Reforming a Relic of the War on Drugs: Civil Asset Forfeiture

Would it surprise you to find out that, if you were pulled over by a police officer for a minor traffic violation, any possessions your have in your car (including cash) could be confiscated? Or that you could lose your home if your grandson sold $40 worth of drugs on your porch? Or how about if you drove to a party where alcohol was being served illegally, would it surprise you to find out that your car could be confiscated?

You shouldn't be surprised. Because all of those things have actually happened to people in various parts of this country. And it's all legal based on something called "civil asset forfeiture." The laws governing it are a mixture of federal and state statutes. But the basics are that law enforcement can take possession of any asset that they claim has been involved in criminal activity. The owner of said asset needn't be charged with any crime themselves. And in many states, our justice system is turned on its head: in order to retrieve their property, the owner is required to prove - beyond a reasonable doubt - that the asset was not involved in a crime.

In August 2013, Sarah Stillman wrote an in-depth article about civil asset forfeiture and summarized it's beginnings as part of the war on drugs:

Forfeiture in its modern form began with federal statutes enacted in the nineteen-seventies and aimed...at organized-crime bosses and drug lords. Law-enforcement officers were empowered to seize money and goods tied to the production of illegal drugs. Later amendments allowed the seizure of anything thought to have been purchased with tainted funds, whether or not it was connected to the commission of a crime. Even then, forfeiture remained an infrequent resort until 1984, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. It established a special fund that turned over proceeds from forfeitures to the law-enforcement agencies responsible for them. Local police who provided federal assistance were rewarded with a large percentage of the proceeds, through a program called Equitable Sharing. Soon states were crafting their own forfeiture laws.

Revenue gains were staggering. At the Justice Department, proceeds from forfeiture soared from twenty-seven million dollars in 1985 to five hundred and fifty-six million in 1993. (Last year, the department took in nearly $4.2 billion in forfeitures, a record.) The strategy helped reconcile President Reagan’s call for government action in fighting crime with his call to reduce public spending. In 1989, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh boasted, “It’s now possible for a drug dealer to serve time in a forfeiture-financed prison after being arrested by agents driving a forfeiture-provided automobile while working in a forfeiture-funded sting operation.”

A March 2010 report on civil asset forfeiture done by the Institute for Justice explored the "profit motive" for law enforcement inherent in this practice: "The results suggest, albeit indirectly, that when state law makes forfeiture less rewarding and more difficult, state and local law enforcement agencies engage in less of it." To give you some idea of the potential profit in just one city:

From 2002 to 2012, Philadelphia took in almost $6 million annually and $64 million in total in civil forfeiture revenue, Sheth said.

During that time, 1,172 homes and other real property, 3,290 automobiles and other vehicles and more than $44 million in cash were seized.

The New York Times recently received recordings of trainings provided to law enforcement officers on civil asset forfeiture in New Mexico, New Jersey and Georgia where one presenter offered "useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers ('everybody’s got one already'), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars."

Like most areas of our criminal justice system that require reform, the victims of civil asset forfeiture are most often Black, Hispanic and/or poor. As Stillman reported:

“For real-estate forfeitures, it’s overwhelmingly African-Americans and Hispanics,” Rulli told me. “It has a very disparate race and class impact.” He went on to talk about Andy Reid, the former coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, whose two sons were convicted of drug crimes in 2007 while living at the family’s suburban mansion in Villanova. “Do you know what the headline read? It said, ‘THE HOME WAS AN “EMPORIUM OF DRUGS.” ’ An emporium of drugs!” The phrase, Rulli explained, came directly from a local judge. “And here’s the question: Do you think they seized it?”

I think we all know the answer to that question.

If, in fact, there is the possibility of bipartisanship on the issue of criminal justice reform, this is an area that is screaming out for attention.

Odds & Ends

Ben Geman has written a must-read profile on John Podesta’s year in the White House driving the “go-it-alone” climate strategy.

Due to the lack of public trust in District Attorney’s handling of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner shootings, the City of Cleveland has probably made a good call in handing off the probe into the Tamir Rice case to a county sheriff’s office.

Michael Memoli reports:

President Obama is heading back to Washington on Saturday after a two-week holiday visit to Hawaii, but he won’t stick around for long.

Eager to stay on the offensive as new Republican majorities are seated in Congress, the president plans to take a more bullish economic message on the road next week in something of an early test drive of his State of the Union message.

Would it surprise you to learn that the Senate’s 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than it’s 54 Republicans?

In health news, scientists find that most types of cancer are caused by “bad luck.” No, it doesn’t have anything to do with black cats or broken mirrors. It’s all about random gene mutations that occur when stem cells divide.

You’ve probably read about how Jeb Bush is breaking up with corporate boards and investments in order to prepare for his 2016 presidential run. But Andy Borowitz reports on the one break-up that would probably do him the most good: Jeb Bush Resigns as George W. Bush’s Brother.

Finally, since I started the day out with Eva Cassidy, I think I’ll end it with her gorgeous cover of this classic blues tune.

How We Choose Presidents

In the midst of an article about Mario Cuomo, James Fallows addresses something that gets too little attention.

National office in the modern United States—the presidency, or a serious candidacy for it—requires a broader range of skills than any real human being has ever possessed…

To succeed fully in national leadership a person would in principle need to be as shrewd a manipulator as Lyndon Johnson, as confidently patient a commander as Dwight Eisenhower, as quickly intelligent as John F. Kennedy; as publicly sunny as Ronald Reagan; as fundamentally sane as Gerald Ford—you get the idea.

When choosing a president, we usually assume that we should simply support the candidate that most closely aligns with the policies we support. But it is often the mix of skills each candidate possesses from the list Fallows identifies (as well as others) that determine whether or not they will be successful in implementing those policies.

Back in 2007 when the Democratic primary looked to be a contest between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, Mark Schmitt wrote a fascinating article along these lines suggesting that we were witnessing the first “Theory of Change” primary.

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track.

I’ll let you read the rest of the article to see how he perceived the difference between those three candidates’ theory of change. But he was right - they had radically different approaches based on their own unique personalities and set of skills.

We don’t know yet who will enter the 2016 presidential contest. And the first screen is always about how their policies align with our own preferences. But I would suggest that is a necessary - but insufficient - test for how they will perform in office.

The Changing Role of Money in Politics

The 2012 presidential election was the first to be held in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's ruling on Citizens United. Too many of us have forgotten that the results of that election were the opposite of what the megadonors had hoped for.

Can't buy me gov.

That line neatly sums up the dismal showing on Election Day for the fundraisers, super-PAC strategists, and big-dollar donors of the Republican Party. Outside groups spent north of $1 billion this campaign season—bankrolled mostly by a small cadre of wealthy contributors—and yet they and their funders, especially on the Republican side, were left with little to show for it when the sun rose Wednesday morning. The GOP's flagship super-PAC, Karl Rove's American Crossroads, had an abysmal 1 percent return on its $104 million investment. Megadonor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, invested $57 million in 2012 races; only 42 percent of the candidates who received Adelson support won. Other big donors—say, Romney super-PAC backers—got nothing for their money.

Perhaps we forgot about all of that because the 2014 midterms turned a lot of it around (with a few exceptions, i.e., Eric Cantor).

The 100 biggest campaign donors gave $323 million in 2014 — almost as much as the $356 million given by the estimated 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less...

And the balance almost certainly would tip far in favor of the mega-donors were the analysis to include nonprofit groups that spent at least $219 million — and likely much more — but aren’t required to reveal their donors’ identities.

The numbers — gleaned from reports filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service — paint the most comprehensive picture to date of an electoral landscape in which the financial balance has tilted dramatically to the ultra-rich. They have taken advantage of a spate of recent federal court rulings, regulatory decisions and feeble or bumbling oversight to spend ever-greater sums in politics — sometimes raising questions about whether their bounty is being well spent...

Taken together, the trend lines reflect a new political reality in which a handful of superaffluent partisans can exert more sway over the campaign landscape than millions of donors of more average means.

With sweeping victories for the Republicans these megadonors financed, it appears as though that success overshadows their previous failure in 2012 to influence the election outcome.

But it does raise a couple of questions: Are megadonors more effective at influencing midterms than presidential elections? And if so, why? One possible answer to those questions comes from turning our gaze away from who gives the money in order to focus for a moment on how it is spent.

Over the last few decades, as the amount of money in politics has exploded, the vast majority of those dollars have been spent on media - particularly television advertisements. Recently we've been learning more about what audience those ads reach. Derek Thompson reported it this way: Half of Broadcast TV Viewers Are 54 and Older - Yikes. As Cecilia Kang pointed out, younger viewers are trending away from traditional television in favor of subscription-based channels and streaming options.

And so it should probably not come as a surprise that a midterm election focused on turning out older voters in local elections is more fertile ground for expensive television advertising.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the 2016 presidential election. I would simply note that all of Karl Rove's millions of dollars in TV advertising were no match in 2012 to a simple recording by a catering staff at Mitt Romney's famous 47% event. In the meantime, the Democrat's largest megadonor - George Soros - has "shifted his giving away from pure politics, preferring to fund causes devoted to building up progressive infrastructure."

At least until the laws are changed, megadonors are legally able to use their millions of dollars in an attempt to influence elections. The question will increasingly be...what do they spend it on?

Photo of the Day: Flip-Flopper-in-Chief

When Is Our Southern Border Secure Enough?

The Republican position on immigration reform has always been that the U.S. must first secure our borders before we consider options for the 11 million undocumented people who are already in this country. Other than finding a way to hermetically seal it off, we are never going to reach total border security. So the question becomes...what is secure enough? I would propose that we're pretty close right now.

Back in April 2012, Pew Research reported that net migration from Mexico to the U.S. had fallen to zero - and perhaps less.

The sharp downward trend in net migration from Mexico began about five years ago and has led to the first significant decrease in at least two decades in the unauthorized Mexican population.

This week, Pew Research reported that border apprehensions of Mexicans have fallen to historic lows.

The new Border Patrol apprehensions data reflect a broader ongoing shift in the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population that was shaped by a migration wave from Mexico that lasted from the 1980s until the Great Recession. Mexico remains the top country of origin for the nation’s unauthorized immigrants, but their numbers have declined since 2007, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

(As this report explains, the uptick in non-Mexican apprehensions is in part due to the surge of unaccompanied Central American child migrants earlier in 2014)

 Pew's research suggests the following reasons for this dramatic change:

The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and broader economic conditions in Mexico.

The next time a Republican says that before we consider a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people in this country we need to secure our borders, an appropriate response would be...done that!

Funding Government That Works

Ron Haskins was a policy analyst for House Republicans in the 1990's and an advisor to President George W. Bush on social policy. But recently he took to the editorial pages of the New York Times to urge the upcoming Republican Congress to financially support an Obama initiative.

Hardly anyone knows it, but since its earliest days the Obama administration has been pursuing the most important initiative in the history of federal attempts to use evidence to improve social programs...

A growing body of evidence shows that a few model social programs — home visits to vulnerable families, K-12 education, pregnancy prevention, community college and employment training — produce solid impacts that can last for many years.

Expansion of these programs has been possible because the Obama administration, building on work by the Bush administration, has insisted that money for evidence-based initiatives go primarily to programs with rigorous evidence of success, as measured by scientifically designed evaluation...Since 2010, these principles have been the basis for competitive grants to more than 1,400 programs across the country...

The Obama evidence-based initiative has charted a new path that could reduce poverty and increase economic opportunity for the disadvantaged. Rather than cut these programs, Congress should extend funding so that successful programs can expand to new sites while programs that are not working are improved or abandoned. Social policy is too important to be left to guesswork.

This kind of pragmatic approach to social policy is critical for liberals to embrace because the best way to advance a progressive agenda is to demonstrate that government works.

I will, however, offer a couple of caveats. The kind of evaluation Haskins is talking about is incredibly expensive. Small social programs around the country are likely producing these kinds of results but lack access to the resources needed to implement rigorous evaluation. Conversely, low-cost evaluations can easily be manipulated to suggest outcomes that are oftentimes not valid. Furthermore, the "science" of evidence-based evaluation is not as settled as Haskins implies.

We shouldn't fool ourselves that the kind of process the Obama administration has embraced is simple. But I agree that it is one of the most important unnoticed things this President has done. We all need to engage in the challenging work of holding government programs accountable to produce results.