemail.pdf

'Mortgage settlement' funds paying for prisons, not foreclosure relief.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/16