I know you're
already mad about various injustices, but when you read Sarah Stillman’s recent
New Yorker article, “Taken,” your blood will boil. It’s about
the laws and practices – developed over the last 15-20 years as part of the
"war on drugs" and the general encroachment of police-state tactics –
regarding what is called “civil forfeiture.” And it’s about a lot more than
that.
[Do you hear
the echoes in how suspicion of terrorism becomes terrorism itself? In how I don’t have to prove American citizens
Awlaki, father and son, are “terrorists” (whatever that is) before
drone-killing them, because my suspicion that they might be is good enough?
(We won’t even get into how suspicion=guilt regarding other little stuff, like,
oh, chemical weapons.) Do you see how years of putting up with pre-crime
tactics for the “war on drugs” has been training in compliance for the more
radical presumptive-guilt tactics of the “war on terror”? Constantly selling
“war”-inflected frameworks of legal exceptionalism, the state has used various
opportunistic bogeymen – “communists,” “drug dealers,” “pedophiles,” terrorists”
(Who cares about them?) – to lure citizens
into accepting a creeping radical authoritarianism. Preemptive forfeiture today, preemptive detention tomorrow too.]
The insidious
wrinkle in all this, which makes civil forfeiture not only creepily
authoritarian but also painfully, infuriatingly, predatory,
is that state and federal civil-forfeiture laws have allowed the police forces
and prosecutors who seize “suspicious” property to keep all of it, and, in many
cases, to use it any way they see fit, including personal perks and bonuses. As
Stillman points out, we’re talking everything from “Halloween costumes, Doo Dah
Parade decorations,…credit-card late fees, [and] poultry-festival supplies,” to
“a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation…. important to [the District Attorney’s]
reelection,“ to “a twenty-one-thousand-dollar drug-prevention beach party,” to “a
city marshal’s ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus” and another officer’s “total
of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.” Stillman reports: “In Hunt County, Texas, I
found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a
year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the
assistant district attorney’s entire salary.” In other words, the real practice
of civil forfeiture has become a lucrative system of “policing for profit,” a
system that has literally legalized highway robbery and turned police into
pirates.