perfidy

While everyone was (justifiably) freaking out over the stupendously bad Supreme Court ruling in Kelo, other property rights are taking a beating as well. Richard Diamond reports on the accelerating trend of state and local governments taking you car with the flimsiest of excuses.

Just days after the Supreme Court ruled that cities could take homes from private owners to build strip malls, the US House of Representatives issued a non-binding condemnation of the court’s decision. While the publicity firestorm could eventually result in stronger laws against public seizure of private property, state governments are happy to continue confiscating automobiles like property rights never existed.

The number of excuses given for government automobile seizures is expanding dramatically. Since 1991, the Commonwealth of Virginia has permanently seized 6,450 automobiles for crimes ranging from drug-running to “frequenting a bawdy place.” Now other jurisdictions are deploying new technologies to seize cars for the most minor offenses imaginable.

A key technology in the desperate fight against citizens with unpaid parking tickets or library fines is something known as APNR, or Automatic Number Plate Recognition. This system was originally developed to recover stolen vehicles. A small camera snaps a picture of a license plate, and a computer instantly performs a background check. In a large scale test in the UK last year, police took 28 million pictures, stopped over a hundred thousand motorists, and recovered eleven hundred vehicles. All to the good. But while they were at it, they also issued "51,000 tickets to drivers for offenses ranging from speeding, to drinking from a water bottle, to talking on a mobile phone." A system designed to recover stolen vehicles discovers its killer app: a honking big revenue stream for government.

Leave it to the Americans to take a good idea and take it to its logical endpoint. Just around the corner from me in Arlington, VA, city treasurer Frank O’Leary said in a TV interview, "I rub my hands together in great glee and anticipation... I think it’s beautiful. It gives us a whole new dimension to collection." Combining the new technology with the existing practice of vehicle seizure in complete disregard of the Constitution is the new way of doing business. Says Richard,

Before ANPR-facilitated seizure was deemed acceptable, a screwed-up parking ticket database was a minor hassle. Now it’s a Constitutional nightmare, mocking fundamental and cherished legal protections: the right to be presumed innocent, the right to a trial by jury, the right not to have excessive fines imposed, the right not to be searched or have your property seized without reason or warrant, and the right to due process.

States conducting automotive seizure rely on a doctrine found in a 1931 Supreme Court ruling stating "It is the property which is preceded against, and, by resort to a legal fiction, held guilty and condemned as though it were conscious instead of inanimate and insentient." In other words, it’s OK to confiscate your car because you forgot to pay an $85 parking ticket; you didn’t commit the crime, your car did. In 1980, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the concept, convicting a 1976 Mercedes Benz 280S of drug-running. The Bill of Rights, the court argued, applies to people not to cars.

That ruling - the lynchpin of the RICO civil forfeiture process - makes a complete mockery of any rational conception of property rights. There are whole websites devoted to cataloguing the evils of civil forfeiture. While these laws were intended as a way of punishing slippery drug dealers and mafiosi, as is the way with all law enforcement powers they were soon used against other targets. And eventually, against ordinary citizens.

If the police take your car, they do not have to prove that it violated some RICO statute. You have to prove that your vehicle was "innocent." And now that these new laws are allowing the police to take cars for things like unpaid library fees (and who among is is without sin on that count?) basically they can take your car for any reason whatsoever. The only way in which this is different from auto theft is that the police are the thieves.

Many people say that the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. But property rights seem to be on a slip 'n' slide right now, headed for the abyss.

[wik] Here's a good summary of the asset forfeiture phenomenon.