Attorney General Eric Holder's sharp curtailment of federal civil asset forfeiture programs is a dramatic and much-needed reversal of a controversial and increasingly sketchy law enforcement practice. But that's presuming it sticks, and at the
Washington Post, Radley Balko worries about
the possible loopholes:
[T]here are some loopholes in the new policy. One grants an exception to joint task forces, in which state and/or local police officials were together with a federal agency on an investigation. The language isn’t clear, but if the exception requires active involvement of federal law enforcement personnel, it’s not quite as big a loophole. But if the exception applies to the hundreds of federally funded anti-drug task forces across the country, it’s a much bigger deal. In an interview with Reason’s Jacob Sullum, Eapen Thampy, head of the advocacy group Americans for Forfeiture Reform, fears it may be the latter.
As virtually every drug task force I know of has a federal liaison on call, this means business as usual by 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.
That's something that will be needing clarification. And regardless, of course, individual states still have their own civil forfeiture laws, although few are as lenient (read: as easily abused) as the federal program has been.
The notion that property of any sort can be "seized" and used by the government merely on suspicion of a crime, not on any proof of that crime, is one of the more curious legal inventions of the modern era. It's led to an increasing reliance on those assets as a funding tool for law enforcement, which in turn has led to many, many reports of the abuses that can and do occur when you're, say, driving around in a particularly nice car and your local law enforcement officer believes that your very nice car is probably connected to drugs for reasons, or having cash confiscated during routine traffic stops, and so on. This is something that both sides of the aisle should be eager to put a freedom-loving stop to. Not just for federal programs, but in the states as well.