EARLIER this year Sarah Stillman wrote a first-rate piece in the New Yorker on the abuses of civil asset forfeiture—a practice wherein police seize and keep the property of people who have not been convicted of a crime. The piece opens with the story of Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson, who had their cash taken by authorities in the small town of Tenaha because they "fit the profile of drug couriers", even though no drugs were found in their car nor were they charged with any crime. Despite this, Ms Stillman writes, "The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime."

Those two sentences are true only to the extent that the two key qualifiers in them are true. The first is "obtained through illicit means". That strongly implies not civil, but criminal asset forfeiture, referring to the seizure of property proven in a court of law to have been obtained through illicit means, not to the seizure of whatever property police can concoct a semi-plausible excuse to grab. The standards for civil asset forfeiture are far lower, as Ms Stillman andothershaveinfuriatinglydetailed. Police do not have to successfully prosecute someone, or even charge them with a crime, to seize their assets. The second is "funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime." Using a convicted trafficker's Escalade for stakeouts has a certain poetic justice.

Using forfeiture funds as the district attorney's (DA) office in Fulton County, which covers most of Atlanta, is alleged to have done, does not. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the sordid details: $5,600 on a Christmas party; $1,100 for flowers; $3,200 for "sirloin beef tip roast, roasted turkey breast and mini crab cakes with champagne sauce"; $8,200 on a security system for the home of Paul Howard, Fulton's DA; $4,800 for a holiday awards gala held at a "historic Midtown mansion". Mr Howard insists that he has done nothing wrong and that he has wide discretion in how he spends. But these are funds seized by federal investigators, who gave the Fulton DA's office a cut. They are subject to federal guidelines, which say, among other things, that seized funds are to be used "for law enforcement purposes only", and that agencies receiving funds should spend them "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of extravagance, waste or impropriety." They also state that seized funds are supposed to enhance an agency's ability to do its work, not replace local funds. But emails seem to show that the Fulton County DA's office did just that: when they were running low on money in February,they implored the feds to give them their cut of funds sooner. That hints at the first of two philosophical problems with asset forfeiture: the financial incentive it creates. Radley Balko's book is especially good on this. In the eighth chapter, Mr Balko discusses the head of a Missouri police force's sex-crimes unit that was always starved for cash, while, as she explains, "The SWAT team, the drug guys, they always had money... There was always funding through asset forfeiture." When police profit (literally profit, by having more money, not figuratively profit by making American streets safer) by chasing drug dealers and drug users, they will do so, even at the expense of chasing more dangerous criminals who may have less stuff to take. That is a perverse and harmful way to allocate law-enforcement resources. The second is who the seized funds come from. As the Institute for Justice notes, in 2011 the median value of seized property in Georgia was $647. We're not talking about seizing yachts and Ferraris from drug kingpins; this is decidedly more downmarket. This sounds as though federal investigators are taking poor people's money and stuff so that friends of the Fulton County DA's office can eat crab cakes in champagne sauce and enjoy a fancy Christmas party.

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