Civil asset forfeiture laws are mostly terrible. The “war on drugs” has not been won, and time and time again we read about how egregious and abusive the application of civil asset forfeiture is when employed by our law enforcement agencies. Loopholes are created to insure that even somewhat positive outcomes in civil forfeiture laws are corrupted. The costs to the tax payer and to American citizens is large. The reason law enforcement supports asset forfeiture laws is that they budget according to asset forfeiture goals. According to a new report, Tennessee’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security has some expensive tastes.
The inspector general report released on Thursday said it had "identified several areas of improvement" with the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security's use of the program. Namely, the report took issue with $112,614 in funds spent on food with just over $110,000 spent on catering from March 2014-March 2016 based on funds from the program.
The report said the Tennessee law enforcement department had no procedure to track equitable sharing requests and no designated account for expenditures. It also cited problems with the department's reports, saying one came late and two came without signatures from Tennessee officials.
It’s hungry work fighting off drug cartels and “bad hombres.” Fancy hungry work. But listen, while it’s against guidelines to use forfeiture monies toward food and beverages, the DSHS controller has a good excuse.
According to auditors, the DSHS Controller claimed “that he did not know these expenditures were unallowable,” though the guidelines are publically accessible online. But in response to the audit, the DSHS said it will fully reimburse the federal government for the $112,614 officials wrongly spent.
Our law enforcement agencies steal more from citizens than burglars do. Billions of dollars have been “seized” from people who have never been charged with a crime. Billions. Our current evil tree elf, Jeff Sessions wants to turn the ship of progress back around and ramp up the civil forfeiture programs. This means more lawsuits and more waste and more egregious examples of our law enforcement agencies being turned into bag men for a billionaire mob.
