Column
2017-13 (4/17/17)
It is easy to find government's
failures. Its successes are a bit harder to smoke out of their
holes. I recently found one of the successes in the most unlikely of
places, an op-ed from the “New York Times.”
The success story comes from Pagedale,
Missouri, a community of about 3,300 near St. Louis. You know that
the success has to be spectacular to get noticed far away in New York
city.
Pagedale has its own court which costs
about $90,000 a year. Fines and cost collected by the court exceed a
quarter million dollars per year. That is nearly a 300 percent
return on investment. If that isn't success, What is? If a business
hauled in that kind of profit, someone would be screaming for a
Congressional investigation.
The dastardly deeds that can get the
city into a pagedalions pocket include not walking on the right side
of crosswalks; barbecuing in the front yard, except on national
holidays; and failing to have a screen on every door. It is also a
violation if the enforcer does not like the look of a home owner’s
drapes or if the window blinds are not neatly hung.
The Pagedale court handled 5,781 cases
in 2013. That is about 1.75 cases per resident. The money collected
adds up to about $75 per resident.
Policing for profit wasn't invented by
Pagedale. Speed traps have been around almost as long as
automobiles. Michigan still has a law enacted to cut down on speed
traps. The law banned speed limits of less than 25 miles per hour.
It has been amended to create a few exceptions. Still, most speeding
violations are much about revenue and little about safety.
Code violations and speed traps are
small potatoes in government's quest for other people's money. The
big leaguers play at the asset forfeiture table. Why bother with
hundreds of dollars when tens of thousands, or even millions, are
there for the taking?
In civil asset forfeiture the
enforcers skip over people and go straight for the loot. They file a
claim that certain assets may have been involved in a crime. The
next steep is seizure of the assets. The owner can attempt to get
his presumed guilty assets back if he can jump through all of the
right hoops.
The first hoop usually is posting
bond for the privilege of trying to reclaim his own property. To its
credit Michigan did eliminate this hoop. Posting bond can be a
challenge when all of the owner's money and other assets have been
taken from him.
The national government has developed
a nasty habit of seizing bank accounts for the dastardly deed of the
account owner making too many deposits of less than $10 thousand. A
sheriff in Florida took cash from anyone caught in his county
carrying more than a hundred dollars. He claimed that anyone
carrying $100 or more must be dealing in drugs.
In most cases of civil asset
forfeiture no person is even charged with a crime, leave alone
convicted. Civil asset forfeiture should be abolished. A criminal
conviction should be prerequisite to forfeiture. Unfortunately
abolition isn't going to happen soon.
Squeezing the the profit from fines
and forfeitures would greatly discourage enforcers from pursuing
money instead of criminals. No one involved in collecting fines and
forfeitures should be allowed to benefit from the collection.
All fines and forfeitures should be
put in a separate fund where they couldn't be spent by or for
government. The money could be used to reduce taxes, compensate
crime victims, or some other worthy purpose. With the profit removed
from fines and forfeitures, don't expect the fund to ever grow large.
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Copyright
2017
Albert
D. McCallum
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