Michigan Cops Destroying Drug Cartels With Microscopic Drug Busts, Seizures Of 20-Year-Old Vehicles
from the defeating-a-giant-means-chipping-away-at-random,-possibly-unrelated-toes dept
Crushing drug dealers and criminal cartels: that's the asset forfeiture narrative. The reality is something completely different. It's the government taking property from people with a minimum of due process, urged on by a set of perverse incentives. Law enforcement agencies directly profit from the stuff they take from people, so there's really no reason not to.
When the general public hears forfeiture is being used to target criminal cartels, they tend to think of piles of cash, luxury vehicles, sprawling mansions, and the occasional aircraft. In reality, it's whatever cash cops can find laying around (usually less than $1,000) and vehicles a couple of decades old that are someone's barely-reliable ride.
Whatever statistics can be obtained -- and it isn't much, given the secrecy cloaking these state-ordained seizures -- always tell the same story: 99% of civil asset forfeiture is penny ante bullshit. It's this way for several reasons. First, smaller forfeitures aren't worth fighting in court, so small ball seizures are almost guaranteed to end up in the hands of law enforcement. Second, it all adds up over the year. A bunch of small seizures turns into real money eventually. Third, cops aren't willing to let drug lords walk. But they'll take stuff from anyone they can imagine might be part of a cartel, even when it's someone busted carrying nothing more than a personal stash.
And that's if they even find contraband at all. The absence of criminal evidence seldom deters seizures, and forfeitures have been expanded to cover vehicles driven by impaired or uninsured drivers.
Wayne County, Michigan is no exception to this particularly depressing set of rules. As the Michigan Capitol Confidential reports, local law enforcement has seized millions of dollars worth of property, but a closer examination of the data shows its forfeiture programs prey on the poor and/or drug users who have nothing to do with the supply side of the Drug War.
Altogether, there were 736 asset forfeiture proceedings in Michigan in 2017 during which someone lost property to the government despite never being charged with any crime; this happened 380 times in Wayne County. A state law passed in 2015 requires law enforcement agencies across Michigan to submit data about forfeiture to the Michigan State Police.
Jarrett Skorup of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who co-authored a recent report on civil forfeiture, said the data shows nearly all of those Wayne County seizures involved vehicles valued at less than $1,000. He said it’s likely that these forfeitures disproportionately affected low-income individuals, who are less able to afford an attorney or navigate the legal system to reclaim their property.
The report [PDF] doesn't break down the total value of vehicles seized, but the numbers bear out Skorup's claim. The state as a whole reported $13 million in net total proceeds from all property forfeited. $11 million of that was cash. There were 7,999 vehicles seized statewide. Simple division says that's only $250 per vehicle. State agencies also seized other property that wasn't vehicles or cash, further lowering the per vehicle estimate.
Now, there are a few unknown factors that may bring that number back up slightly. It's unclear whether this reflects proceeds after auctions, etc. that would result in a lower net total for the state due to differences in expected property value and its actual value after "disposal." This may raise the per vehicle value, but there's still a long way to go from the $250 baseline and a dollar amount that would suggest something other than what appears to be happening here: thousands of seizures of vehicles worth less than the legal costs that would be accrued fighting the forfeiture.
There's more disturbing data in the report beyond the apparent wholesale forfeiture of cars whose value barely exceeds the going rate for scrap. A vast majority of those targeted by forfeiture -- with or without accompanying criminal charges -- were caught with the lowest amounts needed to trigger criminal charges. 88% of cocaine-related seizures involved the less than 50 grams. 83% of marijuana-related seizures also involved the lowest amounts needed to charge someone. And so on down the chart of criminal charges.
The lowest-level busts make up the vast majority of all seizures. It makes sense that officers would encounter users far more often than dealers. What doesn't add up is the narrative: that forfeitures are essential to destroying drug cartels. All it's really doing is depriving people of property and disproportionately punishing the demand side of the drug problem.
Serious crimes barely register. There are thousands of drug-related forfeitures -- with more than 80% of those covering bare minimum possession. The list of serious crimes -- ranging from grand larceny to child molestation to home invasion -- makes up only 95 of the state's ~6,000 seizures. The only other big chunk (984 forfeitures) is related to prostitution charges, showing the state is willing to take away vehicles for engaging in consensual sexual transactions.
This abuse of a law enforcement tool has gotten the county sued. Multiple citizens are seeking to have the program found unconstitutional. Two of the plaintiffs listed in this story by the Detroit News have waited years for a hearing on seized vehicles, one of which is a 1998 Toyota Avalon, to give you some idea what kind of prime drug-dealing vehicles the county targets.
The small bright spot in all this is there's a bill seeking to institute a conviction requirement for forfeitures. If state agencies have to be able to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, they'll be far less likely to engage in specious seizures based on little more than the agency's desire to have more money/stuff. Unfortunately, the bill appears to be waiting for its Senate counterpart to arrive and it's been waiting almost six months at this point.
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Filed Under: asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, drug busts, michigan, theft
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You say that as if the poor and disadvantaged can just up and move in the blink of an eye without any issue at all.
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For comparison, the US index is 4.68, Honduras 8.32 (highest in the world).
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Perception
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A. Law enforcement B. Politics C. Violating privacy D. All of the above
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E. Health Care
F. Prisons
G. Education
H. Military
I. Charity
J. Religion
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Systems will move to increase their metrics of success. To make a system move in the direction you want, make a metric for it (and tie consequences, both good and bad, to it). If you use a proxy metric, then the system will move to increase the proxy by what ever means is easiest, even if that is not what you wish to increase.
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victory is near
Just one more century and 10 million more cops -- then the Drug War will be complete glorious victory.
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because no one cares & no one will listen to them.
If they were taking away Buffy or Biffs new mustang that mommy & daddy got them because they had a joint, there would be outrage.
This way it is just a tax on poor bad people, they had to have been bad the cops pulled them over. We can feel that it is the poor peoples fault because if they had just behaved they never would have been stopped, because the cops are never mean to nice upstanding people.
Notice how there isn't any public outcry anymore over what they were doing in Ferguson putting poor people on a debt hamster wheel where they could never catch up?
The budget filled out by the people least able to afford it & who no longer look to the police to protect them because they know they are just a cash cow to them, not a citizen worth protecting.
This country is really fscked up...
We can watch body cam video of a cop executing someone & still not convict them, but we assume the people robbed of their cars for being 'drug dealers' were very bad people who had millions from their dealing.
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This is trickle-up forfeiture. By stealing the vehicles of the people least able to fight back, the cops hurt drug trafficking in multiple ways at once:
Besides, if the forfeiture were used against the advertised targets, those targets can afford an attorney to contest the seizure.
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Nothing new there, they have been doing that forever but want it to be new and exciting.
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If drugs are required to commit a forfeiture...
I mean... how likely is it that all of those people had exactly the minimum amount of drugs on them? Eh?
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Re: If drugs are required to commit a forfeiture...
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The manufactured crisis and the impossible solution
rant:
Methinks if you take an honest look at just who is behind the profit side of the illegal drug economy, all this will make perfect sense.
The extremely wealthy love to invest their cash in things that show a good fast profit return. There is no better investment field than the illegal drug economy. Drugs are dirt cheap to make/grow. A dollar spent will return hundreds, if not thousands in return.
But the laws..... well, if you're law enforcement people are included in the profit side of the illegal drug economy too, then they have no reason to stop the drug trade, and thus no reason to target either the cartels, or their financiers.
On the other hand, since drug users have their "rights" stripped by the laws, they make the perfect target for law enforcement's reverse Robin Hood actions - for legal forfeiture-based theft by the cops, which leaves the users on the street to gather more stuff for later repeat forfeitures. A renewable resource!!
Once the cops can make a buck from the illegal drug economy, they become a part of that economy and will thereafter do whatever it takes to keep the ball rolling and the cash flowing in, which means actually protecting the drug economy financiers and the cartels.
In case you have not noticed yet, its also the wealthy who create the laws of the land.
This "problem", like most of the problems now facing the American people, has been manufactured by the American Wealthy, to provide a new source of tax free, unreported income, and has proven to be the most lucrative business model since War.
The problem however, is almost impossible to fix.
The American people are worshipers of the wealthy and will do nothing to reduce the ability of the wealthy to turn a profit, simply because they too want to be among the wealthy and want to make sure all of those extra ways and means of making money remain intact in case they too should some day become a member of the 1%.
Its the American Dream.
The American public is thus incapable of dealing with this problem in a sensible fashion and will continue to allow the billionaires to drain their wealth until as always, the fascists have shipped their host's wealth to their off-shore vaults and then migrate to take up residence in the next wealthy country. Shake and repeat.
Remember, Fascism is a for-profit business model, not a form of government.
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Not everyone
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"Not everyone."
True.
But you three guys really don't count much against the horde of wannabe millionaires.
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So what type of gov do you recommend, and really what type of government couldn't be used as a for profit business model? Do you espouse a new government that strips the wealthy of all their money and assets and divides it up among themselves so that now we'll have new masters called socialists to marginalize, deprive, and find new ways to rob the public and enrich themselves and will end up harming us, enslaving us, and making us poorer than ever before? I hope not because it's this kind of thinking that leads to our loss of rights and eventual total subjugation in a police state and you are being tricked into believing this paradigm.
It's not the "American Wealthy" as you call it that is at fault. Many "wealthy" people are honest and hardworking, and they do pay a disproportionate amount of taxes and create employment, a good thing. It's the globalists, and calling them "wealthy" is truly an understatement. They are the multi multi trillionaires who own the whole pharmaceutical and medical industries, the illicit drug trade, the mega corporations, pretty much everything and most governments, especially powerful in the US and Europe. Most politicians and govs around the world are in their employ and you're right, there is no dearth of individuals wishing to join their ranks which is why they often enter politics. Their goal is to create a one world socialist government.
That's why they stir up negative emotions and blame "the wealthy" to create class warfare and constantly have us at each others' throats and not concentrating on what's really important like what they're doing in secret and against us, often right under our noses.
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So, to coin an analogy
Both are methods of nickel and diming people in ways that they don't dare (or care) to protest, but raise significant amounts of cash for the perpetrator.
And, as usual, the poorest people are the ones being screwed the hardest.
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Poor people do not need/use the internet? This is news to me.
I recall a news bit on tv that was discussing how the homeless use their cell phone to find daily necessities like food and work.
In addition, why are middle class folk not screwed by asset forfeiture? There have been many reported instances of this occurring to middle class people. Is there insurance (/s)?
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