The murder of five police officers in Dallas, an atrocity rooted in the boiled-over tension between urban blacks and the police officers that watch over them, has created various firestorms of protest, counter-protest, and Internet virtue signaling (the last being the easiest and most prevalent). It has also elicited numerous proposals for addressing this tension, including one of note that addressed the use of police as revenue generators.
The last, an article in Mother Jones that discusses how police are being used to fill their departments’ and municipalities’ coffers through various forms of fining citizens. While it makes a good point, i.e. that there are conflicting incentives when police are being used to generate money rather than to protect the people, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It makes no mention of asset forfeiture or the War on Drugs, both far bigger drivers of this conflict than fines for broken tail lights and failing to signal.
For those unaware, the government in many jurisdictions can simply take your stuff without convicting (or even charging you) of anything if it can gin up an argument that your stuff was used in criminal activities. This is known as asset forfeiture. Prosecutors will literally file charges against your stuff, e.g. “The City of East Bumblebee vs $4000 in Cash,” and unless you go to court to sue for the return of your stuff, they just keep it. The excuses they use can be ludicrous, including that a drug-sniffing dog gave a “positive” response to your cash (e.g. at some point in its history, your money was used to snort a line of cocaine) and that any large sum of cash in someone’s possession is itself a signal of either criminal origin or criminal intent. Since, under a federal program known as Equitable Sharing, local governments get to keep 80% of what they seize, there’s a mighty powerful incentive to seize stuff.
Is this a big problem? You betcha. In 2014, the government took $4.5 billion via forfeiture. In contrast, the sum total of wealth stolen by burglars in 2014 was $3.9 billion. To be fair, some forfeiture involves people who are actually guilty of crimes, but that should be true for ALL forfeiture. The asset forfeiture issue has grown to the point where people have started to take notice, and a couple states now require a conviction before assets can be seized, but the renewal of the Equitable Sharing program shows that the feds are still quite happy to let state and local law enforcement steal without due process whatever they can get away with. The obvious injustice of this is something that doesn’t help relations between police and communities.
Taking steps to end the cop-as-revenuer matter would be a good step. An even better one would be to end the War on Drugs.
1.5 million drug arrests took place in 2012. Most of these were for possession, and nearly half were for pot possession. 2 That’s 650,000 arrests in just one year for pot possession. Pot’s initial criminalization back in the 1930s was rooted in anti-Mexican bigotry, and its vilification through the next couple decades was rooted in anti-black bigotry. That bigotry matches with the far higher arrest rate for blacks for pot possession 9. To what end? The nation’s finally inching towards sanity on pot prohibition, and, frankly, pot smokers are not a threat to society. The structures that supply pot and other illegal drug users, on the other hand, are a major source of crime and resultant strive in the black community.
Nearly half of violent crime is gang related, and that number reaches 90% in some jurisdictions. 80% of non-suicide gun deaths are gang-related. 40% of gang crime is drug sales. Despite blacks being only 12% of the nation’s population, 35% of gangs in the country are black. Half a century of a War on Drugs has achieved no success. Drugs are readily available to anyone who wants them, with relatively little risk, and of better quality and higher potency than ever. Much of the militarization of police is [driven]13 by the drug war, and far too many no-knock SWAT drug raids have gone terribly wrong.
The War on Drugs has taken a terrible toll on the black community, and it is the root source of so much of the tension and conflict between police and blacks. End it, leave people alone to indulge their vices of choice, re-purpose police to defend against and pursue those who commit crimes against others (and, make no mistake, blacks DO look to police to fight crime). Restore the sense that police exist to protect citizens from bad actors, instead of to harass them for stuff they do that doesn’t hurt anyone.
Unfortunately, both forfeiture and the War on Drugs involve money in politicians’ pockets. Forfeiture is “free money” to both the feds and the locals who have Fed backing in collecting whatever they can. The drug war industry (private prisons, corrections unions, police forces, Big Pharma, the liquor companies) has a vested interest in seeing it continue. People’s perceptions of forfeiture and the drug war are also persistent, no matter that the evidence speaks otherwise. It’s why few are talking about these changes as the real remedy to the tensions that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement and others. These are hard changes to make. But, they’re what we need to do if we’re serious about making things better.
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