I just stumbled upon someone asking how much cash he can carry on himself without a risk of a police officer taking it away. Then when I scrolled through comments it sounded like a police officer can decide to take away your money and NEVER EVER give it back!
Is that actually true??? I mean, the idea that police officer can take your money if they decide you have “too much” on you is insane already. But even if so, there is no way you can’t then go to police station or something and get it back!
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>Is that actually true???
No, generally speaking the police can’t just take your money for no reason at all. As with everything in life, mistakes get made and laws get abused. The internet has a way of concentrating extremely rare occurrences to make them appear to be commonplace when they’re not.
Civil asset forfeiture has two uses:
1) Allowing the government to seize abandoned property. So, for example, if someone abandons a car on the side of the road, the government can take possession of that car.
2) Allowing the government to seize property that was used to commit certain crimes or was purchased with money you made from committing a crime. So, for example, if you sell drugs out of your car then the government can seize your car.
There are two main criticisms with civil asset forfeiture:
1) People used to accidentally commit a money laundering related felony and would have their bank accounts seized. When you deposit certain amounts of money in a bank, the bank has to report that deposit to the government. If you deposit under that amount of money, the bank doesn’t. Routinely depositing just under the reportable amount of money is, itself, a crime called “Structuring”.
People used to accidentally violate that law all of the time because they wrongly believed that if they deposited too much money they would get in trouble, so they would always deposit just under the limit. Their bank would then report the structuring to the IRS, who would seize their bank account.
Someone would then look into things and realize that the person whose bank account was seized wasn’t a tax evader or money launderer, but the process to unseize the account was complicated and required the cooperation of the IRS.
The IRS changed the rules regarding structuring over a decade ago so that this wouldn’t happen anymore, so the modern criticism hasn’t had a basis in reality for some time. Nonetheless, it persists on the internet.
2) People can have their property seized even though they weren’t involved with the crime that was committed. The stereotypical example of this is that you loan your car to a friend. The friend then starts selling drugs out of the car and gets caught. The friend goes to jail and the car is seized despite the fact that you, the owner, were not involved in the crime.
Obviously not everyone agrees that this is an unfair situation.
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The other area that civil asset forfeiture tends to occasionally crop up in is drug mules. Not all drug mules carry drugs – some carry the cash proceeds of drug sales despite not otherwise being involved in said sales. Its not uncommon for drug mules to be caught with huge quantities of cash – tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into hidden compartments in their car.
A lot of times these cash only mules are otherwise normal people with families and respectable jobs. The government often enters into a deferred prosecution agreement with them whereby they don’t admit that the committed a crime, but agree not to challenge the forfeiture of the cash.
Sometimes a friend or family members finds out that Suzy the elementary school teacher had $50,000 taken from her by the police, but Suzy won’t talk about why. That friend/family member then goes to the media, who pick the story up. Suzy doesn’t want to say that the $50k that got pulled out of a hidden compartment in her trunk was drug money and she entered into a deferred prosecution agreement. The reporter then either doesn’t know about or doesn’t mention the real reason that the $50k got seized and the story ends up on the internet.
As with people whose property get seized because it was being used by their friend to commit a crime, a lot of people don’t feel that Suzy’s situation is particularly unjust.
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