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“You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the f*** it's gonna take you.”
This oft-cited wisdom comes from Detective Lester Freamon, a character in the classic HBO series The Wire, which tracked how an elite task force of (fictional) Baltimore cops used electronic surveillance to bring down criminal networks. But, the sentiment is ironic to a fault: if you keep following the money, it might take you right back to the police.
Asset forfeiture has long been a topic of controversy in law enforcement. Cops and prosecutors have had the power to seize property and cash from suspects before anyone has actually been convicted of a crime (usually narcotics-related). Then these law enforcement agencies have plugged a portion of that money (and money derived from auctioning of property) into their own budgets, allowing them to spend in ways that possibly would not have passed scrutiny during the formal appropriations process.Critics note that asset forfeiture creates a perverse incentive for policing priorities: the more assets cops seize, the more money they get to spend. Satirist John Oliver characterized the practice as akin to “legalized robbery by law enforcement” in a must-watch segment on his show Last Week Tonight. News organizations, including New York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Free Beacon have recently outlined abuses of the system.
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The Washington Post has released its giant cache of Equitable Sharing Agreements from thousands of local law enforcement agencies around the country. We urge you to dig in, find your local cops, identify out how they’ve spend this money, and let the world know what you find.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 24 2015, @12:58AM
Take responsibility? You mean like his AG announcing that the DOJ will no longer participate in civil forfeiture except for cases where public safety is concerned? Would you count that as this administration taking some responsibility?
Gee, it really must gnaw at your soul that W has feet of clay. For the record, I didn't single out W in my earlier response; in fact, I didn't even mention his name. I did point out that this has been going on for quite some time under administrations that spanned the political spectrum.
I have no problem with pointing out the misdeeds of this administration. For example, I do wish that Eric Holder would have gone the entire way and banned the practice outright. My problem comes when partisans like you kick the one guy who actually is trying to do something to clean up the mess. Why not applaud the effort and encourage him to do more? I also found it odd that you were suggesting some sort of conspiracy of liberal media to suppress this information when it has been known--and reported on--by left-leaning news organizations for decades. (One of the links I provided was to a story from 2010; there are other, even older, news stories I did not bother linking to.) Just because this was first brought to your attention by Fox News a couple of days ago, doesn't mean it wasn't already widely reported on before. You would know this if you had bothered to look at the datelines on the links I provide in my previous post. Hell, you could have even just googled "civil forfeiture", like I did, and seen for yourself. But you didn't do that. Instead, you decided to spin this as some sort of "lame stream media" conspiracy to suppress a scandal. Honestly, it is just plain sad when partisans like you desperately try to shoehorn a story like this into your political agenda, no matter how imperfect the fit.