Records Broken - CAF & Homelessness
Two things were reported but not sufficiently connected in roughly the last month:
In America, the amount of Civil Forfeiture exceeded all civilian theft and burglary combined. (Source)
Homelessness is projected to be at its all-time-high in 2024 with more than 650k people in America living unhoused. (Source)
In my own city of Chicago, doing hard, thankless, high-quality work was Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts who put together a report called ‘I Don’t Know Why I Am Here - Observations from Chicago’s Civil Asset Forfeiture Courtrooms.’ - LINK.
So Grateful For These Organizations And The Work They DoMy American readers have no doubt received their ballots and looked at the list of judges and speculated on what their day-to-day looks like. Please skim through the report. You will learn how judges contend with suffering, confused people. These aren’t criminals. These are regular people pushing their way through a tangle of towing fees, storage fees, and obscure, punitive ordinances. Let me remind you, this is not criminal forfeiture that takes place after a conviction. This doesn’t require convictions or even charges. This is the government taking ownership of private citizen’s property if that person has been suspected of a crime.
When we as a society allow law enforcement to keep the proceeds of this type of asset forfeiture, we are incentivizing them to go out and “scout” for vehicles and assets to bolster their own budget. There’s a perverse incentive and we’re naive if we think it will not be abused.
Laws written to recover the assets of kingpins like John Gotti are used to take vehicles away from people struggling to make a living.
In America, with its car-centric infrastructure, taking a car from someone is like taking their pants and expecting them to go to work. It’s infuriating, it’s wrong. Take their car and you have fast-tracked them to losing housing.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing and talks of constitutionality and due process. In the May 2024 Supreme court ruling on CAF, Kavanaugh wrote: “The Constitution requires a timely forfeiture hearing; the Constitution does not also require a separate preliminary hearing.”
Whatever, mate. He, and, a lot of us, frankly don’t want to see what’s plainly there.
Law enforcement, facilitated by legislators and by extension, us, steals more from Americans than burglars and robbers. More people on the brink will not be able to go to work, to make mortgage and rent payments, to fight against foreclosure and eviction, and will end up as people experiencing homelessness where they will then be perceived as having “failed” rather than as having been sinned against.
I’m not a lawyer; I’m not a data scientist. But I know that 1) & 2) are related. I know that we are punishing people for poverty, not for criminality, and that is wrong.
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