California One Step Away From Ending ‘Policing For Profit’

Throughout most of the United States, a police officer may seize and keep cash and property from citizens — without any due process. This practice, known as policing for profit, is about to become outlawed in California.

According to the ACLU, California Gov. Jerry Brown is set to sign SB 443. The bill will establish some of the strongest personal property protections in the country.

“There are some innocent people whose assets have been forfeited, and there are some of us who feel that’s unacceptable,” said Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Policing for Profit, or civil asset forfeiture, grew in prominence during the 1980s, at the height of the war on drugs, as a method for law enforcement to tackle drug traffickers.

But as the practice began to spread and affect innocent civilians, public opinion began to turn.

“When you get outside of [the Capitol] you get a general consensus that something like this in its broad form should not be happening in the United States,” California Assemblyman David Hadley, a Republican, said.

But law enforcement still strongly opposes the end of civil asset forfeiture.

“At its core, SB 443 sends basically a message to drug dealers that the cost of doing business has gone down,” Gregory Totten, District Attorney of Ventura County, said.

“In many, many narcotics trafficking cases, we’re not able to actually identify some of the higher-ups in the organization whose money we’re seizing,” he added. “That’s just the nature of illicit drug trafficking.”

The federal government has noted that, as the U.S. Department of Justice does not track criminal convictions, California law enforcement may no longer be paid for their task forces.

But Sen. Mitchell rejects such reasoning as opposition to policing for profit.

“That [policy is] like the IRS saying we don’t have the computer-based system to return your tax return, Ms. Mitchell, so we don’t have to,” she said. “The Department of Justice is going to have to figure it out. That’s ridiculous.”

Sources: ACLU, Los Angeles Times / Photo credit: U.S. Attorney’s Office via Los Angeles Times