POLICE WHO DODGE FORFEITURE LAWS ARE TAKING ONE STEP TOO MANY

A cop pulls you over. Is it that broken taillight? Or is he looking for an
excuse to confiscate that fancy car of yours?

Call me cynical, but who wouldn't be after reading The Kansas City Star's
two-part series this week on police forfeiture cases?

Departments across the country, reporter Karen Dillon found, are seizing
booty worth hundreds of millions of dollars as spoils in the never-ending
war on drugs.

But it's the way they pad their budgets with suspected ill-gotten loot: by
skirting the laws they are sworn to uphold.

Most troubling is the arrogance police departments show by thwarting laws
put in place for the very purpose of removing inherent conflicts of
interest police face in forfeiture cases.

It takes a court order in most states before police can take your car,
house or cash. And to ensure that busts are not predicated on the financial
benefit they might bring law enforcement agencies, some states hand over
seized assets to programs not in the business of crime fighting. In
Missouri that's the schools.

Yet this newspaper found that police in dozens of states are relying on
legal technicalities to get around those laws.

Even in Kansas, where law enforcement agencies can keep confiscated assets
after judicial review, seized property often is turned over to federal
drug-enforcement authorities first.

Reason: The feds have lenient forfeiture laws. A person need not even be
charged with a crime to lose property connected to suspected criminal
activity. Better yet, the feds return the cash to the local cops, less 20
percent normally.

Police call the process adoption.

If it were anyone else, it would be called money laundering.

I'm sure police won't like that characterization. But they have no one to
blame but themselves for such digs.

Aren't cops, after all, supposed to be the good guys? And by that I mean
not simply on the right side in the conflict between good and evil, but the
ones who play by the rules. Laws are laws, correct?

Yet, since the so-called war on drugs began in the mid- 1980s, police have
increasingly thumbed their noses at constitutional protections against
illegal searches and seizures, from the use of no-knock search warrants to
aggressive use of forfeiture laws.

And they justify it with the same logic as some rogue cop who plants
cocaine on a known drug dealer: The end justifies the means.

Many police departments don't like the state laws that prevent overzealous
use of the forfeiture laws, because there is no guarantee they will get to
keep what they seize.

"Just because there is a state law doesn't necessarily mean that that state
law is correct," said the head of one Missouri drug task force agency.

Talk about cynicism. Statements like that take your breath away.

But equally obnoxious is the contention that local authorities have a right
to, in essence, free-lance for the feds because local governments don't
devote as much money to law enforcement as police think they deserve.

Since when do the cops make public policy?

A vice president at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think- tank, put it
best when he told Dillon: "The line between a free society and a police
state is usually broached in small steps."

This is at least one too many. Congress needs to put a stop to this abuse,
and the sooner the better.