U.S. RULES LET POLICE KEEP CASH THEY SEIZE

Police and highway patrols across the country are evading state laws
to improperly keep millions of dollars in cash and property seized in
drug busts and traffic stops.

Most states don't want law enforcement agencies to profit so easily
from such confiscations - they see it as a dangerous conflict of
interest. For that reason, they have passed laws blocking seized
property from going directly back to police, and many states designate
seizures to be used for other purposes, such as education.

But a yearlong examination by The Kansas City Star reveals that police
agencies in every one of more than two dozen states - including North
Carolina - checked by the newspaper have used federal law enforcement
to circumvent their own laws and keep most of that money for themselves.

It works this way: When police seize money, they call a federal agency
instead of going to state court to confiscate it. An agency such as
the Drug Enforcement Administration accepts the seizure, making it a
federal case. The DEA keeps a cut of the money and returns the rest to
police. State courts are bypassed altogether.

Law enforcement says that's not illegal and that without the money,
police would be handcuffed in fighting crime. But millions of dollars
that lawmakers in some states have designated for education, drug
treatment programs and other purposes instead end up back in the hands
of police.

For example:

o An N.C. Highway Patrol trooper stopped a driver last year on
Interstate 95 for tailgating. A police dog signaled drugs were in the
car, where troopers found $105,700 and 2 grams of marijuana, The
driver denied owning either the drugs or the money. The Highway Patrol
gave it to the DEA, which returned more than $80,000 to the state
patrol, even though N.C. law generally requires sending seized money
to education.

o In June, a Georgia trooper stopped a car for speeding on 1-95.
After the driver and passengers gave conflicting stories, the trooper
searched the car and found a hidden compartment containing $7,000,
which the driver said was from savings.

The patrol turned over the money to the DEA, which in January returned
$5,440 to the patrol. Under Georgia law, forfeited money should go to
the state's general fund.

o In 1996, the Missouri Highway Patrol stopped a car for speeding,
searched it because the occupants seemed suspicious and found $24,000.
No drugs were found and no one claimed the money. The patrol gave it
to the DEA to be forfeited, the legal term for confiscation.

The case took a bizarre turn last year when a family that bought the
car at auction discovered an additional $82,000 in the gas tank. The
DEA took that money, too.

Missouri law sends forfeited money to a public education
fund.

Beyond the money diverted from public funds, critics are just as
troubled by the weakening of a basic American civil liberty - the Bill
of Rights protection against improper search and seizure.

Owners who want to recover seized property usually face a much tougher
road in federal court than they would under their own state laws. That
continues despite a federal law passed last month that will place some
limits on forfeiture.

It's no accident that many state laws have stronger civil protections
than federal law, legislators say.

"We have tried to make sure that people who are subject to forfeitures
have some basic rights," said Georgia Rep. Jim Martin, a Democrat and
chairman of the Judiciary committee.

The federal hand-offs, critics say, also create an opportunity for
police to profit from their own actions. Indeed, they trace an
increasing outcry over aggressive or illegal searches by police
nationwide back to the profit motive.

"If you think that by conducting an illegal search and seizing people
on the highway you can increase the number of times where you can take
assets, it is going to become a big motivating force," said Ira
Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

This maybe one of those rare issues that elicits protests across the
political spectrum.

Americans don't realize that forfeitures often occur to "ordinary
people who happen to find themselves in a situation in which they are
simply suspected of having been somehow involved in criminal activity,
whether those suspicions ever prove out or not," said Roger Pilon, a
vice president at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian thinktank.

"The line between a free society and a police state is usually
broached in small steps."

Not every police department turns seizure money over to federal
agencies, but many that do complain that state laws are too
restrictive.

Sometimes, police explain, they believe money they seize is linked to
drugs, but they can't prove it under state standards, and they don't
want to give the money back to a suspected drug dealer. Federal law
lets them take the money out of the owner's hands.

"Everybody uses the federal system," said Lt. Harry Kearley of the
Alabama Bureau of Investigations.

Federal officials agree police have the proper motives for using
federal law.

"I don't think police agencies are in the business of profiting," said
Jerry McDowell, director of the Justice Department's asset forfeiture
and money laundering division.

Besides, he said, it's legal for police to send seizures to federal
agencies because most state laws do not specifically prohibit that.

"We certainly don't want to subvert state law, and we don't want
states to subvert our law," McDowell said.

But, in fact, most states do prohibit simply handing off seizures -
their laws give jurisdiction over seizures to state courts, the Star
has found.

What that means, say legal experts who have examined the little-known
state provisions, is that police cannot simply hand off seizures to
federal agents to avoid state requirements. They need a court order
first.

"This statute is not difficult at all," said David Harris, a
University of Toledo law professor and constitutional expert." The
state court has jurisdictions."

A half-dozen state and federal court decisions have backed that
interpretation.

"A local police department may not take seized property and just pass
it on as it pleases to the FBI in flagrant disregard of state laws,"
according to a federal circuit court opinion in an Illinois case.

Such handoffs began after Congress passed a 1984 law that allowed law
enforcement to share forfeitures as a way to foster greater
cooperation and shut down drug operations.

"The intent was to permit the feds to share with state and local law
enforcement when there were truly federal cases," former U.S. Rep.
William Hughes, the chief sponsor of the bill and a New Jersey
Democrat, said.

But the Justice Department wrote guidelines that have twisted the
intent of the law, critics say. In addition to addressing joint
investigations led by federal agencies, the guidelines created a
process called "adoption."

Under adoption, state and local police could give their seizures to
the federal government - even if a federal agency had not been involved.

The Justice Department "turned around and permitted the forfeiture
laws to be used basically to circumvent state law," Hughes said.

Forfeitures have come to mean a lot of money for police.

The Justice Department says that from October 1996 through March 1999
it accepted $208 million in seizures from state and local police.

But that figure is still being audited because the Justice Department
has not published an annual forfeiture report since 1996, although the
law requires the report to be produced each year.

Whatever the nationwide total, forfeitures can quickly add up for
individual departments.

In a single case in Indiana, a state trooper stopped a truck for
speeding on Interstate 70. Troopers found $811,470 and turned it over
to the DEA, which this year returned almost $500,000 to the state
police and $121,000 to a sheriffs department that helped.

Police say they need the money if they are to continue the war on
drugs. If they lose forfeiture money, they say, local governments are
unlikely to replace it. For example, Capt. Ruben Davalos, head of the
special investigations unit for Albuquerque, N.M., police, pointed out
that his unit costs about $1 million a year, of which the city only
funds about $250,000.

But critics say police who use forfeits to fund themselves end up on a
treadmill.

"The real narcotic here is the money," said Glasser of the ACLU. "It
becomes a stream of income that they learn not to do without and then
they have to generate more of it."