Essay On Civil Asset Forfeiture

Police officers have enough power as it is and with civil asset forfeiture, they are given even more power. They are allowed to take our homes, our money, and our prized possessions if they have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that it’s involved in a crime. Civil asset forfeitures also vary by state. Most people don’t even go after the police in court for the stuff that they seize from them due to the process they have to go through. This cases tend to appear as United States of America v. 120,000 dollars in currency. Civil asset forfeiture is something that needs to be put to a stop because of the little limit to what can be done with the money and some of the people not being directly affected by it.
Police officers are able to do whatever they want with money or other items they confiscate. It has been proven that some of the money taken in the United States has been used for pointless items that have nothing to do with better the police station. Williams states,“The state and federal laws illustrated above allow law enforcement much leeway in the use of forfeited funds, and, coupled with the lowered due process protections in civil forfeitures, it is no surprise that law enforcement agencies engage in this practice” (Williams 327). Citizens feel that it should not be this way

because not all things that police departments enforce are 100 percent effective.
There are things that certain states have provided for police officers who confiscated crime-related property.

Ronald Helm discusses the studies that are done about the profit- based incentives that come from civil asset forfeiture cases. Helm asserts, “Benson et al . (1995) examine the policy and bureaucratic underpinnings of asset forfeiture by analysing forfeiture case processing in several Florida police agencies. They conclude that the effects of the Comprehensive Crime Act of 1984, particularly those sections pertaining to asset forfeiture, provided police agencies with incentives to pursue forfeiture cases and that doing so has resulted in expanded budgetary discretion” (Helm

4).
Not everyone is going about their day committing crime so why do police feel that they need extra tasks to do. Crawford declared, “After three years, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled that the government had failed…consideration of a number of factors, including the small number of crimes occurring at the Motel over many years, Mr. Caswell’s lack of involvement in any drug-related incidents, and the minor scale of the drug-related crimes” (Crawford 259-260). Poor Mr. Caswell was dragged into a mess of allegations for three years only to find out there was no proof of his involvement of anything. Why should our people suffer at the likes of other people’s and the police’s mistakes? Even someone we could be doing nothing at all can’t have their actions justified by just explaining what occurred prior to their property being seized.
Property seizure (in the form of money or someone’s home) is something that needs to be put to an end because of the trivial limit to what can be done with the money and some of the people not being the suspect of the said crime. The government already has enough power as it is, so why do we allow them to have anymore?