This practice has not been borne out of the war on terror as the Prison Planet link implied; it devolved in the beginning out of the war on drugs but any excuse will suffice "in a pinch"
This has been going on for decades but has become rampant in recent years; neither Americans nor any foreign national is safe from confiscation of cash or any valuable property if the police choose to confiscate it:
" - The perversion is that confiscation — preying on the general public — has become a profit center. The Justice Department's Equitable Sharing program has given police the incentive to steal. No less than the executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas said to the New Yorker that, “It’s definitely a valuable asset to law enforcement, for purchasing equipment and getting things you normally wouldn’t be able to get to fight crime.”
Philadelphia is a major abuser of the law. Police and prosecutors took in $64 million between 2002 and 2012 in a state that allows them to keep 100% of the loot, says that Journal edit. It's been used to pay for 20% of the Philadelphia District Attorney's general budget and the staff's salaries. Supplicants who hope to get their money back find themselves appealing not to a judge but to their adversary, a prosecutor in an office at City Hall. - "
Law Enforcement s License to Steal
More on this frim circa 1996:
" - Willie Jones of Nashville was flying to Houston on February 27, 1991, to purchase plants for his landscaping business. Because Jones was black and paid cash for his plane ticket, the ticket clerk reported him to nearby Drug Enforcement Agency officers, who presumed Jones was a drug courier. DEA officers at the Nashville airport approached Jones, checked his identification, and asked permission to search him. Although Jones refused to grant permission, the officers searched him anyway and found $9,000 in cash. The DEA agents then announced that they were “detaining” the money. Jones observed: “They said I was going to buy drugs with it, that their dog sniffed it and said it had drugs on it.” (A 1989 study found that 70 percent of all the currency in the United States had cocaine residue on it.) Jones never saw the dog. The officers didn’t arrest Jones, but they kept the money. When Jones asked the officers for a receipt for his money, they handed him a receipt for an “undetermined amount of U.S. currency.” Jones objected and asked the officers to count the money out, but the officers refused, claiming that such an action would violate DEA policy.
Federal judge Thomas Wiseman, in an April 1993 decision, concluded that “the officers’ behavior at this point was casual and sarcastic . . . /they believed that the seizure of the currency was all but a
fait accompli . . . they cared little for Mr. Jones’s feelings of insecurity.” Judge Wiseman concluded that the DEA officials’ testimony on the seizure was “misleading,” “unconvincing,” and “inconsistent” and ordered the money returned—after a two- year legal battle. Jones observed: “I didn’t know it was against the law for a 42-year-old black man to have money in his pocket.”- "
Http://fee.org/freeman/detail/seizure-fever-the-war-on-property-rights/
