Could this mean the end of the Fairfax County Police Navy, Air Force and Drone Program?
In August of 2012 Kevin Palizzi, a decorated fifteen-year
veteran of the Fairfax County Police Department who had written 1,049 traffic
summonses in one year pulled over a man named Mandrel Stuart on Interstate 66, allegedly
because the windows of his SUV were too dark. For some reason Palizzi didn’t
have the device to check whether the tinting of the windows exceeded the legal
limit so he cited Stuart for having a video running within his line of sight.
In the meantime another cop arrived with a drug-detecting
dog. The cops said that the dog was alerted to the left front bumper and wheel
of Stuart’s car, searched the vehicle and found $17,550 in cash. Deciding that
the money was related to the illegal drug trade, they kept it under a bizarre
federal forfeiture law.
Stuart was legally entitled to carry the cash which he
intended to use to buy equipment and supplies for his barbecue restaurant in
Staunton, Virginia. He sued and not only got the money back but forced the
Fairfax County government pay his legal bills, which totaled nearly $12,000.
The police department, Palizzi and the other cop paid
nothing.
In 2001,Palizzi had been involved with two others cases,
both in Chantilly where he was accused of psychical abuse and planting
evidence.. In one of those cases the victim said Palizzi stopped the couple
after claiming he had smelled marijuana from their car as it drove by and
stopped near his home on Pan Am Avenue in Chantilly. The FBI investigated.
Holder limits seized-asset sharing
that split billions with local, state policeMandrel Stuart talks about his
experience being stopped by Fairfax police last year and having $17,550
confiscated under a civil forfeiture law.
Attorney General Eric Holder on
Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars
and other property without proving that a crime occurred.Holder’s action
represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal
property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on
drugs.Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more
than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset
forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.The
program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them
“adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. It allowed police
departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of
the adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.“With this new
policy, effective immediately, the Justice Department is taking an important
step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except
for public safety reasons,” Holder said in a statement.Holder’s decision allows
some limited exceptions, including illegal firearms, ammunition, explosives and
property associated with child pornography, a small fraction of the total. This
would eliminate virtually all cash and vehicle seizures made by local and state
police from the program.While police can continue to make seizures under their
own state laws, the federal program was easy to use and required most of the
proceeds from the seizures to go to local and state police departments. Many
states require seized proceeds to go into the general fund.A Justice official,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the attorney
general’s motivation, said Holder “also believes that the new policy will
eliminate any possibility that the adoption process might unintentionally
incentivize unnecessary stops and seizures.”Holder’s decision follows a
Washington Post investigation published in September that found that police
have made cash seizures worth almost $2.5 billion from motorists and others
without search warrants or indictments since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001.The Post found that local and state police routinely pulled over drivers
for minor traffic infractions, pressed them to agree to warrantless searches
and seized large amounts of cash without evidence of wrongdoing. The law allows
such seizures and forces the owners to prove their property was legally
acquired in order to get it back.Police spent the seizure proceeds with little
oversight, in some cases buying luxury cars, high-powered weapons and
military-grade gear such as armored cars, according to an analysis of Justice
Department data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.News of
Holder’s decision stunned advocates who have for a long time unsuccessfully
sought to reverse civil asset forfeiture laws, arguing that they undermine core
American values, such as property rights and due process.“It’s high time we put
an end to this damaging practice,” said David Harris, a constitutional law
scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. “It has been a civil-liberties debacle
and a stain on American criminal justice.”Holder’s action comes as members of
both parties in Congress are working together to craft legislation to overhaul
civil asset forfeiture. Last Friday, Sens. Charles Grassley, Republican of
Iowa, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, along with Reps. James Sensenbrenner
Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, and John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, signed a
letter calling on Holder to end Equitable Sharing.Grassley praised Holder’s
decision on Friday.“We’re going to have a fairer justice system because of it,”
Grassley said. “The rule of law ought to protect innocent people, and civil
asset forfeiture hurt a lot of people.”He said he planned to continue pressing
for legislative reforms.“I commend the department for this step and look
forward to working with them on comprehensive forfeiture reform that protects
Americans’ property rights,” Sensenbrenner said. “Equitable sharing has become
a tool too often used to bypass state law. Forfeitures should be targeted and
must have appropriate procedural protections. “The new policy could become one
of the more notable pieces of Holder’s legacy. Holder has already announced he
is leaving the department, and it is clear that he is takings steps to burnish
his place in history. In a speech on Thursday, he pushed for better tracking of
police use-of-force incidents.But Friday’s action is sure to engender its share
of controversy.The policy will touch policing and local budgets in every state.
Since 2001, about 7,600 of the nation’s 18,000 police departments and task forces
have participated in Equitable Sharing. For hundreds of police departments and
sheriff’s offices, the seizure proceeds accounted for 20 percent or more of
their annual budgets in recent years.The action comes at a time when police are
already angry about remarks that Holder and President Barack Obama made after
the controversial police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri,
and New York City. Some have accused them of being “anti-cop.”“It seems like a
continual barrage against police,” said John Thompson, interim executive
director of the National Sheriffs’ Association. “I’m not saying there’s no
wrongdoing, but there is wrongdoing in everything.”Critics of the decision say
that depriving departments of the proceeds from civil asset forfeitures will
hurt legitimate efforts to fight crime, drug smuggling and terrorism.Bill
Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police
Organizations, said, “There is some grave concern about the possible loss of
significant funding while local police and state police are being asked to do
more and more each year.”Over the past decade, thousands of people have had to
fight the government to get their cash and property back, often hiring lawyers
and spending more than a year in the process. Many of them were people of color
and immigrants swept up in police dragnets on the nation’s highways aimed at
stopping drug dealers, money launderers and terrorists.That includes people
such as Mandrel Stuart, who was stopped in 2012 by Fairfax County, Virginia,
police, detained without charges, handcuffed and stripped of $17,550 in cash
that was to be used for equipment and supplies for his barbecue restaurant in
Staunton, Virginia. He eventually hired a lawyer, and a jury gave him his money
back in 2013. But he lost his restaurant while fighting the government, because
he had no working capital.“A lot of people won’t be harassed the way they are
harassing them now,” Stuart said on Friday after he heard about Holder’s
action. “It’s some justice at last on our side.”Civil asset forfeiture is one
of the most powerful — and unusual — law enforcement tools. Police do not need
evidence of a crime to use it, because it is a civil action against an object,
such as currency or a car, rather than a person.As a consequence, protections
common in criminal law do not apply. In fact, owners who want to recover their
cash or property must show it is theirs and demonstrate it is not tied to
crime.Forfeiture has its basis in British admiralty law, but it became a part
of the fight against drugs in the United States beginning in 1970, when
Congress allowed police to seize aircraft, boats and other property used to
transport narcotics or bought by drug lords with ill-gotten gains.In the 1980s,
the law was expanded to include cash. About the same time, the Justice
Department created its Asset Forfeiture Program and began allowing federal
agencies to adopt seizures made by state and local authorities. Those changes
led to a massive increase in money deposited into the federal forfeitures fund
as seizures by local and state police surged. Allegations of police abuses also
increased.Searing reports by the Orlando Sentinel and other newspapers about
abuses spurred Congress to pass the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act in 2000.
But a key change — ending the sharing of seizure proceeds between local police
and federal agencies — was cut from the bill after fierce opposition from
police and prosecutors. Some lawmakers called the sharing of money a “perverse
incentive” for overly aggressive police tactics.After 9/11, the use of the
asset forfeiture law and the Equitable Sharing program rose to new heights as
federal authorities called on local, county and state police to help keep watch
on the nation’s highways, not only for drug smugglers but also for
terrorists.The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security paid private firms
millions to train local and state officers in the techniques of an aggressive
brand of policing known as “highway interdiction.” That training, developed by
the firms, included methods for ferreting out suspicious drivers and coaxing
them into granting warrantless searches of vehicles, according to internal
company training documents obtained by The Post. The documents emphasized the
importance of targeting cash.Departments that had once focused on seizing drugs
changed their focus to money in recent years, some officers said. “Over a
period of a single decade, the culture was now totally changed,” said Shawn
Pardazi, a Mississippi police detective who teaches highway interdiction.The
federal government also encouraged police to collect and share intelligence
about drivers, even those who had done nothing wrong. The training firm Desert
Snow started a private intelligence system called Black Asphalt that enabled
police to share tips about drivers across state lines and funnel raw reports
about drivers to federal authorities, including those at the Drug Enforcement
Administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Civil asset
forfeiture has become one of the few public policy and social issues that
united activists and lawmakers across the political spectrum, some of whom
dubbed the system “policing for profit.”After The Post series, John Yoder and
Brad Cates, two directors of the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture office
under President Ronald Reagan, said the program should end. In an opinion
piece, they said the program began with good intentions to fight the “profit
motive” that fueled drug cartels and other criminals. “Over time, however, the
tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among
government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.”The
Institute for Justice and other libertarian-leaning groups teamed up with the
American Civil Liberties Union and left-leaning groups to press for changes in
the wake of the Post investigation.“This is a profoundly important and
path-breaking change in the ability of the government to take property of
Americans,” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice,
which produced a study about civil asset forfeiture five years ago called
“Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture.”In recent months,
Grassley, the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Patrick
Leahy of Vermont, the panel’s ranking Democrat, joined the effort, along with
Sensenbrenner and others.“I am deeply troubled by the well-documented reports
of innocent Americans swept up through the misuse of civil asset forfeiture
laws,” Leahy said in a statement to The Post. “This program was designed to be
a crime-fighting tool, not just a fundraising tool. I look forward to working
with Senator Grassley to impose some much-needed oversight and accountability
into this area.”Holder said seizure adoptions will continue to be employed by
local and federal authorities, but only in limited circumstances when public
safety is at risk and where local and federal authorities are collaborating in
cases clearly involving criminal activity.The public safety exceptions include
seizures of weapons and other dangerous items, and property related to child
pornography, which have accounted for only a tenth of a percent of the total
seizures since 2008, a Post analysis found.Joint federal and local
investigations accounted for just 9 percent of all seizures but 43 percent of
the value of all seizures. Local and state seizures without federal
participation amounted to 57 percent of the dollar value of the seized items
under Equitable Sharing since 2008 — $3 billion out of $5.3 billion, according
to Post research.In announcing the new Justice Department policy on Friday,
Holder said there is also less need for federal seizure adoptions. In the
1980s, when the policies took effect, few states gave police the authority to
make civil seizures and forfeit the assets of criminals in the way that federal
law allowed.“Today, however, every state has either criminal or civil
forfeiture laws, making the federal adoption process less necessary,” Holder’s
statement said. “Indeed, adoptions currently constitute a very small slice of
the federal asset forfeiture program. Over the last six years, adoptions
accounted for roughly three percent of the value of forfeitures in the
Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program.”Some police departments have
shown an apparent preference for federal law over state laws. Equitable Sharing
required the seizure proceeds to go back to the departments, while state asset
forfeiture programs can mandate that the money go into the state’s general
fund.The federal agencies that have historically adopted the seizures, such as
the DEA and ICE, stand to lose a considerable amount from the change in policy.
Federal agencies have taken in $800 million from the program in cash alone
without warrants or arrests since 2001.The Treasury Department is also changing
its asset forfeiture program to follow the same guideline included in Holder’s
order, the statement said.Federal agencies make larger seizures of cash and
property through avenues other than Equitable Sharing, typically in cases
involving defendants ranging from drug cartel kingpins to Bernard Madoff, whose
fraud case has resulted in more than $9 billion in forfeitures in recent
years.Those programs are not affected by the changes to Equitable Sharing, but
Holder also said the new policy is the first step in a “comprehensive review”
of civil forfeiture in general.Justice Department officials noted that civil
asset forfeiture has hurt criminals and their organizations. It also has
enabled the government to refund money to crime victims — about $4 billion over
the past 15 years.“Asset forfeiture remains a critical law enforcement tool
when used appropriately — providing unique means to go after criminal and even
terrorist organizations,” Holder said. “This new policy will ensure that these
authorities can continue to be used to take the profit out of crime and return
assets to victims, while safeguarding civil liberties.” –
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