Forfeit this!

“First the sentence, then the trial!” said the Queen…

We live in an age of cynicism.  We see a car in an action movie and assume that its appearance was paid for. We’re all media savvy, hip to the hype.

Cynicism may be the easy path to “wisdom,” but it is often justified. We know that sales people may promote some products over others for reasons internal to their business model, their stock or profit margin, not because they believe in them. We understand that those on commission follow structural imperatives, independent of their character or their product line.

We feel neither betrayed or bamboozled. Buyer be wary.

The level playing field of last resort, the least personally incentivized area, is the government, the distillation of our collective sense of equal treatment and equal justice. There’s nothing in it for the Post Office clerk when they sell you stamps or describe anticipated delivery times, just the commission of their job. They’re not on commission.

But it is a scandal when we learn that the military spent some seven million dollars inserting product placement ads for patriotism in NFL games. Patriotism is supposed to be a neutral, collective good, not a brand. And it is a scandal when we learn that African Americans buy, use and sell currently illegal drugs at about the same rate as European Americans but are 400 percent more likely to be penalized by the government. Justice is supposed to be a neutral, collective good, and the prosecutors and cops who disproportionately target those African Americans are acting on personal animus, that their bias is accidental to their job.

That bias is bad enough. But here’s where it gets even worse.

There are laws called the Forfeiture laws that are head scratchingly bizarre. Created and justified as an attack on the drug king pins, it aims to deprive them of their ill gotten goods. And it turns the presumption of innocence on its head. The mere appearance of too much cash or too fancy a car allows the state to seize same. And the citizen has to sue to prove the property is innocent. And the court cases –literally—list the US government vs. things. US vs. $2,000. US vs. 2015 Mercedes Benz. And in 80% of cases, the police departments keep the goods without a trial. The people they target may in some cases be using cash to buy and sell certain drug, but there are ample documented cases where they had just taken a lot of cash from their bank to make a large purchase with it, or were driving a fancy car while black etc..

It’s one thing for a person of color to be pulled over and given a ticket for the same behavior a white person gets away with or a warning for. The cynicism and distance between the community and the police is well established. But now add the possibility that the cops are working on commission.

It’s one thing for that traffic ticket to go to the municipality, but what if it went in large part to the very department that pays the officer’s salary?

Is there any way to not be cynical? Is there any way for the cops not to become corrupted?

Entire police departments actually budget such forfeiture grabs in their annual budgets and admit that they are in some sense dependent on them.

This is virtually the same incentive that rival gangs have to steal from one another—except here there is no real fear of retaliation. Legal recourse is a joke, especially for the small fish who are virtually the only target. Except of course on paper, where this is claimed to be aimed at 100 foot yachts and such like.

It has become documented highway robbery. And the police are doing it. In our name. In our profession’s name. In our country’s name. It has the feel of a Roman orgy.

It primarily damages the innocent or even the very small scale person running today’s illegal rum, replaceable, cogs in the multi billion dollar wheel of illegal sales, vulnerable and replaceable. And it damages rarely and to little sustained effect the bigger fish. And it totally destroys respect for the police.

We are all cynical. This is icing on the cake of our increasing cynicism.

Forget drugs for a minute. We all break one law or another virtually every time we get behind the wheel. Sometimes we get caught, and we are nearly always technically guilty even if we argue (correctly sometimes) that while we were exceeding the posted speed limit, it is an artificially low number, or the stop sign we slowed but didn’t stop for was positioned such that we had perfect vision and the track was absolutely clear and so on. But technically, we were guilty. How do you feel if you find out that they are working on a quota system of such stops? How would you feel if you find out that they or their department pocket some percentage of your fine?

This is so blatant that people have trouble literally believing that it’s been in effect for years and has brought police departments hundreds of millions of dollars (actually over 2 billion).

How is this possible. How could something so blatantly un-American, become accepted practice?

IT’S THE WAR, STUPID

During real wars, movie studios were commandeered and turned into training grounds and barracks; civilian needs are subsumed, speech is curtailed—loose lips sink ships—our freedoms are willingly curtailed. Witness how we quarantined against their will people to destroy small pox.

It takes that clear and present a danger to motivate us to suspend both our freedoms and the presumption of innocence.

The War on Drugs has been sold to us as such an emergency; a gateway opening, a flood emerging.

But after a half century of unabated crisis and epidemics it is being exposed as a pathetic replay of another hysteria-based policy, alcohol prohibition. And as states move away from using punishment to guide personal choice, the air is escaping from its tightly wound zero tolerance approach. And we are moving to do what we do after wars—rebuild and restore.

Non violent drug "offenders" are being released from jail, heroin addicts are being seen as victims, not criminals. The dysfunctional life- and community-destroying hysteria of mandatory minimums is being challenged and altered.

Forfeiture laws are a particularly painful and grotesque manifestation of this war-time mentality, and they, too, are being challenged, but they persist.

It is understandable that some police departments still crave the immediate gratification involved in such booty—that sort of gratification is not confined to those in the throes of addiction—it can seduce and entrap even those sworn to oppose addiction.

It’s time to seal it up and let historians marvel at how law enforcement got seduced and denigrated by this form of bribery and corruption.

We owe it to our nation, our lower-income communities, and to our police departments themselves, to take this rancid bone away from the dogs. To lose this corrupting incentive, this very real threat.