National law enforcement organizations, very much including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, obviously must themselves follow the law — in particular, the guarantees provided American citizens in the Bill of Rights — to the letter.
The FBI clearly did not do so during its March 2021 raid on 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at a firm called US Private Vaults in Beverly Hills.
“Newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it,” the Los Angeles Times reported this week. “They omitted from their warrant request a central part of the FBI’s plan: Permanent confiscation of everything inside every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.”
The Fourth Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” is clear, and stipulates a warrant must describe “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The blanket seizure of all the vault’s 1,400 boxes and random seizing of money and valuables kept within is about as blatant a violation of the Fourth Amendment as we can imagine.
The total value of the property seized is estimated to be more than $100 million. People kept their valuables safely locked away there for any number of reasons — reasons of their own, and no business of the government, certainly not of a government police agency without a legitimate search warrant listing detailed probable cause.
The information has come to light from a class-action lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm concentrating on civil rights, on behalf of those whose rights were clearly violated.
According to the firm’s Andrew Wimer, the FBI ignored the warrant’s clear wording that it “does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes,” but only authorized the FBI to “inspect the contents of the boxes” to “identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property.”
The action highlights why Congress needs to enact a federal law against asset forfeitures without a conviction in a court of law.
Otherwise, money-grubbing police agencies from very small and local departments to the very top of the federal ladder will continue with impunity the shameful binge of unjustified seizure of private property they have been on for over a decade now.
They get to keep much of the money they seize to pad their department budgets, and so have a strong incentive to do so, often enough literally illegally.
For instance, a California state law passed two years ago clearly says that a business that “transports cash or financial instruments, or provides other financial services does not commit a crime under any California law … solely by virtue of the fact that the person receiving the benefit of any of those services engages in commercial cannabis activity as a licensee pursuant to this division.” Yet, knowing this, San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies pulled over vans operated by a courier service called Empyreal three times late last year and this January, seizing more than $1 million in cash that was being transported from legal marijuana stores.
As Reason magazine has reported, “When the Empyreal driver asked a deputy why Empyreal vehicles were being stopped so frequently,” the company says, “the deputy told him it was ‘political’ but declined to elaborate.”
Americans of all political stripes need to rise up and support the protections of our lawful freedoms that so many police agencies from the local sheriff to the FBI are clearly so eager to violate in order to steal our money for themselves.