EXPERTS SAY CHANGE IN POLICE DRUG-MONEY POLICY UNLIKELY

KANSAS CITY (AP) — Federal lawmakers could stop police from improperly
keeping millions of dollars seized in drug busts and traffic stops, but a
yearlong examination by The Kansas City Star found that change will not come
soon — or easily.

Congress passed legislation last month curbing some federal forfeiture
powers. But the version that reached the White House was missing a provision
that could have blocked the way police across the country use federal
agencies to circumvent their own state laws.

Law enforcement has lobbied hard to maintain the system that allows police
nationwide to keep much of the drug money and property they seize. The
handoff arrangement, in which federal agencies are said to "adopt" state
seizures, works this way:

When police seize money, they avoid taking it to state courts because most
states have passed laws barring seized property from going directly back to
police.

Instead, police call in a federal agency, which accepts the seizure under
federal law, keeps a portion — usually 20 percent — for itself and sends the
rest back to police.

"That’s a No. 1 problem," Rajeev Purohit, director of legislation for the
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said of circumvention. "If
you got rid of that, you would be more than halfway toward solving the
entire problem."

A coalition of liberal and conservative groups plans to push for similar
legislation again. But many agree that it won’t be easy, considering how
hard it was to get last month’s reforms passed.

"Anything further is going to be very hard fighting," said Julie Katzman, a
key aide on the Senate bill for Sen. Patrick Leahy, a co-sponsor and Vermont
Democrat.

The Missouri Constitution requires in most cases that forfeitures go to
public education, and in 1993 the General Assembly tried to rein in police
as tightly as possible.

That year a law specifically prohibited police from handing off drug money
they seized to a federal agency. Only a judge could make that decision.

But last year The Star reported that police were handing off seizures to
federal agencies and getting back millions of dollars.

Law enforcement officials explained that police were not violating state
law: They weren’t handing off seizures because they really weren’t seizing
the money — they were simply "detaining" it for a federal agent. As a
result, Missouri lawmakers attempted to rewrite statutes this session to
make it clear that a seizure is indeed a seizure, but the effort died this
month.

"Unless the state law mirrors the federal law, you are not going to stop
police from going to the feds, no matter what you do," Claire McCaskill,
Missouri state auditor and a former prosecutor, told a legislative hearing
last year.