Apr 20, 2022
Guest: Dan Greenberg, Competitive Enterprise Institute
The idea that police can seize property — cash, jewelry, cars or even houses — without ever charging someone with a crime seems like something that would happen in some corrupt soviet satellite rather than American cities.
And yet, it happens every day with police using a practice known as “civil asset forfeiture.” Billions of dollars are seized from private citizens every year — often with police never having to prove in the court of law that such property was connected to any sort of criminal wrongdoing. Deputy General Counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute Dan Greenberg’s new paper, Five Myths of Civil Asset Forfeiture, dives into how such an un-American policing practice has become worryingly commonplace among the law enforcement community and what we can do to fix it.