--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [Introduction music fades out] Today, we're talking about civil forfeiture, a system that allows police to seize your property without ever charging you with a crime. And you probably won't get it back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm joined by Nathaniel Carey, an investigative reporter for the Greenville News in South Carolina. Nathaniel, thanks for being on the show.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: Thanks for having me, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's start with the basics. What is civil forfeiture, and how does it work?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: Basically, it's a system that allows police and sheriff's officers to seize cash and property. They're not charging a person with a crime. They're charging an object with a crime.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: So many times you'll have a case that is the city of Greenville against $10,000 on an iPhone. We've seen police seize PlayStations and Xboxes and television sets, a boat, jewelry, firearms, even an RV.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And this property can be taken when you're not even charged with any criminal offense at all. It's a civil matter, and it's completely separate from any potential criminal offense.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why does this exist? Why are cops allowed to do this?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: The idea and the intent behind the law is that this gives cops a tool to go after drug rings. If you take the drugs, those drugs are just going to be replaced. If you take the profits, then that strikes at the heart of the drug ring.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: But what we've found is the number of cases where there may not be any drugs involved at all. And many, many times, if there is a charge and even a conviction, it's for a possession. And so where's the enterprise? That's what defense attorneys have told us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You and your team just put out a big investigation on this kind of crazy tool police have called civil forfeiture. How much property, how much money has been seized in South Carolina?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: We found that police agencies across the state over this three-year period had seized more than $17 million from people. That's not including vehicles, houses, electronics, all of which they can seize and then sell and use those proceeds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So $17 million just in cash?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: That's right. $17 million just in cash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in South Carolina, 95% of those proceeds go to law enforcement. 75% goes right back to the agency that made the seizure. And 20% goes to the prosecuting agency that handled the case.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: What does law enforcement end up doing with the cash?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Under South Carolina law, they are supposed to use the cash for fighting crime. So they can use it for all sorts of investigations. They can purchase equipment with it. They've used it for drug buy money. They can use it for fuel for their helicopters or for parts for their helicopters.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And that's not something that's allowed. They aren't supposed to use it for ongoing operating expenses. It should be just considered a bonus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when we reached out to police officers and police chiefs at the end of our investigation just to run these findings by them and make sure we had everything straight. And we asked them, you know, what would happen if there was reform and you didn't have access to this money anymore?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: Police chiefs were telling us they'd have to shut down their canine units. Or they'd have to drastically redo their operating budgets. And so they're obviously counting on this funding.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a direct incentive for them to find people's money and take it. That's the crux of the issue. So if there's a questionable case, they're going to lean on the side of taking the money and we'll sort this out later.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: In fact, that's exactly what at least two police chiefs have told us. So if someone takes, let's say, ten thousand dollars of your money because they found you with an ounce of weed in South Carolina, how do you try and get it back?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If they take ten thousand dollars, you actually have a little bit better chance, huh? Because there's an amount that's high enough that you may be able to convince an attorney to take your case.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And most of these cases are actually much smaller. 55% of the time, they've taken less than $1,000. And we found more than 2,000 instances where they seized less than $500.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if they netted 17 million, that means they just took a ton of money from a ton of people.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: That's right. That's where we get more than 4,000 subjects where they're seizing money from. And so when it's less than $10,000, when it's 40 bucks, $200, $1,000, how do you try and get your money back?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're basically out of luck. People will go to the defense attorney and they'll say, hey, here's my case. This was taken unjustly. This was my tip money from a pizza delivery or I just got off work at the bar. And they'll have a case, but the cost involved and the time involved for an attorney makes it not worth it.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And so they have to turn these cases down. And individuals are then left to try to go at it alone and try to figure out this complicated civil court process by themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who ends up being hurt by this in South Carolina? You looked at 4,000 cases. What did you find?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: One of the things we were able to find through this process was the race of almost everybody who was involved in one of these cases. And we found that 71% of all civil forfeiture cases in South Carolina involved African Americans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Despite the fact that African Americans make up just 27% of the state's population, 65% of the time, these cases were involving black men.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And if you were black in South Carolina and you wanted to get your money back, you had half as much chance of getting it back as if you were white.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up, privateers, slavery, and moonshine. The origin story of civil forfeiture.
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--:-- Nathaniel Carey: Nathaniel, how is civil forfeiture even legal? Has it always been legal?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this actually goes back all the way to the American colonies. Great Britain wanted every ship that was headed towards America to pay tariffs to England.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And if you wanted to go out of the way and not have your goods be taxed, they set up this legal system where they could seize the goods that this ship captain was bringing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that where forfeiture in America really got its start.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: These privateers would patrol the seas and they would seize these ships and seize the goods from the ships.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That kind of died down into the 20th century when prohibition saw a resurgence in forfeiture. Law enforcement would go after the moonshine.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And they would go after the vehicles that were transporting the moonshine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then it began to die down again until really into the 1970s and early 80s with the war on drugs.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: The federal government led the way with using civil forfeiture to go after the proceeds of kingpins and big money laundering operations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's where our modern era of civil asset forfeiture really took off.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: How does it evolve or perhaps devolve from this British shipping concern to this drug kingpin thing to like getting called to a guy's house who's just been burglarized and then taking his rent money?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We spoke to a man named David Smith. He was a federal prosecutor with the Justice Department in the 1970s and 80s.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And he's the one who first began experimenting with using civil forfeiture to target drug dealers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what he found was when he would go to local and state agencies and say, we're trying to go after these people's money. We think that's a good way to go after the criminals and break up these rings.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: He wasn't finding much success. So what the Justice Department did was create a system where they would share these profits.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And once they created that system, everybody wanted to be involved in this.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And that's where we end up with the system that we have today, where they are incentivized to go after the cash when they come across it, especially in drug cases, but sometimes not even in drug cases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I feel like that's one historical timeline, the historical timeline of civil forfeiture in the United States and specifically South Carolina.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: What about the other timeline that's important here, the timeline of infringing on the civil rights of black people in South Carolina?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's this clear line from slavery to the Civil War and to civil rights and to civil forfeiture.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: In South Carolina, this goes back to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. He was marching through the south to Savannah, and he promised these freed slaves they'd receive 40 acres of tillable ground from all of these plantations that had been abandoned and confiscated from Confederates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And many of these African Americans who had just been emancipated, they were given army mules left over to give them a head start in this new lifestyle, and large numbers of them stayed.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And after President Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson returned this land to its previous owners.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that left these freed slaves to tend land that had been ripped from them. And they became sharecroppers and often worked for their former owners.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: Fast forward decades later, and communities use these covenants to create whites-only neighborhoods.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They prevented black people from buying homes in the appreciating part of town.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And banks used redlining of areas that they considered poor investments, and it would give them the ability to reject loans to some black residents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so there's been this distrust of the system, and that actually leads to more of our African-American residents who carry cash.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: More often, African-Americans in South Carolina are either unbanked or they do not use their bank account.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And more often, black South Carolinians are working jobs that pay in cash, such as tourism-related jobs or food services or industry jobs.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And so just historically, there's more African Americans, particularly in our rural areas, who are carrying cash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that just leads to more opportunity for them to have their cash seized.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: So it's almost like these two timelines converge at civil forfeiture, this history of moonshine and the colonies and bootlegging and the history of oppression of black people in South Carolina.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It certainly seems that that's the case. When you have 7 out of 10 cases of civil forfeiture are involving black people in South Carolina, there's really only one reason that it would be that great of a disparity.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: Seizing people's cash and property and prized possessions without charging them with a crime, man, it seems downright un-American.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That exactly what one professor that we talked to told us. This seems like it un... it doesn't follow the property rights that we all believe that we have as Americans.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: And it's because it's taking place separate of any sort of a criminal case. You could be found completely innocent on the criminal side, and yet your assets can still be seized and forfeited.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You talked to any number of cops in your investigation. What do they think of the reporting you came up with?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: They see this system as being fair in their eyes. What we've heard from police is that these people have an opportunity to recover their assets. They can take us to court if they believe we unjustly did this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But by and large, what we found is that doesn't actually happen. It certainly doesn't happen with every case.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: What police fear is that they're going to lose a source of funding that's not going to be made up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think that the cops in South Carolina have ever been confronted with the actual numbers. And they'd never, until our series began to roll out, have never seen the scale or the disparities that are involved in asset forfeiture.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: So I think that awareness may open some eyes and change some minds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Would you mind repeating some of those numbers for us before we go?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: 71% of cases were targeting African-American residents, and the vast majority of those, 65% of all cases, were against African-American men in South Carolina.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: African-Americans only make up 27% of our state's population, and African American men make up 13%.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: So there's this wide disparity between the population numbers of South Carolina and the numbers that we're finding in our asset forfeiture cases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can see how this is a tool that police would need to go after drug kingpins who were, you know, otherwise elusive.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: But getting back to the story of Isaiah that you told up top, I mean, this is a guy who called the cops for help, and they took his rent money, and he ends up getting evicted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did he get any justice in the end?
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: It's been almost three years since he lost that money. He's tried to take actions to try to get it back after the fact, but that case is already closed and done with, so he's made no progress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just crazy how they can screw you over in such a short period of time. But then it'll take 30 to 90 days at minimum for them to just fix what they destroyed.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: But then by the time I gain that information from my lawyer, you tell me that, oh, it's too late. The money's already lost in the system. Like, what?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last week, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits excessive fines, applies to the practice of civil forfeiture.
--:-- Nathaniel Carey: The ruling will make it harder for states and police departments to use civil forfeiture for regular funding, and it also allows defendants to argue that seizing their property is excessive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To be clear, though, this does not stop civil forfeiture, but it is a ruling that might lay the groundwork for sweeping change in the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Nathaniel Carey, he reported this story along with Anna Lee and Mike Ellis for the Greenville News in South Carolina.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Irene Noguchi, Bridget McCarthy, Noam Hassenfeld, Luke Vanderplug, and Afim the Dream Shapiro make the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Siona Petros is our intern.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Shouts to Kainaz Amaria at Vox for her help with this one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Aspiration for supporting the show today.
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