A Militarized Police Force Willing to Rain Bullets In Order to Make It Rain Cash

 Ryan Metzger - 

The New Jim Crow - Relevance

Civil Forfeiture, The Enemy of The People (Rawlinson)

    Wow!... This book has left me speechless more times than any other piece of literature or information I have ever read, and even that may be an understatement. Alexanders take on an informational book has really brought it to a whole new level with her complex comparisons and facts about the systemic racism that plagues our country. Throughout chapter two and three, the level of detail and scrupulous information is unparalleled by anything else I have read thus far in my life. Chapters two and three talked about extreme problems in our policing system like: the militarization of our police forces, for profit policing including civil forfeiture, and other blood boiling acts of racism like simply ignoring the entire 4th amendment of the Constitution. Of all of those topics presented, this blog is mainly going to focus on for profit policing.

     Civil Forfeiture is going to be something I mention many times throughout this blog, so for those of you who do not know what it is - civil forfeiture is the act of taking someone's personal property after they are suspected to have commit a crime. You may also wonder, is this even legal? And the answer to that it is yes, it is 100% legal because of implicitly racist loopholes in our justice system. In order to understand these loopholes, you have to go back into the history of what civil forfeiture was originally made for.

     Like many of the systemically racist problems facing our society right now, civil forfeiture started in 1970, at the height of The War on Drugs. Civil forfeiture was disguised as a way for police officers to seize large amounts of cash and drugs from drug cartels all across the U.S. in order to cripple their funding. But as we know from the last reading, the CIA was actually one of the largest traffickers of drugs themselves, and was using the war on drugs as a way to cover up illegal operations in South America (for the full backstory go read my first blog on The War on Drugs). 

    So why did the government introduce the Civil Forfeiture laws if they were not actually made to prevent cartels from trafficking drugs? Civil forfeiture had a few different objectives: civil forfeiture was made to seize what little the black communities still had during the war on drugs, and to bring more money into the funding of police departments. Somewhere along the line in The War on Drugs, the police realized that all of the cash, drugs, and property they were seizing could be sold for a profit, which in turn would allow them to buy new equipment and get paid higher wages. From this moment on, the definition of policing changed forever, no longer was it to protect the community, it was now to find as many illegal behaviors as possible in order to seize as much money as possible.

 

    "Suddenly, police departments were capable of increasing the size of their budgets, quite substantially, simply by taking the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales" (Alexander p.79). 

 

    Civil forfeiture was further fueled by racist policies like stop and frisk, lack of needing search warrants, and racially profiled traffic stops. Not only this, but a now fully militarized police force willing to raid peoples houses from suspicion they have drugs has led to the brutal murder of many innocent Black Americans, and the theft of billions of dollars from Black communities.

 

 "The transformation from "community policing" to "military policing," began in 1981, when President Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, intelligence, research, weaponry, and other equipment for drug interdiction" (Alexander p.77).

Unsurprisingly, civil forfeiture and racial profiling were systemically used against predominantly Black communities, especially poor Black communities.  

 

     "Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least fifteen states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men"(Alexander p.98).

 

    As seen from that quote, civil forfeiture is not a thing of the passed, even to this day civil forfeitures are being abused against the Black community and other minority communities in order to systemically steal their wealth. Americas justice system was built off of the idea that you are innocent until proven guilty, yet for Black Americans, if they are even "suspected" of having committed a crime, their house, car, and money can be seized from them with no actual evidence convicting them of their crimes. If this is not blatant racism, I don't know what anyone would consider racism. Literally creating and abusing laws to steal innocent Black Americans property  is absolutely horrendous, and though some may say this is the opposite of what America was built to represent. I'm starting to think that maybe this is what America represents, a country full of racist policies that cripple and destroy the Black community, and full of racial injustucies that are never solved.

 

What do you guys think about this? Do you think that policies like civil forfeiture are direct infringements upon the constitution, or maybe even what other policies you think violate what America was founded on? Comment Below