Last November, The New York Times carried a shocking story about seminars held around the nation in which police officials are told how to maximize the amount of property they confiscate from the public – without criminal convictions or meaningful external review – so as to boost their budgets: “Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (‘everybody’s got one already’), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.”

The sessions were explicitly not about how a police force can keep society safe but how an agency can legally seize homes, cars and other property from families and take money from people who don’t have what police consider adequate explanations for why they’re carrying lots of cash.

This is gangster government. After hearing about appalling cases in California – such as law enforcement authorities seeking to seize the home of an elderly disabled woman in the Palo Alto area after a young family member was caught selling drugs at another location – the state Senate voted 38-1 in June to approve a measure by Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, that would limit when property can be seized without a criminal conviction.

Appallingly enough, the measure was killed in the Assembly on Thursday after vociferous lobbying by police officials. It’s disgraceful that police chiefs fight for the right to stomp on due process.


We thank local Assembly members Toni Atkins, Shirley Weber and Brian Maienschein for backing the Mitchell measure. As for members Marie Waldron, Rocky Chávez and Brian Jones, who opposed the bill, they are on record as supporting policies that amount to an overt assault on democratic values and the Fourth Amendment. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez didn’t vote on the measure.

We must take the profit out of policing. It creates incentives for corrupt behavior by those we trust to fight corruption – incentives that are acted on.