The Heritage Foundation has published a booklet on civil asset forfeiture—the practice by which law enforcement can seize cash and valuables from innocent citizens and keep it to pad their budgets. It features a number of horrific tales of citizens unjustly targeted, nine of which have been highlighted by the Daily Signal.
According to civil forfeiture law, police need only “suspect” that your property was somehow involved in illicit activity. Without charging you with a crime, they can seize, and often keep, anything from cash to cars and computers. The property is treated guilty until proven innocent.
Even the tiniest infraction can set police upon your property. In Michigan, Heritage recounts, Detroit’s Contemporary Art Museum threw a “Funk Night” party for 130 people—only to find armored police, guns blazing, knocking at their door and forcing party-goers onto the ground.They proceeded to seize 40 cars from attendees.
The reason for this urgent raid? The Art Institute forgot to get a permit to serve alcohol. Police claimed all those vehicles had to be seized, because they might be implicit in this heinous crime against humanity.
They charged all 40 owners $900 each to get their cars back.
Other seizures occur when police claim that someone carrying a large sum of cash must have obtained it through illegitimate means—even when there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation and no evidence of wrongdoing.
In one particularly outrageous incident, a Wisconsin mother, Beverly Greer, was trying to scrape together the funds for her son’s $7,500 bail. She was required to pay in cash, so she made several trips to the ATM, drawing from her savings and disability pay.
But once she arrived at the jail, police set a drug dog on her and seized the cash. She showed them her ATM receipts, but they ignored her and called her sum “drug money.”
Only after Greer’s lawyer demanded the money back did police relent and return the cash.
The IRS is another frequent offender in civil seizure cases. They often take money from small businesses by accusing them of “structuring” violations—depositing just under $10,000 in order to avoid federally mandated disclosures. Except many small businesses make these “suspicious” deposits for perfectly innocent reasons, like concerns about keeping too much cash on hand.
The report features several of these IRS seizures. In one case in Georgia, the IRS took almost $1 million from an Iraq War veteran running a gun shop. They gave him no warning, and later refused to return the money. After a lengthy court battle, the agency ended up keeping $50,000.
The report, and the Daily Signal’s summary, are worth reading in full.
