WHEN COPS ARE THIEVES

If the County Sheriffs of Colorado has its way, law-enforcement
agencies will soon be able to take your house, cars, cash and jewelry,
sell it off and divvy up the proceeds quietly and privately among
themselves. This organization, which lobbies for the interests of
sheriffs across the state, is the force behind House Bill 1238, which
rolls back a 2002 law guaranteeing Colorado residents reasonable
protections against "asset forfeiture" - a fancy legal term for when
the cops use the force of law to take your stuff.

The idea behind asset forfeiture is to deprive criminals of property
used to commit crimes and the money they make by breaking the law.
Think of a coke kingpin with several houses, a yacht, a few
helicopters, lots of guns and ammo, as well as a fleet of fancy cars.

When he's busted, the empire that cocaine built is taken from him,
liquidated and put toward paying for the expense that went into
bringing him down. Fair enough, right?

When it comes to drug kingpins, asset forfeiture seems just and
reasonable. But every law has unintended consequences. Prior to 2002,
the state's asset forfeiture law too often resulted in property and
cash being taken from innocent men and women - people who either
hadn't committed a crime or who were arrested but later acquitted.
Further, the law gave law-enforcement officers a financial incentive
to see every arrest as a potential opportunity for profit.

Consider the single mom who loaned her car to her cousin - only to
lose it after the police pulled her cousin over and discovered
marijuana seeds and a wad of cash hidden in the vehicle. It didn't
matter that the car didn't belong to the cousin or that the woman was
innocent or that losing the car was a major financial blow to her. The
police sold the vehicle and pocketed the cash.

Then there was the disabled man who, prior to the state's medical
marijuana law, was busted for growing a couple of pot plants in his
house. He wasn't a dealer; he didn't sell dope to school kids.
Instead, he used marijuana to control his chronic pain. The police
checked county records and saw that he'd paid off his mortgage with
settlement money from the accident that deprived him of his mobility.
After discovering how much money was tied up in his house, they
started forfeiture proceedings, depriving a man with no job and no
ability to work of his home at great profit to their agency.

And what about the Mexican worker who came here legally to help build
Denver International Airport? He bought a ticket home and boarded a
plane with $15,000 in hard-earned cash. Police searched him and found
the cash. They discovered no drugs on him or in his luggage. Nor did
they find any evidence that the money came from the commission of a
crime. But because a drug-sniffing dog reacted to the money, they
decided to keep it, even though studies have shown that 99 percent of
bills in circulation are tainted with the scent of illegal drugs.
After the man hired an attorney, he got 40 percent of his wages back,
but the cops kept the other 60 percent because they could.

The above are real incidents provided to Boulder Weekly by attorneys
who worked to get the 2002 reform bill passed and signed into law.
(See "Pirate police," cover story, March 21, 2002.) It was incidents
like these that brought people together from the left and the right
and all points in between to change state law to protect individual
property rights and discourage abuses by law-enforcement agencies.

The 2002 law, still currently in force, works in a couple of different
ways, requiring that a person be convicted before their property can
be taken. It also removes the financial motivation for law enforcement
to seize assets by dividing the money from forfeitures equally between
local substance-abuse programs and local county or city government for
allocation through a public budgeting process. And it requires
law-enforcement agencies to stay on the level by submitting an annual
forfeiture report to the Department of Local Affairs.

Now, some in the law-enforcement community want to revert to the way
things were before the 2002 law passed, when they could take people's
money, jewelry, cars and homes without first getting a criminal
conviction and keep the majority of it without any public
accountability. It's a recession, after all, and they need money from
somewhere.

House Bill 1238, sponsored in the house by Rep. Joe Rice, D-Glendale,
and in the Senate by Sen. Brandon Shaffer, D-Boulder, would wipe away
the 2002 reforms that curbed law-enforcement abuses. It would remove
the requirement that a person be convicted of a criminal offense
before their property could be taken. It would further allow a
person's property to be taken even if that person didn't know his or
her property was being used to commit a crime. It would even remove
the requirement that law-enforcement agencies prove that the property
they're trying to seize was instrumental in committing a crime. And it
would allow cops to keep the majority of the booty without any public
accountability or reporting requirement.

In short, HB 1238 gives law-enforcement agencies both the incentive
and the legal ability to abuse their authority at the expense of your
individual property rights. As one local attorney, Dennis Blewitt, put
it, "It turns cops into privateers."

We need law-enforcement agencies to uphold our rights, not to rob us
at gunpoint. Fortunately, the same bipartisan, grassroots coalition
that came together to get the 2002 reforms passed is joining forces
once again to defeat Rice's ill-conceived bill. Boulder Weekly urges
you to join that effort by contacting Sen. Shaffer and other local
representatives and asking them to kill HB 1238. A bill like this is
utterly at odds with the United State's highest principles of justice,
among them this gem: "innocent until proven guilty."