Legalizing pot makes police departments poorer due to fewer asset forfeitures
According to a January 9 Wall Street Journal article, the legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado may mean that cops have less money to play with. When weed was illegal, police departments could cash in via civil asset forfeiture—they’d raid grow operations and dealers and seize cash and other kinds of property. Those seizures provided both a financial incentive to prioritize drug crimes and a financial perk for departments. Now, presumably, there will be fewer marijuana raids, thus less money for the cops. Washington state hasn’t earmarked any of the tax revenue soon to be coming in from the legal weed market to go to law enforcement, and Colorado may send some of their new dollars towards the cops, but not necessarily—in both states, millions of dollars normally spent on law enforcement may disappear as a consequence of the end of prohibition.
The specifics of forfeiture laws vary from state to state, but generally speaking police can take large amounts of cash (often anything over $10,000) from defendants based only on the suspicion that a big chunk of currency found during, say, a traffic stop, might be drug profits. It can also be chillingly easy for cops to take your property through asset forfeiture if a family member you live with is dealing drugs. The Department of Justice is generally very generous about sharing funds—as long as there’s tangential federal involvement in a case, the Feds take 20 percent of the assets forfeited and the rest goes to the local cops—so police departments are strongly encouraged to go after drug dealers; not only do they get photo ops with “dope on the table,” they can keep the majority of the profits from the sale of seized homes, vehicles, and property. (Not to mention that cash.) Often the onus is on the owner of the property to prove that it wasn’t involved in a crime, which can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor.
If this sounds like bullshit, or possibly theft, or at least very bad policy, you’re not alone in thinking that. But it’s the way the law has been since the 1980s, and there hasn’t been enough of a public outcry to reform it—but as it turns out, legalizing marijuana helps slow down the asset forfeiture machine as well. The WSJ piece reports that departments in Washington and Colorado may have to make cuts, particularly to multi-jurisdictional narcotics squads like the one in Snohomish County, Washington, that has raised up to $1 million in forfeiture funds in some years. (In Snohomish, they even keep some of their law enforcement vehicles on a patch of former pot-growing land that was taken in a forfeiture operation.)
There’s a long way to go before the warped incentives of asset forfeiture laws are fixed—even in Colorado and Washington, cops can go after unlicensed marijuana growers or step up their investigations into still-illicit narcotics such as heroin or cocaine. (And no doubt some departments will do just that.) Still, marijuana legalization will have yet another benefit if it forces police departments to slim down and cut a few million dollars of drug-war fat. It could even halt the seemingly unstoppable slide towards full-on police militarization just a bit.
http://m.vice.com/read/legalizing-pot-makes-police-departments-poorer
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Pity. 
