Returning to this long dormant thread on civil asset forfeiture, or as I described it,
… forfeiture is nothing more than judging a suspect to be guilty without trial …
WaPo has a disheartening statistic for me:
In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential burglaries in the United States.
Their accompanying chart is even more depressing – $2 billion is a local minima.
There’s not a lot more to add on this thread, outside of the ridiculous numbers involved. The numbers either indicate we’re in the midst of a massive crime wave, despite FBI statistics to the contrary, or those elements of government with access to civil asset forfeiture are abusing it.
One more note from the article, which covers an incident in which a man by the name of Kazazi lost $58,000 to U. S. Customs:
The first thing the Kazazis noticed was that the dollar amount listed was $770 less than the amount that Kazazi said he took with him. The family said that the cash was all in $100 bills, making it impossible for it to add up to $57,330.
[Wesley Hottot, the Kazazi family’s attorney,] said that these types of “errors” are common in forfeiture cases and that it is “always in the same direction” — government receipts coming up a few hundred or a few thousand dollars short of what defendants say they had.
Does the few criminals this helps to convict outweigh the government corruption it encourages? Better yet, these additions to the federal and state treasuries, small as they may seem, are a means to reduce taxes. In an era in which taxation is such a keyword, is it really wise to use such a morally dubious and unprincipled approach to the problem of raising funds for public purposes?
Shouldn’t we simply raise the proper taxes and be honest about paying for that which benefits us?
I do believe I’ll be writing my Senators and Representative.
