What is policing for profit

In South Carolina and beyond, law enforcement agencies upgrade their cars, fly first-class, and buy absurd amounts of Gatorade seriously with forfeiture funds. Supporters of the practice claim that it allows them to thwart wealthy drug and gang kingpins and fight more high-level crime with the proceeds.

These relatively low-value seizures put property owners in a Catch because hiring a lawyer to fight the forfeiture case will cost more than the value of the lost property. All of this is in line with prior reporting on the subject: Other journalists investigating forfeiture have also uncovered discrimination and corruption. The officers searched the car, which was being driven by a Latino man. They found cash that the couple had with them to buy a used car, but no drugs.

Make no mistake: This is extortion. Civil asset forfeiture subverts constitutional principles, like protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, the presumption of innocence, and the right to due process. Louis Pub. Radio Jan. In St. Louis, officials promised to forgive nearly a quarter million outstanding warrants for traffic offenses in response to the protests. Nicholas J. Pistor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Oct. Two months after the protests began they flared again as a result of another form of profit-based policing when an off-duty police officer killed another black teenager, this time in the nearby town of Shaw.

Louis , St. This officer was being paid by a private company to patrol the area. Though he was not on duty, the company required him to wear his official uniform. Louis Oddity , St. Shaw is among many St. These businesses capitalize on the fact that wealthier neighborhoods like Shaw want and can afford more police.

In turn, towns can cut official funding to police while ensuring a separate source of income for officers. These trends of allocating police according to profit and criminalizing poverty to raise revenue extend well beyond St. Section A of this Chapter examines three examples of how governments raise revenue through policing.

Section B identifies how this trend perverts the role of police. Section C examines when these developments might be unlawful. In April , Tom Barrett was arrested for stealing a can of beer from a convenience store in Augusta, Georgia. Human Rights Watch , supra note 20, at 34— As Barrett began skipping meals to pay Sentinel, his protein levels dropped so much that he was ineligible to donate plasma.

Barrett was arrested and told by a judge that he could stay out of jail if he paid Sentinel several hundred dollars. Usage Fees. See, e. Laws Ann. Code Ann. Beth A. Code Crim. In Washington, a trial by twelve jurors requires double the fee of a trial by six jurors. Markadonatos v. In some of these schemes, fees are a way for prosecutors to avoid any inquiry into guilt.

For example, arrestees in Washington, D. District of Columbia, F. Prosecutors can get in on the action too by promising to suspend prosecution in exchange for a fee.

See Wayne A. Wright, Mercenary Criminal Justice , U. This change was specifically intended to offset a cut to prosecutor funding. Unlike plea bargains, these agreements require no finding or admission of guilt.

See generally Gerald E. Barron, City Bound 76—90 Hamilton, J. In , around a quarter of inmates said they owed court-imposed fines, restitution, or fees. In twelve states, over eighty percent of surveyed inmates reported these debts. See id. These figures are based on prison inmates serving felony prison sentences, so the rates may be higher when counting probationers not sentenced to prison.

The exceptional sovereign authority to proscribe and punish crime makes law enforcement a uniquely lucrative monopoly. These fees serve to criminalize poverty and severely amplify the burden that criminal punishment imposes on poor communities. Failure to abide by probation or parole terms can make a debtor ineligible for public housing benefits. See 7 U. When coupled with these debilitating collateral consequences, these debts impose an enduring burden that can exceed the penalty imposed for a crime.

For-Profit Probation Supervision. These companies charge cities nothing and depend entirely on the fees they charge probationers. These fees can amount to double or triple the fine directly imposed by the court. The traditional purpose of probation is to provide an opportunity for criminal offenders to earn relief from incarceration if they can meet regularly with a probation officer and satisfy various judge-ordered benchmarks for good behavior.

See generally Howard Abadinsky, Probation and Parole 8th ed. In this arrangement, probation offi-cers are usually court employees, so their conduct is both protected and governed by the principles that apply to other judicial officers.

See infra note and accompanying text. But a business whose only work is to extract fees from probationers is simply a debt collector backed by carceral power.

See generally Stillman, supra note Unlike when probation officers work for a court, local governments have little control over how fee schemes are structured or which probationers are hounded.

Yet these companies threaten probationers with incarceration or arrest, often via coercion from state officials. Town of Harpersville, No.

Shelby Cnty. July 11, order granting a motion for a preliminary injunction hearing. Then, when a company decides a probationer is not complying with probation terms or is no longer worth the cost of supervising from among all the probationers who are also not complying , the company can obtain an arrest warrant and summon the probationer to court.

If a probationer fails to appear often because the probation company has been threatening jail time based on the failure to pay fines , she can be jailed for contempt.

If the probationer does show up, the decision to revoke probation is directly informed by the recommendation and representations of the probation company, with the probationer rarely represented by counsel. Civil Forfeiture. These seizures can happen even when the property owner is never arrested or is acquitted of the underlying crime , so long as the police assert that the seized property was probably used in a crime.

See The Palmyra, 25 U. One Assortment of 89 Firearms, U. If property owners do not come to court to contest a seizure within a certain time, police sell the property and keep the proceeds.

United States , U. See Catherine E. Civil forfeiture lets governments aggrandize their criminal authority without actually operating through criminal law.

For example, police seize family homes based on allegations that a resident sold drugs or stop motorists whom they suspect might be transporting cash even for completely benign purposes and then seize assets based on suspicion that criminals often use these kinds of assets. Post , Sept. These efforts are often the product of sophisticated coordination between state and federal law enforcement officials.

The legality of these seizures generally turns on the conceit that a forfeiture action is against property, not a person. This conceit has operated for centuries without any requirement that the government prove any underlying crime. Louis County.

How profit incentives influence policing in Ferguson. How to reform municipal courts in St. Louis to stop profiting off of low-income, black residents. Timeline: Policing for profit. Are middle Tennessee police profiting off drug trade? NewsChannel5 Nashville. Fighting crime or raising revenue? Testing opposing views of forfeiture. Arlington, VA: Institute for Justice. The welfare effects of civil forfeiture.

Review of Behavioral Economics, 4 2 , — Despite the billions generated, our data indicate the typical individual cash forfeiture is relatively small—only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. This suggests that, aside from a few high-profile cases, forfeiture often does not target drug kingpins or big-time financial fraudsters.