Sunday, September 7, 2014

Post 9/11 PD Train for Innocents' Cash

Stop  and  Seize

Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes  

Written by Michael Sallah, Robert O’Harrow Jr.,Steven Rich

After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to
 become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.
Local officers, County Deputies and State Troopers were encouraged to act more
 aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The
Departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on Police training.

The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view:
 the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the Seizure of 
hundreds of Millions of dollars in Cash from Motorists and others Not 
Charged  with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people
 have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get
 their money back.
Stop and Seize: In recent years, thousands of people have had cash confiscated by police without being charged with crimes. The Post looks at the policeculture behind the seizures and the people who were forced to fight the government to get their money back.
Part 2: One training firm started a private intelligence-sharing network and helped shape law enforcement nationwide.
Part 3: Motorists caught up in the seizures talk about the experience and the legal battles that sometimes took more than a year. (Coming Tuesday)
Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms
 that teach the techniques of “highway interdiction” to departments across the country.
One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black 
Asphalt Electronic Networking & Co.; Notification System that enabled Police
 nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — Criminals 
and the Innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses 
and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.
Many of the reports have been funneled to Federal agencies and Fusion Centers as part
of the Government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite 
warnings from State and Federal authorities that the information could 
violate privacy and constitutional protections.
A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see 
who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs.

Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.
“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy
Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. 
Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction
 training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created 
Black Asphalt.
Hain’s book calls for “turning our Police Forces into 
present-day Robin Hoods.”
Cash seizures can be made under State or Federal civil law. One of the primary
ways Police departments are able to Seize money and share in the proceeds at the
Federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture 
program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the Government to take cash and property without
pressing criminal charges and then requires the Owners to prove their 
possessions were legally acquired.
The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more
 than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic Exposés and Congressional Hearings.   But unexplored until now is the role of the Federal 
Government  and the private Police Trainers in encouraging Officers
 to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11.
“Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who
 was trying  to launder large amounts of money,” said Mark Overton, the police chief
 in Bal Harbour, Fla.,  who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida.
 “It was never meant for a 
street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.”
To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice 
Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records
 from training firms and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists.

Civil forfeiture cash seizures

Under the federal Equitable Sharing Program, police have seized $2.5 billion since 2001 from people who were not charged with a crime and without a warrant being issued. Police reasoned that the money was crime-related. About $1.7 billion was sent back to law enforcement agencies for their use.
Amount seized by all agencies (in millions)
$104060100200
  •  Mass.
  •  R.I.
  •  Conn.
  •  N.J.
  •  Del.
  •  D.C.
Select a state to see local agency rebates
Money sent back to local police  for seizures made alone or with others
Note: Table does not include statewide agencies or task forces and only includes local agencies who received more than $250,000.
Source: A Washington Post analysis of Department of Justice data.
The Post found:
  • There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing 
  • Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more 
  • than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies
  •  received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.
  • Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs
  •  of legal action against the Government. But in 41 percent of cases — 4,455 — 
  • where there was a challenge, the Government agreed to return money. 
  • The Appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases, and often
  • required owners of the cash to sign Agreements ot to sue police over the seizures.
  • Hundreds of State and local Departments and Drug Task forces appear 
  • to rely on seized cash, despite a Federal ban on the money to pay salaries 
  • or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210
  •  task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their
  •  annual budgets since 2008.
  • Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network
  •  have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other
  •  police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. 
  • More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said.
  • State Law Enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of
  •  the Black Asphalt Network because of concerns that it might Not be a legal
  •  law enforcement tool.   A Federal Prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law
  •  enforcement information and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But 
  • officials at Justice and Homeland Security continued to use it.
Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on The Post’s overall
findings. But he said the department has a Compliance Review process in place for the
Equitable Sharing Program and Attorneys for Federal Agencies must Review the Seizures
 before they are “Adopted” for inclusion in the Program.
“Adoptions of State and local Seizures — when a State and local Law Enforcement agency
requests a Federal Seizing agency to adopt a State and local Seizure for Federal Forfeiture — represent an average of only 3 percent of the total forfeiture amount since 2007,” Carr said.
The Justice Department data released to The Post does not contain information about race.
Carr said the department prohibits racial profiling. But in 400 federal court cases 
examined by The Post where people who challenged seizures and received some money
 back, the Majority were Black, Hispanic or another Minority.
A 55-year-old Chinese American restaurateur from Georgia was pulled over for minor 
speeding on Interstate 10 in Alabama and detained for nearly two hours. He was 
carrying $75,000 raised from relatives to buy a Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles, La. He  got back his money 10 months later but only after spending thousands of dollars on a
 lawyer and losing out on the restaurant deal.
A 40-year-old Hispanic carpenter from New Jersey was stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia
 for having tinted windows. Police said he appeared nervous and consented to a search.
  They took $18,000 that he said was meant to buy a used car. He had to hire
 a lawyer to get back his money.
Mandrel Stuart, a 35-year-old African American owner of a small barbecue restaurant in
Staunton, Va., was stunned when police took $17,550 from him during a stop in 2012 for a
minor traffic infraction on Interstate 66 in Fairfax. He rejected a settlement with the
Government for half of his money and demanded a jury trial. He eventually got his
 money back but lost his business because he didn’t have the cash to pay his overhead.
“I paid taxes on that money. I worked for that money,” Stuart said. “Why should
I give them my money?”
Edited.... Remainder of exciting article is here:
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/?tid=trending_strip_6

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