'IT'S JUST A SHAKEDOWN': DESPITE CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE REFORMS IN FLORIDA, POLICE ARE STILL FINDING WAYS TO TAKE PEOPLE'S STUFF.

• Author: Ciaramella, C.J.

ON A MAY day in 2015, a task force of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and Miami-Dade Police Department officers raided Miladis Salgado's suburban Miami home and seized $15,000 in cash that they found in her closet.

The DEA agents were acting on a tip from a confidential informant that Salgado's estranged husband was laundering drug money.

The cash in Salgado's closet was not drug proceeds, however. It was money that Salgado,; who worked at a duty-free store in the Miami airport, had been saving up for her daughter's quinceanera, an important coming-of-age 15th birthday party. Salgado had been planning to book a banquet hall, D.J., and photographer. Suddenly bereft of her savings, she had to cancel the party.

It took two years for Salgado to get her money back, even after a DEA agent admitted in a deposition that there was no connection between her cash and the alleged criminal activity. In the meantime, Florida passed a law reforming the state's civil asset forfeiture process, which allows law enforcement to seize property--cash, cars, houses--even when the owner isn't convicted of a crime. The 2016 law raised the burden of proof for forfeiting property and now requires at least an arrest before most property can be forfeited.

But despite tightening the rules for when police can keep seized property, Florida remains one of the most prolific practitioners of civil forfeiture. The Sunshine State took in more revenue through forfeitures than any other state in 2018, according to a survey by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm. Local and state police can evade the new restrictions by working with the federal government, just like the Miami-Dade police did in Salgado's case. In return for calling in the feds, they get a cut of the proceeds.

"The federal government is literally paying state and local police to circumvent state law," says Justin Pearson, managing attorney for the Institute for Justice's Florida office. "That's not the way things are supposed to work."

'IT WAS REALLY THE WILD WEST'

STATE SEN. JEFF Brandes (R-St. Petersburg), who sponsored the 2016 law, says that before its passage, "it was really the wild west" in Florida when it came to asset forfeiture. "You had some crazy stories where there were police departments with 10 members, and they'd have three people whose basically full-time job was asset forfeiture."

Florida, like most other states at the time, had few protections for innocent property owners and little oversight of police departments' activities. This was not without consequences.

In 2012, the Justice Department demanded that the police department in Bal Harbour, Florida--population 2,500--return $4 million in forfeited assets after audits showed the department had been misusing funds for lavish expenses, vehicles, payouts to snitches, and first-class travel. A follow-up Miami Herald investigation found the Bal Harbour police had been running a task force investigating money laundering by international drug cartels, in which task force members posed as money launderers, ostensibly to learn more about cartel networks. Over the course of the three-year investigation, the task force laundered $56 million for drug cartels through undercover police bank accounts, and took $1.7 million for themselves as commission. The Bal Harbour police made zero arrests or major drug seizures as a result of the investigation, and even when accounting for federal seizures based on tips from the task force, the task force was still funneling far more money to drug cartels than it was stopping. The Herald obtained confidential records showing that Bal Harbour officers later withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from those accounts, and...