Scott Tibbs
We need full transparency on civil asset forfeiture
By Scott Tibbs, December 8, 2023
This is an open letter to Bloomington Mayor John Hamilton, with a copy sent to incoming mayor Kerry Thompson.
Back in 2015, I requested that the Bloomington Police Department provide the total value of money and property was seized by the BPD though civil asset forfeiture on an annual basis. The police department denied my request, claiming that this constituted "investigatory records." This was always suspicious reasoning, as the police do not have to disclose information about specific cases to disclose the total amount confiscated each year.
Now, however, this reasoning has been invalidated by the Indiana Supreme Court's 5-0
ruling that people who have their money or property confiscated by law enforcement have
the right to a
jury trial. Since these trials are public, there is no longer any reason to withhold this information - especially if no names are mentioned and it is the combined total of all cases.
Civil asset forfeiture is a fundamentally unjust practice that should never have been allowed at any level. The fact that someone who has not been convicted of a crime could lose his or her property with no ability to get it back is a direct attack on the Constitution's guarantee of due process. There are many documented cases of this. In fact, there have been many documented cases of people losing their property because of a crime
someone else committed. This practice should be abolished everywhere.
However, if civil asset forfeiture continues, government at the bare minimum should be fully transparent with the public about how much money is confiscated on an annual basis. We should not have these things taking place in secret. If the police are doing nothing wrong, then there is no reason to hide this information. I strongly urge you to take all necessary steps to reveal the total value of everything that has been confiscated, both from this point forward and for as far back in the past as can be obtained.
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