California Lawmakers Move to Limit Seizures by Police

California lawmakers took a major step toward reining in a controversial practice that has allowed law enforcement agencies to keep cash and other property seized during traffic stops -- even if the owner was never convicted of a crime.

On a bipartisan 66-8 vote, the state Assembly passed Senate Bill 443 Monday, nearly a year after the same house soundly defeated the measure. The difference? This year, powerful law enforcement groups that lobbied hard in 2015 to kill SB 443 stayed neutral after intense negotiations and some significant changes.

"The fundamental question is, should the government be able to permanently take your cash or other properties without proving you have committed a crime?" said Theshia Naidoo, a staff attorney with the Drug Policy Alliance, which co-sponsored the measure.

Naidoo and other supporters said the measure, if signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, would be among the most sweeping recent reforms to what's known as asset forfeiture. The practice allows police to seize property if they believe it could be connected to illegal activity -- even if they never end up charging the owner with a crime. It gained favor by law enforcement agencies during the drug war as a way to starve drug traffickers of their cash flow even if there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute.

But critics say the law has been used by some police agencies as a way to pad their own budgets with the property of innocent people -- often immigrants, the poor or others with limited means to fight to get their money back.

A 2013 New Yorker piece detailed how a small town in Texas was among the jurisdictions aggressively using the practice to seize small amounts of cash from drivers who were often never even issued a traffic ticket. A 2014 investigation in the Washington Post uncovered how the practice surged after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks -- in large part because of a private company that was training police agencies across the country. The Post found more than $2.5 billion in cash seizures without search warrants or indictments from 2001 to 2014, and wrote that hundreds of government agencies appear to rely on the money to support their budgets even though they are not allowed to under federal law.

In California, law enforcement officials reaped more than $100 million in cash from the practice in 2014 alone. A Drug Policy Alliance report released last year found that the average value of those California seizures in 2013 was $5,145.

The bill passed by the Assembly requires police and prosecutors to secure a conviction before they can permanently seize cash or property worth less than $40,000. The version shot down in the Assembly last year would have required a conviction in nearly all cases, regardless of the value of the property; law enforcement officials complained that the measure would have undercut their ability to combat large drug trafficking organizations and would have decimated police and prosecutors' budgets.

The California measure attracted an odd mix of supporters, including Republican lawmakers and civil liberties proponents who often disagree. It was introduced and authored by liberal Los Angeles Democratic State Sen. Holly Mitchell, but championed in the state Assembly by Republican Assemblyman David Hadley of Torrance.

Hadley said he hopes the negotiations and compromise "can be a model for how we address many of complex challenges before us."

And Assemblyman Jay Obernolte, a Republican from Big Bear Lake, called the compromise "evidence of the process working"

"I think that the bill, SB 443, strikes a very appropriate balance between protecting the right of law enforcement to enforce the law on the one hand, and protecting unjustified seizure of property on the other," he said.

Only one lawmaker spoke against the measure in the Assembly. Assemblyman Jim Cooper, a Democrat representing Sacramento who also served in the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department before entering politics, warned that most drug dealers are not huge traffickers and said SB 443 will prevent police from going after those people.

Naidoo, the Drug Policy Alliance lawyer, said there's an "emerging bipartisan consensus" that reform is needed. She noted that this year alone, bills aimed at reining in asset forfeiture were introduced in 22 states and that eight states enacted what she called "substantial reforms."

If California's SB 443 becomes law, she said, it will be the most far-reaching change enacted this year.