“I must report against the law,” Terry Richmond, the protagonist of the presently fashionable Netflix film Insurgent Ridge, tells Jessica Sims, a police officer in a small Louisiana city. That crime was freeway theft: the theft of $36,000 in money. However the perpetrators have been two of Sims’ personal colleagues, and the money seize was completely authorized.
Whereas the main points of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s screenplay are fictional, the broad outlines of Richmond’s predicament are sadly acquainted. The movie vividly illustrates the unjust penalties of civil asset forfeiture, a system of legalized larceny that permits police to grab property that’s allegedly tainted by crime.
The U.S. Supreme Court docket has facilitated that racket each by approving the final idea and by giving cops broad leeway to cease and search vacationers. In 1996, for instance, the Court docket dominated that the Fourth Modification permits police to drag over a motorist each time they’ve possible trigger to consider he has dedicated a visitors violation, even when that’s not the actual motivation for the cease.
Richmond is stopped whereas biking by city on his option to publish bail for a cousin who was arrested for marijuana possession. Whereas the precise nature of Richmond’s alleged visitors violation is unclear, the cops finally say they’re letting him go together with a warning.
Earlier than that occurs, nevertheless, the officers search his backpack, ostensibly for weapons, and discover a bag of cash—the proceeds from Richmond’s sale of his curiosity in a Chinese language restaurant, which he says the police can confirm by contacting the restaurant’s proprietor. A few of the cash is for his cousin’s bail, he explains, whereas the remaining is earmarked for a pickup truck he plans to purchase for a boat-hauling enterprise.
The cops however hold the money. “We’ll maintain on to this cash,” one says. “We have concluded from our investigation that that is drug forex.”
Richmond, who has dedicated no crime, is astonished by this flip of occasions. However as a sympathetic courthouse worker explains to him, police can seize property with out accusing the proprietor of against the law as a result of a civil forfeiture is notionally an motion in opposition to the asset itself.
Richmond additionally learns that difficult a forfeiture sometimes prices greater than the property is value and that police departments use seizures to complement their very own budgets. And he discovers that police could also be prepared to return a portion of property they seize if the proprietor lets them hold the remaining, particularly if they might have bother justifying a forfeiture in courtroom.
Actual-life forfeiture abuses ceaselessly resemble Richmond’s expertise, that includes pretextual visitors stops, questionable searches, and the discovery of cash that police view as inherently suspicious. Cops bent on seizing money are likely to dismiss the proprietor’s rationalization of its supply, whether or not it is poker winnings, the sale of a automotive, or a retiree’s life financial savings, and its meant use, whether or not it is movie manufacturing bills, a down fee on a music studio, or—as in Insurgent Ridge and a number of precise circumstances—a truck buy.
Obscure allegations, generally together with cut-and-pasted boilerplate, are one other widespread function of forfeiture circumstances. So are extortionate calls for, euphemistically often called “mitigation” affords, that homeowners give up a few of their property to keep away from a pricey, extended, and iffy authorized battle.
On the root of all of it is the revenue motive created by statutes that allow regulation enforcement companies hold a giant share of the proceeds (in Louisiana, 80 p.c) from forfeitures they pursue. As Insurgent Ridge suggests, the heads of these companies generally use their loot for questionable functions, spending it on booze, marijuana, prostitutes, live performance tickets, and residential safety programs.
Even when police and prosecutors comply with relevant spending pointers, the system is inherently corrupting. It encourages them to give attention to elevating income as an alternative of defending public security.
Whereas Terry Richmond’s forfeiture downside is lifelike, his resolution, which includes appreciable extralegal self-help, just isn’t. In the actual world, the reply lies in abolishing legal guidelines that flip cops into robbers.
© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
