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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good, how are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Not bad. Because I feel fairly certain over roughly the next half hour, 45 minutes, I'm going to be wildly entertained by your face as we discuss the second time. This is the second part of a two part episode, if you will, on asset forfeiture.
N. Rodgers: When last we left listeners, a gentleman had been arrested for a small possession, a small amount of drugs, and had a non felony possession, then the government wanted to take his truck.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yep. Fine State of Indiana.
N. Rodgers: That is one of the problems that I have with this law, is that and I'm glad the Supreme's weighed in and said, no, wait a minute. There's such a thing as too much.
J. Aughenbaugh: Too much, yes.
N. Rodgers: They shouldn't be able to strip your entire life of whatever. When last we left, Aughie was jaywalking across the street in his leather shoes. The government says, well, we're going to seize your leather shoes. But what if they had said you were jaywalking in front of your house and they had said, we're going to take your house too or we're going to take your, you know what I mean?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It is scary that until the supreme said wait, there's a line, there didn't seem to really be a line, and it's easy when somebody is a bad person. It's easy when it's [inaudible] and he's selling massive amount of drugs and he's also abusing his people and he's a violent monster. What is that guy with the hippos?
J. Aughenbaugh: I have no idea.
N. Rodgers: Famous drug Lord.
J. Aughenbaugh: Escobar.
N. Rodgers: Escobar.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah,.
N. Rodgers: He imported hippos from South America and now there's nothing to kill them because there's no natural predator for a hippo in South America anyway. Whole separate issue. But like him, I wouldn't mind. I mean, like that dude was a terrible dude. He did all these terrible things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because we discussed that in the previous episode that when you think about asset forfeiture, I mean in theory, it makes a lot of sense. If you're trying to prevent criminals from engaging in criminal behavior, you might want to provide them an incentive to think twice before doing it, and one of the ways is you might want to go and tell you.
N. Rodgers: You're going to lose everything.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're going to lose everything. If these are truly bad people, I mean, you gave the example of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. I mean by all accounts, from the time we, we being the United States put him into office until we finally forced him out of office. He sold drugs.
N. Rodgers: He ran human trafficking stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was a bad person and he propped up his regime in part because of all the illegal, of all the assets.
N. Rodgers: He stole from people and that he acquired?
J. Aughenbaugh: That he acquired. But when you're talking about in the case that we mentioned last episode, Tim's versus Indiana, I mean, we're talking about a guy who was convicted on a non felony possession charge. In other words, and I forget what drug he had, whether it was marijuana or, whatever the case may be. This is a guy who more than likely recreationally use drugs. He gets pulled over for a traffic stop. The cops find that he had a small amount of drugs, not enough to qualify for the intent to distribute. But then the cops, what did he have, Nia?
N. Rodgers: He had $225 worth. I haven't found the drugs yet, but the Land Rover was worth 42,000.
J. Aughenbaugh: At that point, the ratio here, between what he possessed and what the State of Indiana wanted to take. Just struck us as gratuitous over the top.
N. Rodgers: I feel it. Pleaded guilty in Indiana State Court to dealing in a controlled substance and conspiracy to commit theft. At the time of Tim's arrest, police seized a Land Rover SUV he had purchased with $12,000 with money that he has received from an insurance policy when his father died?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Having a bad.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. That period.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. Observing the times had recently purchased a vehicle for more than four times the maximum $10,000 monetary fine assessible against him for his drug conviction, the trial court denied the State's request to take his truck.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: They wanted to over punish him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. What we're going to talk about.
J. Aughenbaugh: That becomes a moral question, where, Bernie Madoff destroyed the holdings of a lot of older retired folk.
J. Aughenbaugh: He wiped out retirement funds.
N. Rodgers: Which I would argue is a far worse crime than $225 worth of drugs that you're carrying around with you. You know what I mean?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I mean, when I find.
N. Rodgers: It has to come in here somewhere.
J. Aughenbaugh: When it was announced that Bernie Madoff was going to have to return over $180 billion worth of assets, I had absolutely no problem with it whatsoever because he destroyed retirement funds. Retirement funds of working class individuals who all of a sudden woke up one morning and were told you have nothing. You have nothing.
N. Rodgers: You're going to work till you drop because to retire.
J. Aughenbaugh: What we're going to talk about this after.
N. Rodgers: My frustration with the state is I think the state becomes overzealous if there's no governor on that. If there's limit, thank you. If there's no limit to what you can do, then the state's greed could potentially get in the way of.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: What actually justice.
J. Aughenbaugh: What we're going to talk about, what we're going to talk about listeners this episode, are criticisms of asset forfeiture programs. We want to be very clear about this. This was one of the more stunning things as we begin to do research on these programs.
N. Rodgers: Everybody hates this.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I mean it is truly remarkable.
N. Rodgers: In the first sentence of Aughie's notes for the criticism, he mentions the ACLU and the Koch brothers in the same sentence. If those two groups are aligned in any way with criticisms, there's some pretty serious.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, I got to admit. As I was hyping that sentence, I was just like I'm pretty sure I've never put those two groups together in the same sentence in all the years that I've been doing research and teaching.
N. Rodgers: I was just going to say, thinking back on every slide you've ever taught, I'm not sure that there's a sentence included both of those groups.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're talking about both.
N. Rodgers: Sorry, for people who don't know, the ACLU is the American Civil Liberties Union, which is a very liberal, progressive organization. For anybody who doesn't know the Koch Brothers. Koch Brothers Foundation, they are very conservative. These are two opposite ends of the political spectrum without being the truly insane people at the complete far ends. But they are what one would say would be a normal conservative and a normal liberal organization both coming together to say, wait a minute, hold on just a second here. This doesn't seem to be good.
J. Aughenbaugh: These programs need to be reformed.
N. Rodgers: What is the main problem you see?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I think we should go ahead and target or not target, but to describe both sides of the ideological spectrum. For liberals, they have produced. Nia, I stopped waiting through them. I think there's easily a couple dozen studies.
N. Rodgers: In fact, he stops reading, it's because he's gotten the point well.
J. Aughenbaugh: My eyes were growing bleary. In the conclusions, we're roughly the same. There is significant evidence that asset forfeiture programs statistically over-target poor people and people of color.
N. Rodgers: Makes sense. They don't have any way to defend themselves.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: For the proceedings. Often those folks cannot afford a lawyer, especially poor people cannot afford a lawyer, and so they're stuck trying to navigate that system where Aughie explained in the last episode and briefly that it's 181 days of motions before you even get.
J. Aughenbaugh: Before you even get to court, right?
N. Rodgers: Right. If you're not a person who can afford to retain an attorney to do all that, you're probably going to end up just forfeiting the asset.
J. Aughenbaugh: The process requires resources from people who don't have a lot of resources. What's being targeted is in many instances their only asset. It could be a car, which is their only asset. It could be a home that has been handed down in generations, and it's the only asset that that family or person actually owns.
N. Rodgers: As a percentage of their wealth.
J. Aughenbaugh: It is extremely high.
N. Rodgers: Significant compared to wealthy people. The other thing is, and I want to put a plug in here for, if you don't know the system, that has a huge effect. We talk about that with people who come to university as first-generation students.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: How hard it is for them because they don't know the system and there's nobody in their family who can walk them through the system, and if you think academia is not a system, it's because you've never registered to take a class. There's a whole system involved in this. If you don't know how to do it, you're going to probably have a really hard time with it. That's another part of this is if you're talking about an educational gap in terms of how you even navigate the government and/or the legal system. Also, people of color and poor people have had, I would imagine, many more instances of negative interactions with the system, than white people have.
J. Aughenbaugh: These individuals already believe the system is stacked against them.
N. Rodgers: Stacked without some reason. Really you can take my car my only way to get to work, my only way to get my kid to daycare?
J. Aughenbaugh: You can take my house. Am I supposed to be on the street while I'm supposed to attend multiple court appearances even before the trial? They're using words like we're suing the asset, we're not suing you. What does that mean? Think about how long it took you and I to describe that the civil process, the person's not being sued, the asset is being sued.
N. Rodgers: That was 10 minutes in the last episode.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: That's somebody who's patiently explaining it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's not a government bureaucrat who's like, it's not my problem that you don't understand.
J. Aughenbaugh: Conservatives hate asset forfeiture because they think it's a violation of either due process, you're taking away one's property before due process.
N. Rodgers: Before I've been found guilty of something.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. With civil forfeiture, the asset can be taken before you even get to court, or they believe it violates the Takings Clause. Because your property, your asset's being taken and by the way, you're not being offered just compensation. Now, that's it.
N. Rodgers: From the conservative point of view, property is tied to freedom, it's tied to social position. For the founders, it was tied to actually getting to vote, getting to have your voice heard.
J. Aughenbaugh: Standing in society is rooted in property.
N. Rodgers: That thread runs through the conservative.
J. Aughenbaugh: DNA in our country since before the founding.
N. Rodgers: You're talking about a fundamental, life, liberty and property. You're trying to deprive me of one of the three, that's unacceptable.
J. Aughenbaugh: This flows from John Locke, social contract, yada.
N. Rodgers: I think it's wonderful that they have what we would call in the Supreme Court a concurrence.
N. Rodgers: You've reached the right conclusion for the wrong reason. We're are still there on the conclusion.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're still there. Unfortunately, for critics of asset forfeiture, there are two rather important groups that push back against any effort to get rid of these programs. By the way, we could get rid of these programs in law.
N. Rodgers: As you say Congress could fix that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Congress could fix it. A state legislature could fix it, unfortunately.
N. Rodgers: But why would they?
J. Aughenbaugh: One, state local governments in general love these programs and the reason why is, asset forfeiture programs generate huge sums of money, which means that elected officials then Nia don't have to turn around and do what?
N. Rodgers: Raise your taxes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Raise taxes.
N. Rodgers: Read my lips. No new taxes.
J. Aughenbaugh: New taxes. There are very few politicians that ever win elections or win re-elections.
N. Rodgers: Say guess what next week I'm going to raise your taxes, isn't that fun?
J. Aughenbaugh: Vote for me and I'm going to raise your taxes.
N. Rodgers: I wasn't paying attention till you said that, but now I know I'm going to vote against you. For most people. Unless you can make a good argument for, if we raise everybody's taxes a little bit, then we'll get this really cool thing, and people oftentimes will say, okay. That's often done on referendums. But unless people you get buying from people.
J. Aughenbaugh: The second group that loves them and they are, depending on the jurisdiction, rather potent political force is local and state law enforcement agencies. At the state level, oftentimes they get to pocket all of the money generated from assets.
N. Rodgers: Oh, really? It doesn't go to the localities in some states?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to talk about that, I'm going to break that down. Remember as we discussed in the previous episode, Nia, with the Department of Justice, the federal program. They get a cut of assets seized by the Feds if they have cooperated.
N. Rodgers: Because one of the things we were talking about was that the law encourages all of the agencies up and down, from local, to state to federal to work together. Because they all get credit, basically.
J. Aughenbaugh: Just to give you an example of how much money the Feds have made. This is just one example. With one effort, the asset forfeiture program run by the Department of Justice, post 911 terrorist attacks, the Feds have taken in over 2.5 billion dollar and over 61,000 nearly 62,000 cash seizures per the Federal Civil Forfeiture Program.
N. Rodgers: They've taken $2.5 billion in cash. That have to do with Aughie's boat or his leather shoes or his coffee mug which if you don't know what I'm talking about, see last episode. But aside from those, think just straight up and walked in and took cash money.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Two point five billion dollar in 22 years. Is a lot of money.
J. Aughenbaugh: If local and state law enforcement cooperate with the Feds, they can pocket up to 80% of the proceeds.
N. Rodgers: Of that 2.5 billion, that's only 20%.
J. Aughenbaugh: Theoretically, yes.
N. Rodgers: Of what may not have come into their hands. That figure could be more like ten or 12 billion total.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Holy cow. That's starting to be real money.
J. Aughenbaugh: In 42 states. At least half of the profits from asset seizures. Again, this is money, jewelry, cars, homes, goes directly to law enforcement. Which means that law enforcement can say to state and local governments, if you give us free reign with asset forfeiture, you won't have to allocate as much money to law enforcement. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Budgets for cars.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: All that. Oh my God. Which is a terrible incentive for them.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a horrendous incentive. In 26 of these states, 100% of the profits go directly to law enforcement. State governments don't even get a cut.
N. Rodgers: Wow. In 26 states.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Which encourages those 26 states to do a lot of this because this officers get the money. Oh my God, this is how they're able to buy surplus military tanks and all the toys and stuff that I shouldn't say toys, but all the equipment.
J. Aughenbaugh: We have local and state police departments that have SWAT units.
N. Rodgers: They are better armed that our federal defense.
J. Aughenbaugh: That are comparable or in some cases exceed the capacity, of nation states.
N. Rodgers: Watch out Canada.
J. Aughenbaugh: You don't have to fear the US Federal Government.
N. Rodgers: But you have to fear Detroit. I shouldn't say Detroit because I don't know if they have high seizures.
J. Aughenbaugh: You need to fear Wisconsin, Minnesota.
N. Rodgers: Not even the state government, you need to fear a police department within.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Wow.
J. Aughenbaugh: Get this in over half the states, there is no reporting requirement in regards to how much money they actually raised through asset forfeiture.
N. Rodgers: See, and that is a huge problem to me. That's the problem that makes my face scrunch up the most. Let me a completely different example, but it parallels to me. What we know of the Ferguson Police Department is that they were regularly finding and arresting African Americans in Ferguson. Because there was no transparency from the Ferguson Police Department, even though people complained and said hey happening, there was no way for state officials or federal official really know until they did investigations and they did a lot of it. It is terrible that police departments don't have to have a reporting mechanism in 29 states where they tell you where they got the money, how they got the money, what the justification was for taking it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, if you think that Nia and I are anti law enforcement, not we are not. What we are is in favor of and if you think about the origin of this podcast. We want Americans to access government documents so they can be better informed and make better choices as participants in the democracy.
N. Rodgers: Having favorite substance in the world is sunshine.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Throwing a light on something.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, there could be any number of good reasons why asset forfeiture has increased. Maybe we find out it has not increased, but we don't know because there aren't requirements to tell us.
N. Rodgers: We don't know how much money is slashing around in that system.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Because if you don't have to report it, that means that it can be spent on all kinds.
J. Aughenbaugh: If a police department says, we don't have money to hire a full complement of officers, but yet they're pulling in a quarter of a million, a half a million, a million dollars every year on asset forfeiture, I want to know as somebody who might live in that community where in the heck is that money going?
N. Rodgers: Right. Or worse to me we don't have enough money for police officers, we need to start seizing stuff so that we can generate enough money.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which then leads me to want to ask questions of elected officials, well why aren't we allocating enough money?
N. Rodgers: Exactly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because this is providing, I would argue perverse incentives. Simply because you as elected officials don't have the guts or will to go ahead and say to the voters, hey, we have to make tough choices and if we don't make tough choices, then we're going to have law enforcement engaged in behaviors that you might find troubling. Okay?
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's where transparency comes in here.
N. Rodgers: Exactly, the law should not be opaque. It should be clear to everybody, how it's being administered, who's being administered to, and that it's being equitably administered. Because otherwise you get to people's arguments of certain communities are more targeted than others.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: But you have on here a thing that I have to admit made me do the silent screen thing when I was reading your notes. In 27 states, law enforcement needs to demonstrate a preponderance of the evidence. In 27 states the bar is that low, that it's more likely than not that the property is related to to criminal conduct. Fourteen states law enforcement only needs probable cause, only Nebraska and Wisconsin require proof beyond a reasonable doubt for civil asset forfeiture. Two states out of 50.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or flip it around 41 out of the 50 states have the evidentiary standard is so low.
N. Rodgers: That number is so low that I could get over it.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is the next level of criticism Nia, and as a constitutional law weenie this just drives me nuts. One of the hallmarks of the American legal system is due process of law. But if you think about for instance, just the civil forfeiture part of this discussion, they can take the asset and then it may not be until another half year later that you actually get your day in court. That means that the asset has been taken from you and then you have to demonstrate, not the government but you have to demonstrate that the asset was not used by you in a criminal enterprise.
N. Rodgers: Some of states required that the owner of the seized property prove innocence.
J. Aughenbaugh: To me, excuse the expression, that's ass backwards. I'm sorry, the burden should be on the government.
N. Rodgers: You have to prove that this was used in a crime, or that it was purchased from the proceeds of the crime. You have two ways you can go about that, but you have to prove that rather than me having to prove that the asset is innocent. Why does the asset not have the assumption of innocence that we have as the basis of American law?
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, I read a couple studies, one by a liberal think tank and another by conservative. Where over half of the people whose assets have been seized don't even bother going to court, because they think it's a waste of time or that they think they're going to lose. Well, if you're law enforcement and you're the government and you basically know that more times than not, the person is not going to challenge your asset seizure.
N. Rodgers: What would stop you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Where's the disincentive to go ahead and take people's property?
J. Aughenbaugh: Aggie says she has in more than 80% of asset forfeiture cases the owner of the property is never charged for the crime.
J. Aughenbaugh: Never.
N. Rodgers: How is that even a thing? Aughie and I are both, I'm going to go here just briefly. Probably in part it's because we have middle class white privilege, this doesn't happen to us generally, this does not happened to us. I don't know if Aggie assets have ever been seized but mine have never been seized.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: It wouldn't even occur to me that you could seize my assets and never charge me with a crime.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've known people. As recently as a couple of years ago, a guy in my neighborhood, where one day I was going for a run and I saw a tow truck show up with a local police department car. They took his truck, I stopped my run, I started talking to my neighbor and I said what's going on? And he goes, they just seized my truck, they said the truck was used in criminal. He goes and he pulls out the motion, the court document. It said, a criminal enterprise. He goes, I'm not entirely sure what an enterprise is. So I explained what enterprise means. But this was his only vehicle.
N. Rodgers: Now he's going to lose his job because he can't get back and forth to work, in to school there's all these other issues.
J. Aughenbaugh: In fact Nia, the first words out of his mouth was, I'm supposed to be at work in an hour and I'm going to have to take an Uber because he goes, I don't have another vehicle.
J. Aughenbaugh: This went on for months and he asked me, what would you do? I said, get yourself a good attorney. He goes, I can't afford a good attorney. I said to navigate this process, you're going to have to get one. But this is a working class dude. I've known him the entire time I've lived in this house. If he's engaged in criminal activity.
N. Rodgers: He's been very subtle about it.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's really good with the allocation of his time because I've seen him when he's come home from work. He looks exhausted. I don't know whether he's got the time or the energy, but to your point the way this affects poor and working class Americans and people of color is despicable. Again, it completely flips due process on its head.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. What we believe about ourselves as having a decent criminal system is that we assume your innocence, and the prosecutor has to prove that you're guilty before they deprive you of liberty. But what they do by seizing your property is they are also depriving you of liberty in the United States, if it's a car or if it's a home, because now you have either no way to get to work or no place to live. I personally, I'm not against seizure, but I'm thinking maybe there ought to be rules about what you can seize and for how long you can seize it. Maybe that process needs to be sped up. But also, should you be allowed to take a person's only vehicle and deprive them of work? Because now you're depriving them of the money to pay for a lawyer to get their stuff back. It's this whole horrible cycle.
J. Aughenbaugh: If they're not guilty of a criminal activity, and they're somehow able to convince a judge that the assets should be returned. Now, you're talking about significant costs that they're going to be paying because lawyers don't come cheap. They may have lost their job or they may have lost their house or there may have been opportunities that they had to forego simply because they spent a whole bunch of time in court trying to explain that, no I didn't use my automobile for criminal activity, I lent it to a friend. I was doing a friend a solid and now you're punishing me because I perhaps have bad choices in friends. There's not a criminal statute that says you can be.
N. Rodgers: Poorly with friends and we're going to put you in jail.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, there have been examples. There are cases I came across in my research where you had spouses who did not know that their spouse was engaged in criminal behavior and they lost their car, they lost their home etc. Again, you might be wondering how could you not know the person who you're sleeping with, eating meals with etc. was engaged in criminal activity. Hey, criminals are good at hiding stuff.
N. Rodgers: Criminals by their nature tend to be liars. Because part of being a criminal is being good at lying.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure. You by association are being punished. It's one thing if the government is forced to go ahead and show that you were aware/complicit, but again, the burden should be on the government, not on you. This assumption that you knew a particular asset was being used in a criminal activity just strikes me as fundamentally wrong.
N. Rodgers: There's no grandma in the world that would lend her car to a grand kid.
J. Aughenbaugh: Heck no.
N. Rodgers: Hey, grandma. Can I borrow your car for a couple of hours? Sure.
J. Aughenbaugh: Most parents would do that. I've lent my vehicle to some of my friends. Heck, when I used to own a pick up truck, I would have friends who would say, hey, Aughie, can I borrow your truck? I didn't ask them for a full itinerary. All I wanted to know was when they returned my truck, did they put a full tank of gas in the truck.
N. Rodgers: I think that a solution to this could be that the law enforcement agencies do not get to keep the money or the property, that it must be turned over to the state and it goes into a state fund and they have to get their budget needs met just the way every other agency does through state budgeting process. I think it would help curb some of the excesses that are probably happening in some places.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because if you could reduce some of the incentives.
N. Rodgers: It would be thoughtfully done. People would do it in a more thoughtful way, I think. They wouldn't say, well we'll just get the money because we need money to do a cool thing. They would say, well, the money's not coming to us. Let's make sure we've dotted our eyes and crossed our teeth. The other thing is we need transparency. All state need to report this. How much did you take? Who did you take it from? What was the resolution of the case? Because we need to stop this 80% of people never even being charged with a crime but we take their stuff and we keep it. Not cool.
J. Aughenbaugh: This idea that you could just show up one day, take somebody's car, and then force them to go through a long, complicated process just to get an asset back.
N. Rodgers: What we do know is that in some places the corruption is so deep that those assets are immediately sold or liquidated or whatever. They don't even wait the 180 days.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, the first car I ever purchased was an old Ford Fairmont from a local police department auction. When I was doing research for these two podcast episodes, all I kept on thinking was I may have bought somebody's assets at auction.
N. Rodgers: Probably you did without knowing that you might be depriving a person. You're not part of the problem there because you're not.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, but nevertheless, to your point, we need transparency because I want to know how quickly do law enforcement agencies turn around and sell these assets.
N. Rodgers: Because doing it even within that 180 days, that's unacceptable. But I assume that what police would say is we don't have the space to keep all that stuff. Well, then you shouldn't take all that stuff. That's like me saying I have too much stuff, I'm just going to buy a bigger house. Well, wait a minute, why don't you just go through your stuff you need.
J. Aughenbaugh: A police officer saying, well, I don't know anything about jewelry, so we just sold it. Well, then perhaps you shouldn't have taken the jewelry.
N. Rodgers: We sold it for pennies on the dollar.
J. Aughenbaugh: I would be like, well, then perhaps you shouldn't take the stuff. Because if you're not experts in boats, then what the heck are you doing seizing boats?
N. Rodgers: Where are you going to put it? What are you going to do with it? How are you going to even take care of it? Aughie and I have some pretty serious problems with this overall program. Although, again, we would say that if a person like Escobar who goes to trial and is found guilty of a lot of heinous crimes, I don't mind taking his stuff. You know what? You played the game and you played it poorly and now you've lost. That's how that works.
J. Aughenbaugh: Give him due process and if at the end of the day he's found guilty, okay, fine.
N. Rodgers: Then take all his stuff, including his hippos. Do whatever you want to do. But this idea of I'm going to need your shoes, Mr. Escobar. Well, I have to walk to my car. Well, that's too bad. I'm going to need them right now.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Because your shoes were guilty of committing a crime. Wait, what? Yeah. We can probably get a pretty good amount of money for those shoes. You know what I mean?
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the thing.
N. Rodgers: It could encourage potentially those levels of abuses that are just not okay. They're not okay even if somebody's a criminal. If somebody's a criminal, like our guy Tims. I mean, he did a thing. He did a thing and he said he was guilty.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But he did a little thing and he got a giant hammer brought down on him, and he's like, but wait. That seems out of, okay, Mr. Aughenbaugh, we caught you jaywalking, so we're going to have you shot. Like wait, what? We try not to do that in criminal court. We try not to do this sort of excessive.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. There is a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. There's a prohibition on excessive fines. But when somebody is found guilty of drug possession for a couple hundred dollars worth of drugs.
N. Rodgers: You want to take their-
J. Aughenbaugh: Forty thousand dollar plus Range Rover. I'm kind of sort of thinking-
N. Rodgers: That's a little much.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's a little much. Again, there are too many examples to where asset forfeiture was not excessive. Again, I hate to keep on coming back to the Bernie Madoff example, but what that guy did.
N. Rodgers: He deserved it.
J. Aughenbaugh: He deserved it.
N. Rodgers: Then some. There was some money they couldn't find, because [inaudible] caviar and drunk champagne, and [inaudible]. All those assets were gone.
J. Aughenbaugh: If the crime that you committed was a financial Ponzi scheme, yeah, you're good at hiding assets.
N. Rodgers: There's probably stuff made.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the nature of the crime, that's one thing. But if we're talking about somebody who loans their car to their son and then the son uses the vehicle with his friends to commit armed robbery, why should the parents be punished if the parent didn't know that that was what the son was going to use the car for?
N. Rodgers: Most people's kids don't say I'm going to commit armed robbery. I'll be back in a couple of hours.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Hey, mom, can I borrow the car?
N. Rodgers: I want to go rob a bank. Your mom's going to say, no.
J. Aughenbaugh: I keep on thinking back to the negotiations between me and my mom when I wanted to borrow the car. I basically had to swear a blood oath with a detailed itinerary and if I was more than just a minute or two late, I would lose access to the vehicle for a month.
N. Rodgers: You probably technically at some point agreed to give her Mac. Your first born. You know what I mean? Like you probably at some point agreed to like, okay, I'll give you. That and to the conservative point of view of property matters.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Property matters. You don't get to live in a capitalist society where you tell everybody that they got to bootstrap up into the middle or upper middle class, and they got to buy stuff and they got to be whatever. You don't get to tell people that and then take their stuff. That's not okay. If we know that assets are what help people pass things on from generation to generation, which we do know, [inaudible] .
J. Aughenbaugh: That's huge in families of color.
N. Rodgers: They have been deprived of that for 200 years.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's what they've been told is part of the American dream. You work hard.
N. Rodgers: You own certain things.
J. Aughenbaugh: You achieve middle-class status.
N. Rodgers: Give those things to your kids.
J. Aughenbaugh: Kids. They won't have it as rough as you did. Sorry, kids, I can't go ahead and give you the house that you were born and raised in, because the Feds just seized it.
N. Rodgers: It's wrong.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's wrong. That's wrong on so many levels.
N. Rodgers: It contributes to the overall problem with people of color building wealth and building assets.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then Nia, we act shocked when people of color and poor people say, I don't trust the system. Really? We're shocked by this?
N. Rodgers: Well, and can I just throw out here that if property can be seized at any moment, then property becomes less meaningful.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If there is a problematic situation in your city, and you decide, and not you personally, but folks a group decide to riot, it can't be surprising that there's property damage.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: If what the government has told you is that property can be seized at any moment and nothing is really yours, then why would you have any respect for the idea of property or ownership if you've been told that you can't rely on that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Once that gets devalued, then we should not be surprised that we have communities that have been oppressed that go ahead and say, well, we're never going to own it anyways.
N. Rodgers: Or even if we do own it, you can take it at any moment, and make us work to get it back rather than the other way around. Well, I'm not happy not, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. But again, listeners, think about what Nia said just a few moments ago. What we're suggesting here is that there is some value to the program or programs, but like many things that the government does, we have now enough evidence to suggest that significant improvements need to be made. These improvements are constitutional, theoretical, and very practical.
N. Rodgers: Like the president, yet another thing for you to help me take care of.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, and elected officials, Nia, sometimes you like to joke. If elected officials are listening, you need to work on this. Now, of course, I don't know how many are listening, but-
N. Rodgers: You need to work on this.
J. Aughenbaugh: We need to work on this, because there are very troublesome aspects to this program. Thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
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