This was made possible, in part, by the failure of the judiciary to rein in the power of an overzealous federal government. The Supreme Court has twice approved of this type of overreach. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942) and Gonzales v. Raich(2005), the Court ruled that individuals growing crops exclusively for personal consumption—wheat and marijuana, respectively—could be regulated by the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution despite the crops never entering a market of any kind, let alone across state lines.
Civil asset forfeiture refers to a legal procedure by which the government is able to take ownership of the property of people suspected of wrongdoing—even when those people are never convicted of, or even charged with, a crime.
The more a state restricts the use and abuse of civil asset forfeiture, the more state and local police tend to rely on equitable sharing, a federal program which allows state and local law enforcement to seize property under federal, rather than state, forfeiture law, and thus skirt state restrictions. In short, equitable sharing creates a federal incentive for law enforcement to sidestep state law and chase profits under federal law instead.
Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a $20 million police body camera pilot funding scheme to assist law enforcement agencies in developing body camera programs. In the wake of the killings of Michael Brown, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray there has been renewed debate on police accountability. Unsurprisingly, body cameras feature heavily in this debate. Yet, despite the benefits of police body cameras, we ought to be wary of federal top-down body camera funding programs, which have been supported across the political spectrum. “If the DOJ is going to take part in the ongoing debate on police body camera policy it shouldn’t provide a financial incentive for the adoption of its policies," says Cato policy analyst Matthew Feeney.
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