The scare tactics of the law enforcement lobby just won the day.
After the Drug Policy Alliance spearheaded a huge civil asset forfeiture reform victory in New Mexico earlier this year, we set our eyes on California.
Civil asset forfeiture is the barbaric practice of seizing cars, cash, and other property from people without even charging them with a crime. And it’s almost always done in the name of fighting the drug war and used against those unable to afford a lawyer to fight back.
With the help of the ACLU and the Institute for Justice, we passed nearly unanimous reform in the California State Senate — requiring a conviction before property can be seized.
But after seeing our success in New Mexico, the law enforcement lobby went all-in to defeat our bill in the California State Assembly. They swarmed the Capitol and called legislators’ personal cell phones with fear mongering scare tactics.
It worked. They successfully defeated reform by a vote of 24-41.
Whether it’s marijuana reform, civil asset forfeiture reform, or other criminal justice reforms — victory doesn’t happen overnight. Though pressure is building across the country to scale back some of the worst aspects of the drug war, the powerful lobbies working against us are well funded and committed to maintaining the status quo.
We need your support to fight back.
If we are going to scale back and eventually end the drug war, we need you standing with us. It’s time to double down on our work in Washington. We have to stop the perverse federal programs that incentive policing-for-profit and pass civil asset forfeiture reform at the federal level.
I believe we can. A vast majority of Americans are on our side, and pressure is mounting for reform.
But we just saw firsthand how well financed our opposition is. We can’t beat them dollar for dollar and we don’t need to. But we do need the resources to counter their scare tactics.
You can help us. Fund our efforts for reform with a generous donation today.
It’s the wisdom and commitment of advocates like you that will help us end civil asset forfeiture and the drug war.
Sincerely,
Bill Piper
Director of National Affairs
Drug Policy Alliance
Filed under: General Problems
Law Enforcement Officers learn in the academy to use prevarication and outright, bald face lies in order to extract information and confessions out of suspects and those being interrogated. Apparently, those that have graduated and worked their way up the ladder in the various agencies where they are employed have learned to use these techniques in other arenas in order to influence other outcomes in their favor. I understand that fear is a powerful motivator and fear of the unknown a powerful psychological tool. It is that tool that is often used by agents of the State to exploit the people and convince them to surrender their individual liberties in return for the promise of greater security.
This issue has nothing to do with better serving the public and protecting them. The Enforcement Bureaucracies have a huge conflict of interest in this area of the public policy arena. As it stands, these agencies are, under the color of authority, stealing millions, if not billions (it depends on the stats that one believes to be true) of dollars from the very people that they are sworn to protect. There is virtually no practical recourse for the individual who is stopped, detained and robbed of their property, if they seek to have their property restored. The SCOTUS determined a few years back that the person does not have to be suspected of a crime in order to have to forfeit their own hard currency. The High Court determined that the currency itself only has to be suspected of being used in some sort of criminal enterprise in order for it to be seized and forfeited. What kind of reasoning is that? There is no common logic, ethics or morals involved in such reasoning. This is the kind of twisted pseudo-intellectual mentality that organized criminal organizations utilize when going up against their competition.
Basically any member of the State’s punitive priesthood can stop you, detain you and strip you of anything of tangible value in your possession simply by invoking the proper “statutory incantation”. No legitimate warrant, arrest, indictment, conviction or sentence is required. It is tantamount to being randomly chosen to pay an additional supplementary tax (because at the end of the day, even ordinary taxes are extracted at the end of a gun, if the process is taken to it’s end conclusion where the payer refuses to submit to the payee). At what point do we, as a people, say “No!” and withdraw our consent to being ruled by a government that behaves more like a criminal gang with each passing day? It will be the day when we stop living in fear of the unknown and realize the the status quo is worse than the fear that is knowable. I reckon that day is much closer than most realize.