Go to qualitypolicing.com

Tag: war on drugs

  • Every four or five years…

    Just a brief note to commemorate the semi-decennial NYPD drug sweep at the Queensbridge Houses.

    I keep track of these things. (I live nearby.) 9 raids. 22 arrests. 4 handguns.

    Last time this happened was 2013. And that was preceded by similar raids in 2009 and 2005. Sometimes police get disparaged for conducting wack-a-mole policing. (In fact, sometimes *I’ve* disparaged police for this reason.) But one of the reasons crime is so low in NYC is because police do wack those criminal moles (and have the resources to do so) when criminals pop their heads up. Illegal public drug-dealing, so linked to violence, is exactly what police need to focus on. And the residents of America’s largest public housing complex can be a little less afraid.

    There will be another similar raid in Queensbridge in 2023. Mark my words. But maybe that is exactly what is needed. Or maybe a little more continued presence now, rather than a few years, really could prevent the next crew from popping up.

     

    2021 Update: I was off by two years. https://queensda.org/more-than-two-dozen-reputed-gang-members-charged-in-indictment-crimes-include-murder-attempted-murder-and-gun-possession-in-and-around-astoria-long-island-city-housing-developments/

     

  • “That’s quite a day’s work.”

    “That’s quite a day’s work.”

    Yesterday this video came outof Baltimore officer putting gel caps of heroin in a can, placing the can in trash in an alley, leaving the alley, and then “starting” his body cam and going to discover the heroin where he put it. Problem is, for the cops, the camera records video for 30 seconds preceding the press of the on button.

    A man was arrested related to this and held on $50,000 bail. Nobody put up the 10 percent needed to get out, so he had been in jail for the past 7 months. He was released yesterday (eventually) after the video came out.

    These seem to be possibilities, based on the video:

    Option A: Dirty cops planted drugs on an innocent person.

    Option B: Dirty cops planted drugs on a guilty person.

    Option C: Dirty cops realized they forgot to turn on their body cameras, and decided to recreate the discovery, based on a true story.

    Option D: Well-intentioned but stupid cops forgot to turn on their body cameras when the did find the drugs, and decided to recreate the discovery, inspired by a true story.

    Option E: It’s all some great misunderstanding and somehow this is acceptable police work.

    I’m going to dismiss Option E, as has every cop I’ve spoken to.

    Here’s what makes this video so odd. Not exactly the “what,” but the “why?” If you were planting drugs to frame an innocent (or guilty of something else) person, you’d plant the drugs on the person. It doesn’t make sense to plant drugs in a stash because (absent other evidence) people in Baltimore City don’t get prosecuted for a stash of drugs. This is why drug dealers use a stash (it also provides loss protection against robbery). You can’t prove possession without a direct eyes-on chain-of-custody from person to stash. And even then you can’t prove the stash belongs to a person who just happens to be reached into it.

    I wrote about this kind of scenario in Cop in the Hood.

    Could there be a chase of an innocent person, with drugs planted to provide probable cause for arrest? Could be in theory, but I don’t think so here because the drugs were not planted in a place where somebody would throw them while running from cops. No, the drugs were placed in a can, in a drug stash. So maybe this was a reenactment based on a true story. This scenario, which is where I would place my money, is also the saddest. I mean, it was stupid, damaging to police, and harmful to the prosecution of criminals. It was also career ending directorial choice. And for what? That’s what gets me about so-called “noble cause” corruption. Why? (See #3, below.)

    Other issues:

    1) $50,000 bail is a lot of bail, especially for a drug arrest in Baltimore.

    2) Even after watching the video, the State’s Attorney’s office (the public prosecutor) at first only offered time-served. What the hell? It can’t be said often enough what a disaster Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore City’s elected State’s Attorney, has been. Baltimore is a city without effective leadership at the top. One quality of leadership is to take responsibility for what happens under your watch. This does not happen in Baltimore. Bad leadership has consequences.

    3) And it’s always a good time to periodically repeat that almost all police corruption stems from drug prohibition. How’s that war working out? You think the fifth decade will be charm? I don’t. The war on drugs will not be won. And the damage from the fight — to families, communities, incarceration, police — is immense and entirely self-inflicted. Society could better deal with the problems of drug use without police.

    And it’s not that all drug cops are dirty. That’s important to say not to defend cops, but to not excuse the dirty ones. Being involved in narcotics is not an excuse to be a dirty cop; that’s on the cop. But if we want to get rid of police corruption on a systemic level, you need to get police out of the drug game. Just like we did with gambling: regulate and control the supply and distribution. Voila! Cops are no longer on the take with the numbers’ racket.

    But back to the issue at hand. In some ways this is all academic. (But hell, I am an academic.) I’d really like to read the arrest report and statement of probable cause. But there is no scenario where this video is good or defensible. Whether it’s planting drugs or a dramatic re-enactment, it’s bad. David Rocah is 100 percent correct. From Justin Fenton’s and Kevin Rector’s story in the Sun (well worth reading):

    David Rocah, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Maryland, said that even “a faked recreation of officers finding the untied bag of drugs” would still be “potentially criminal” and should be a violation of police rules.

    Rocah criticized the state’s attorney’s office for “the total lack of any apparent systemic response” to the incident, including putting the officer on the stand in another case after the video was flagged.

    Rocah said it was “insane” that state laws that bar the disclosure of disciplinary records for police officers would prevent the public from seeing the results of the Police Department’s investigation or knowing how it punished the officers internally.

    Rocah also said “there is zero reason to trust any video or any statement from any of these officers” given what was clearly observable in the video flagged by the public defender’s office.

    “So even if it is indeed true that they simply staged a re-creation of finding the drugs, these officers have not only destroyed their own credibility, they have single-handedly destroyed the credibility of every piece of video where BPD officers find contraband without a clear lead-in that negates the possibility of it being staged,” Rocah said. “That’s quite a day’s work.”

    Update: Indeed, this officer forgot to turn on his body-cam when he went and found the stash. So he decided to recreate the scene as it actually happened, potentially a firing offense. Counterfactually, had he simply fessed up (or been caught) failing to turn on his body camera, the departmental punishment would have been verbal counseling.

  • Legal weed means 25% fewer overdoses

    This is pretty striking data, as published in JAMAand reported in Newsweek. From JAMA:

    States with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8% lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate compared with states without medical cannabis laws. Examination of the association between medical cannabis laws and opioid analgesic overdose mortality in each year after implementation of the law showed that such laws were associated with a lower rate of overdose mortality that generally strengthened over time.

    Medical cannabis laws are associated with significantly lower state-level opioid overdose mortality rates. Further investigation is required to determine how medical cannabis laws may interact with policies aimed at preventing opioid analgesic overdose.

    It’s not rocket science to figure out a likely cause-and-effect.

  • White-On-White Crime (lots, but without homicide)

    [This relates to my previous post]

    Years ago, like when I was 13, I was with my father, driving from NYC to Chicago, on a baseball road trip (he drove). Between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, we spent one night in Johnstown, PA. (Remember the Johnstown Flood!). After watching the Johnston Jonnies play baseball, we had dinner in a local bar. My father, known for being gregarious and getting along with all races, religions, and education levels, looked around at the pale depressed clientele and said to me in a hushed tone, “These are not my people.” It’s the only time I ever saw him uncomfortable in a crowd.

    Based on my last post, I looked up East Liverpool, Ohio. It’s very white (93 percent) and quite poor. The median household family income of $23,138 is about half the national average. A quarter of the population (and 35 percent of children) are below the poverty line. The population of 11,000 is down from a 1950 peak of 24,000.

    East Liverpool is the biggest city in Columbiana County, which seems to straddle coal, rust, and rural. The county has a total population of just over 100,000 people and is 96 percent white. It’s also poor, with a median family income of just $34,200 (but interestingly, the poverty rate is below the national average). And it’s increasing Republican. It’s Trump country.

    What I’m saying is, kind of like Obama and Clinton, I’ve never felt much kin with this part of America (the Appalachian Scotch-Irish folk of southeast Ohio, northern W. Virginia, and southwest Pennsylvania). If they’re more worried about immigrants, gun rights, and encroaching Sharia Law than about moving forward and letting people help them get out of poverty and not overdosing in from of their grandson, I’m inclined to let them be and not give a damn.

    But here’s the thing. No matter how hopeless and messed up things might be in East Liverpool and Columbiana County, Ohio; no matter how the jobs are gone; no matter how loose the gun laws are; no matter where junkies are shooting up; no matter how much crime there is; no matter how forgotten by the government and mocked by east-coast elites they might be, the good folks of Columbiana County somehow manage not to murder each other. And there is crime in East Liverpool, Ohio. In fact, if the data is accurate (and that is a big if, coming from a small place), the violent and property crime rates of East Liverpool are twice the national average.

    Neighborhood Scout (not exactly an ideal academic source) puts it this way:

    With a crime rate of 53 per one thousand residents, East Liverpool has one of the highest crime rates in America. With a population of 10,951, East Liverpool’s [crime rate] is very high compared to other places of similar population size.

    Best I can tell, this entire county of about 100,000 has maybe one homicide a year. Some years there seems to be none. Other years maybe two. (I’m basing this on Columbiana County, East Liverpool, and Salem City police departments). This homicide rate, 1 per 100,000, is about 1/4th the national average.

    Meanwhile, Baltimore City has a poverty rate lower than East Liverpool. Baltimore’s median household income is higher than East Liverpool. Hell, the average income even in poor East and West Baltimore is higher than East Liverpool. And yet in the past 365 days (Sep 10, 2014 to Sep 10, 2015) 329 people in Baltimore have managed to put themselves in harm’s way and get killed. Now Baltimore has more than six times the population of Columbiana County. So if Baltimore were 1/6th the size, it would have 55 murders. Columbiana County has 1.

    Even whites in Baltimore managed to get murdered 17 times last year. That’s of course a fraction of the number of black homicides, but whites in Baltimore (fewer than 200,000) get murdered eight times as often as the good folks of heroin-addicted poverty-living can’t-find-work police-are-asking-for-help Columbiana County.

    What gives?

    Baltimore City has more unemployment (7.4 percent vs. 5.3 percent). Yeah, sure. And there’s more poverty and extreme poverty in Baltimore. I’m not saying that doesn’t matter. But deep down, no. Poverty is a red herring. Culture matters. Columbiana County’s unemployment could be 20 percent and the murder rate would still be lower that Baltimore City.

    There’s something else going on. The nexus of violence is not poverty and racism but public drug dealing and drug prohibition. I suspect addicts in Columbiana County buy their heroin from friends and family and coworkers. Not from Yo-Boys on the corner. Push drug dealers inside and violence plummets. But when police try and do that in Baltimore, the DOJ complains about systemic racism.

  • “We Need Help”

    “We Need Help”

    This picture of adults overdosing when a kid in their car has been making the rounds since police in East Liverpool, Ohio, posted it on facebook.

    The police department wrote:

    We are well aware that some may be offended by these images and for that we are truly sorry, but it is time that the non-drug-using public sees what we are now dealing with on a daily basis. The poison known as heroin has taken a strong grip on many communities, not just ours. The difference is we are willing to fight this problem until it’s gone and if that means we offend a few people along the way we are prepared to deal with that.

    Normally I wouldn’t consider this event or picture blog-worthy. But I just heard an interesting interview on All Things Considered with the East Liverpool Chief of Police, John Lane. In part:

    Chief Lane: We knew the photos would be shocking… We need help. We’re strapped with resources as far as trying to handle this kind of thing. And I don’t think the public is aware of the problem…. That’s his grandmother, not his mother. And she has custody of him…. He needs to be removed from the environment he’s in. He needs to be put in a safe loving environment.

    Q: Is this about shaming?

    Chief Lane: I don’t think it’s about shaming. It’s to make people aware…. He was sentenced to 360 days. That’s part of the issue here, too. You’ve got an obvious, a person who has an addiction. If you could have some sort of treatment there while he’s in jail, so when he comes out he’s not going right back to this. Some way to work and try to get off of this addiction.

    Q: Is treatment in available if he wanted that?

    Chief Lane: Not here. We don’t have any resources. Even if somebody comes down to the station and knocks on the door and asks for help. Where do we send ’em? We have nothing here, in our county…. We need resources, is basically what it boils down to. We have an understaffed police department, we’re constantly chasing one overdose after another. He had half a dozen over the weekend. One person passed away.

    Q: What have you heard from the state or your local congressman? People who can take action here.

    Chief Lane:I’ve heard nothing. In our little community here we don’t have the resources here to deal with it.

    And in searching for the picture, lots of similar cases popped up:

    December, 2015, Pittsburgh, “A woman who had overdosed on heroin in Pittsburgh’s Morningside neighborhood Thursday afternoon was revived, after her 8-year-old daughter ran to get help.”

    February, 2016, Grand Traverse, Michigan. “The woman also had her 6-year-old son in the car.”

    July, 2016, Burlington, Vermont. “Police were called to the downtown parking lot of Pearl Street Beverage and Lakeside Pharmacy for the report of two people in a semi-conscious state in a car with a [five-year-old] child in the back seat ‘screaming for help.’”

    There’s still the basic and false belief among too many people that somehow, somewhere, there are “programs” to help people. Or that the criminal justice system is a system with so single goal in mind. Like police arrest you, you do time, and you come out better for it. It’s not true. And it never has been true. Sure, sometimes there’s a program here or a grant-funded thing there, but basically, no. There’s nothing. It doesn’t matter what the problem is — crime, drugs, mental illness, poverty (or all of the above) — when somebody calls 911, police will show up. But then what? A lot of people need help. But it’s not the kind of help police officers can give. Especially when police departments themselves need help.

    [See my next post, on crime in East Liverpool, Ohio.]

  • “El Chapo and the Secret History of the Heroin Crisis”

    Damn good (5,500 word) read in Esquire by Don Winslow:

    Okay, I’m going to say it: The heroin epidemic was caused by the legalization of marijuana.

    …

    Weed was a major profit center for [the Sinaloa Cartel], but suddenly they couldn’t compete against a superior American product that also had drastically lower transportation and security costs.

    In a single year, the cartel suffered a 40 percent drop in marijuana sales, representing billions of dollars. Mexican marijuana became an almost worthless product. They’ve basically stopped growing the shit: Once-vast fields in Durango now lie fallow.

    …

    The Sinaloa Cartel decided to undercut the pharmaceutical companies. They increased the production of Mexican heroin by almost 70 percent, and also raised the purity level, bringing in Colombian cooks to create “cinnamon” heroin as strong as the East Asian product. They had been selling a product that was about 46 percent pure, now they improved it to 90 percent.

    Their third move was classic market economics—they dropped the price. A kilo of heroin went for as much as $200,000 in New York City a few years ago, cost $80,000 in 2013, and now has dropped to around $50,000.

    At the same time, American drug and law-enforcement officials, concerned about the dramatic surge in overdose deaths from pharmaceutical opioids (165,000 from 1999 to 2014), cracked down on both legal and illegal distribution, opening the door for Mexican heroin, which sold for five to ten bucks a dose.

    But pill users were not accustomed to the potency of this new heroin. Even heroin addicts were taken by surprise.

    As a result, overdose deaths have skyrocketed, more than doubling from 2000 to 2014. More people — 47,055 — died from drug overdoses in 2014 than in any other year in American history.

    …

    Historically, the Sinaloa Cartel has been the least violent of the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. Admittedly, this isn’t a high bar to clear, but it has long been axiomatic that the Mexican government felt that it could at least talk to Guzmán and his partners in ways it never could with, for instance, the Zetas.

    Many journalists and writers, myself among them, believe that the Mexican government eventually supported the Sinaloa Cartel during the worst years of the drug war in an attempt to establish some modicum of order.

    …

    For the record, Guzmán did not go out that [prison] tunnel on a motorcycle. Steve McQueen escapes on motorcycles. My money says that Guzmán didn’t go into that tunnel at all; anyone who can afford to pay $50 million in bribes and finance the excavation of a mile-long tunnel can also afford not to use it.

    Gentle reader, the man is worth $1 billion. He was thinking about buying the Chelsea Football Club. He went out the front door.

    …

    If Mexico has become Iraq, then the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) is the country’s ISIS.

    …

    What makes CJNG so ISIS-like is that they just don’t give a shit. To consolidate power, El Mencho allegedly authorized the murder of Jalisco’s tourism secretary and the assassination of a congressman.

    In March 2015, lugging assault rifles and grenade launchers, CJNG gunmen rolled into a town and killed five police officers. Two weeks later, they ambushed a police convoy and killed fifteen officers. The next day, they murdered the police chief of another town.

    In April 2016, they shot down a military helicopter with a rocket launcher

    …

    Just as this mess was heating up, a new drug — actually an old drug — entered the scene. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is thirty to fifty times as strong as heroin. It was developed in 1960 by Janssen Pharmaceuticals (now a division of Johnson & Johnson) as a treatment for the severe pain caused by terminal cancer.

    …

    For the narcos, the advantages of fentanyl over heroin are enormous.

    First of all, it’s made in a lab, so you don’t need fields of poppies that can be raided, fumigated, or seized. You don’t need hundreds of campesinos to harvest your crop and you don’t need to take or control territory. (Well, not territory for cultivation—you still have to control access to smuggling turf, hence the renewed violence in Baja, where the murder rate has tripled.)

    But it’s the profits that will make fentanyl the new crack cocaine, which created the enormous wealth of the Mexican cartels in the eighties and nineties. A kilo of fentanyl can be stepped on sixteen to twenty-four times to create an astounding return on investment of $1.3 million per kilo, compared with $271,000 per kilo of heroin.

    …

    We’ll no longer know where’s it coming from, and worse, what’s in it. First responders will not be able to tell if they’re dealing with pure heroin, heroin laced with fentanyl, pure fentanyl, fentanyl cut with God knows what … there will be pharmacological chaos.

    We talk about the heroin epidemic.

    Fentanyl will be the plague.

    …

    So Guzmán is behind bars, it’s over, and we won. Just like we won when Hussein literally reached the end of his rope.

    The Los Angeles Times estimates that two thirds of Mexican drug lords have been either killed or imprisoned. And what’s the result? Drugs are more plentiful, more potent, and cheaper than ever. Deaths from overdoses are at an all-time high. Violence in Mexico, once declining, is starting to rise again

    …

    An entire economy is based on drug prohibition and punishment, something to the tune of $50 billion a year, more than double the estimated $22 billion we spend on heroin.

    …

    That’s a lot of money. There will inevitably be another Guzmán, but he’ll be a distraction, too…. Follow the money.

  • On Felony Running

    [From pp.58-59 of Cop in the Hood]

    To meet the standards needed for a formal prosecution, one must follow the informal rules imposed by the state’s attorney. Rule number one is don’t take your eyes off the drugs. Drug charges against a suspect will not be prosecuted in Baltimore City if an officer fails to maintain constant sight of the drugs. A suspect fleeing from police will throw down drugs while running. An officer in foot pursuit must then choose between catching a suspect with no drugs and retrieving the drugs with no suspect. Officers generally will choose to follow the suspect over the drugs because— along with a personal desire to catch a fleeing suspect—arrests are a police statistic used to judge performance. Found drugs are not.

    After catching the suspect, the officer will return to retrieve the drugs and charge the suspect with possession, knowing full well that the charges will be dropped if the report is written honestly. But officers are rewarded for arrests, not convictions. If the drugs can’t be found–lost in weeds, scooped up by a bystander, or never there to begin with–the officer is in a bit of a bind, left with the noncrime of “felony running.” You can’t lock somebody up for drug possession without drugs. And after a chase, even loitering doesn’t apply. But the officer will find some crime, however minor If you run and get caught, you’re probably not sleeping in your own bed that night.

    [This is why Freddie Gray was arrested for a barely illegal knife].

  • On Clearing Corners and Drug Arrests

    [From pages 65, 83, 49, and 55 of Cop in the Hood]

    Clearing the corner is what separates those who have policed from those who haven’t. Some officers want to be feared; others, respected; still others, simply obeyed. An officer explained: “You don’t have to [hit anybody]. Show up to them. Tell them to leave the corner, and then take a walk. Come back, and if they’re still there, don’t ask questions, just call for additional units and a wagon. You can always lock them up for something. You just have to know your laws. There’s loitering, obstruction of a sidewalk, loitering in front of the liquor store, disruptive behavior.” Police assume that if the suspects are dirty, they will walk away rather than risk being stopped and frisked. You can always lock them up for something, but when a police officer pulls up on a known drug corner, legal options are limited.

    Because of these problems and the “victimless” nature of drug crimes, most drug arrests are at the initiative of police officers. On one occasion, while driving slowly through a busy drug market early one morning, I saw dozens of African American addicts milling about while a smaller group of young men and boys were waiting to sell. Another officer in our squad had just arrested a drug addict for loitering. I asked my partner, “What’s the point of arresting people for walking down the street?” He replied: “Because everybody walking down the street is a criminal. In Canton or Greektown [middle-class neighborhoods] people are actually going somewhere. How many people here aren’t dirty? [‘None.’] It’s drugs…. If all we can do is lock ’em up for loitering, so be it.”

    The decision to arrest or not arrest those involved in the drug trade becomes more a matter of personal choice and police officer discretion than of any formalized police response toward crime or public safety.

    Although it is legally questionable, police officers almost always have something they can use to lock up somebody, “just because.” New York City police use “disorderly conduct.” In Baltimore it is loitering. In high- drug areas, minor arrests are very common, but rarely prosecuted. Loitering arrests usually do not articulate the legally required “obstruction of passage.” But the point of loitering arrests is not to convict people of the misdemeanor. By any definition, loitering is abated by arrest. These lockups are used by police to assert authority or get criminals off the street.

    Police have diverse opinions about the drug problem. I asked my sergeant if it was more effective to arrest drug addicts or to remain on and patrol the street to temporarily disrupt drug markets. He surprised me by choosing the former:

    Arresting someone sends a better message. Locking up junkies makes a difference. This squad used to have more arrests than five of the districts. We used to go out every night and just make arrest runs as a squad. Start with six cars, like a train. Fill one up, then you have five cars. Continue until you’re out of cars. At 1 am, everybody on a drug corner is involved with drugs. We locked them up for loitering. Got lots of drugs, a few weapons, too. After a few weeks, everything was quiet. Eventually it got so that we had to poach from other districts. We ran out of people to arrest. You think the neighbors didn’t like that?

    [Note: This happened in the late 1990s, before O’Malley’s now-maligned “zero-tolerance” push.]

  • Use and Abuse of Terry

    There are some excerpts from Cop in the Hood that seem particularly relevant in light of the DOJ’s report on the Baltimore police. This is from pp.30-31.]

    The 1968 Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio gives officers the right to frisk a suspect for weapons if they have reasonable suspicion that a suspect might be armed. A “Terry Frisk” is a limited pat-down of the outer clothing for weapons. This is distinct from and less than a “search” (for which probable cause is needed).

    While a limited pat-down of the outer clothing for weapons may seem benign, a frisk is very personal and intrusive. During any encounter, an officer can justify a frisk of a suspect by noting the drug trade in the area and the inherent link between drugs and violence. Legality depends on an officer’s perception of his or her own safety. And given the violence, officers in some neighborhoods have good reason to fear for their safety.

    The result of Terry v. Ohio is a huge legal loophole in which people in high-crime neighborhoods, usually young black men, are stopped and frisked far more often than people in other neighborhoods. Intended or not, constitutional rights depend on the neighborhood where you live. While race-blind in theory, the Terry Frisk (confusingly also known as a Terry Stop or Terry Search) gives police the legal right to stop and frisk most individuals in a violent, high-drug area.

    Technically a Terry Frisk may be used only to find weapons. But any contraband in plain view or “plain feel” is fair game, even if the found object was not the original goal. While reaching into someone’s pockets is technically and legally a search, one can easily feel drugs from outside a pocket while ostensibly frisking for weapons.

    In the police academy, trainees are instructed how to use the Terry Frisk to make drug lock ups. If drugs are found on a suspect during a frisk for weapons, officers should complete their search for weapons before addressing the issue of the suspected drugs. If a police officer were to stop a frisk for weapons upon finding drugs, it would be obvious–since drugs are not a direct threat to a police officer’s safety–that the intention of the search was not really officer safety. Once hands go in pockets, a legal frisk becomes an illegal search. The Terry Frisk explicitly does not give police the right to search or empty pockets. But on the street the line between a frisk and a search is not as clear-cut as the Supreme Court wants to believe. Necessary as the Terry Frisk is, in the war on drugs, officers on the street commonly exploit and abuse Terry v. Ohio.

  • In case you forgot…

    Civil forfeiture is still a problem. A man in Chicago has been trying for 13 years to get $101,000 is cash back from the those who stole it.

    Last year, the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago collected more than $19 million in asset forfeitures. The Justice and Treasury departments raked in more than $4.5 billion nationally in 2014.

    Is this case there were no drugs, and, as often happens, the man whose money was taken was never charged with a crime. Take it from Yakov Smirnoff: “What a country!”