Police & our government are seizing motorists assets & keeping the cash
Police nationwide use asset forfeiture to fund DHS run police departments and keep the money if the seizure results from an investigation assisted by or coordinated with "federal authorities." There are hundreds of federally subsidized drug task forces across the country, composed of local cops who are often deputized as federal agents. "As virtually every drug task force I know of has a federal liaison on call," says Eapen Thampy, executive director of Americans for Forfeiture Reform, "this means business as usual [for] local law enforcement using civil asset forfeiture through the Equitable Sharing Program to enforce the Controlled Substances Act and other federal statutes. In other words, the exception swallows the rule." Holder's order also explicitly exempts "seizures pursuant to federal seizure warrants, obtained from federal courts to take custody of assets originally seized under state law." Brenda Grantland, a California attorney who specializes in forfeiture cases, says that means "if a federal prosecutor really wants to adopt a state seizure," he can "just ask the federal judge to approve a federal seizure warrant."
Provided there is some sort of coordination, federal participation, or post-hoc judicial approval, these forfeitures are not considered adoptions. But they have a similar effect, allowing local agencies to take advantage of federal forfeiture law, which requires less evidence and lets cops keep a bigger share of the loot than many state laws do. In fact, the seizures that are not covered by Holder's new policy account for the vast majority of the money that state and local agencies get from federal forfeitures—something like 86 percent, judging from the Justice Department's numbers for fiscal years 2008 through 2013. Similarly, a 2012 report from the Government Accountability Office noted that "adoptions made up about 17 percent of all equitable sharing payments" in 2010.
Robert Morris, an attorney who blogs at Hammer of Truth, argues that such numbers, which reflect the dollar value of seizures, understate the impact of Holder's reform, since they do not tell us how many cases qualify as adoptions. If adoptions tend to be worth less than the other forfeitures in the Equitable Sharing Program, they may account for a larger percentage of cases than the dollar figures suggest. Morris says "cautious excitement" is the appropriate response to the new DOJ policy.
There was a lot of excitement after the DOJ announced its new policy but not much caution. The Washington Post, which broke the story, reported that Holder had "barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges," leaving the impression that equitable sharing had been eliminated rather than pared back. The Post, which recently has done an excellent job of highlighting forfeiture abuses, said the new policy "would eliminate virtually all cash and vehicle seizures made by local and state police from the [equitable sharing] program." The Post did note, deep in the story, that Holder said equitable sharing would continue in cases "where local and federal authorities are collaborating." But it said "most of the money and property taken under Equitable Sharing since 2008…was not seized in collaboration with federal authorities," which is the opposite of what the department's numbers indicate.
http://reason.com/archives/2015/01/26/cops-are-still-robbers