federal district. and this brilliant idea was trained up a few years ago by the justice department basically has a way to raise money for state and local police departments, which participate in these task forces. and the people, i have represented 54 these people in structuring cases and there is probably more than anybody else has done because it started in my district, and they eastern district of alexandria was an excellent program. so i got a lot of the cases. finally frankly i am taking some credit here because even though there were thousands of these cases being brought, nobody at a high level of the justice

department was paying attention to these abuses. neither was congress because there's almost no oversight usually. finally i got "the new york times" to do an article that turned out to be a front-page article about this and boom everything changed. because a program like this just doesn't, can't survive scrutiny but there was no scrutiny going on. >> host: here's a chart. this is from the "washington post" by the u.s. u.s. states attorneys annual statistical report. asset forfeiture spike in recent years. why a spike in a 2013/2012, 2013? >> i'm looking at here chart and the spike is in one year. the statistics can be greatly distorted by a few large or even one extremely large case.

these very large cases typically come out of the southern district of new york or manhattan where they use forfeiture to go after foreign banks for example better money laundering or violating our trade sanctions laws so you get these billion-dollar forfeitures and one case like that can distort the statistics. >> host: let's take some calls. we have tried to explain a little bit what the civil asset forfeiture does and what it is and some of the changes made by the justice department this week. the numbers are up on the screen. if you'd like to dial in and talk to david smith former deputy chief of the asset forfeiture office of the justice department now in private practice natalie and ft. walton beach florida on the independent line, you are first. >> caller: hi good morning.

good morning to your guests mr. smith. i have a question based on the program and the program initially when it started was there any oversight and a need to go-go to supreme court? it seems like it's unconstitutional and also i commend you for coming out and saying this basically amounts to highway robbery and another quick question. do local police departments even have the training to know who is violating any type of civil asset forfeiture rules anybody who has a large amount of cash and create the crime afterwards? thank you very much. have a great day. >> guest: the training is very

minimal for local police departments in the area of a forfeiture. and i think most of the officers who enforcing these forfeitures have very little understanding of the law involved. they only get involved in the seizing of the property and unfortunately one of the scandalous aspects of the "washington post" story that ignited congressional interest in this, this whole area, with the bad training that police departments were receiving funded with federal government money from the dea. in other words training money supplied by federal taxpayers was being used to train officers in extremely aggressive seizure attack next which were way over the line and encourage the kind

of culture, competition among local police departments to see how much money they could seize willy-nilly. so protecting the citizen against illegal seizures was certainly not emphasized in these training programs. so to the extent that there was training, it was bad training. >> host: jody tweets in to you mr. smith, if you can prove your claim and get your money back why can't you sue the police for breaking the law? >> guest: actually you can't sue the police for breaking the law, but as a practical matter it's impossible. legally you can but it takes a lot of money first of all, which most people don't have. it's a thankless task for their lawyers because the local law enforcement agencies will always

defend the police to the hilt. judges are generally very hostile to any attempt to sue the police and will bend the law in favor of the police and it just becomes a futile exercise and a waste of money to sue them. now that's not to say that some class-action suits don't succeed succeed. it if you have got an organization like the aclu to back you up for free and they are suing the entire police department or the city as they have done in some cases there is a case in philadelphia right now which the institute for justice is also working on but if you are an individual trying to sue the police officer who wrongfully took your money it's going to be very frustrating and it's going to cost you way more money than it's worth it unless you are filthy rich.

>> host: howard, berlin germany on our republican line. hi howard. >> caller: yes, hello. yes, i have been studying some of the bureaucratic machinery of the 1930s here in germany where i am studying and there was a huge bureaucratic machine involved in confiscating jewish property at that time but based on legal means. so when i see some of the stories you refer to like if your son is smoking marijuana in his bedroom and the police come they can seize the whole house and the house of the parents who had nothing to do with it based on the fact that the house is being used in a crime possibly

involving the sale of marijuana. so just to give you a minute here we have something called form-based plundering where the jewish poor example -- for example were told they had to make arrangements for immigration however when they started making these arrangements such as getting their money out of the country to another place, they then found themselves in violation of fiscal regulations and called the rise capital flight tax. these all existed before hitler. they just enforce them ruthlessly enmity illicitly -- meticulously. it seems like that is what is happening here in a lot of these small communities and even in larger communities. it's very frightening. i will take my comment off the air. >> guest: well, if the police

were merely ruthlessly enforcing the law it would be bad enough but in the kinds of cases i'm talking about, these highway seizures, they are really not enforcing the law. they are just using the law as a kind of fig leaf to excuse what is really a lawless operation. they are not following the law. the problem is as i was just talking about, it's almost impossible as a practical matter to sue the police and who's going to stop them? very few attorney generals, state attorney generals are going to do anything about it because they work with the police. the local prosecutors are not going to do anything about it because they work with the police and also in half the states, the prosecutors themselves get a share of the forfeited loot to finance their own offices, which is

unconstitutional but virtually unchallenged which is a scandalous situation. so, the problem is it's a lack of will on the part of state legislators who are usually beholden to the police and reluctant to upset them. it's a reluctance to face the fact that you have to spend more taxpayer money on police departments if you don't allow them to seize property for themselves and here now so it's partly a political problem and it's partly a problem of lack of public understanding of what's going on. but that's not much of an excuse anymore because there has been an awful lot of publicity recently about all these abuses. >> host: markets and soup walls, south dakota, a democrat. hi mark. >> caller: good morning. i'm glad you guys are talking about this.

there was a case in monterey county on the central coast of california, a small city in california that this exact same thing is going on. they just arrested a former chief of police. they arrested and interim chief of police in four officers. what they were doing were pulling over migrant field workers around payday seizing their cars and their money and it has just come to light. listening to mr. smith speak i'm wondering if they were arrested the cops were arrested because the county district attorney wasn't getting any of the money. the chief of police's's rather on the tow service in the city so that was the loot. >> host: are you familiar with this issue? >> guest: no i wasn't. that's a great story. that just shows how rank the

corruption can get and how what seemed like relatively small abuses if tolerated get worse and worse. i mean this is obviously criminal and that's why they were prosecuted, but the much more common scenario is police who are engaged in highway robberies but for the sake of their own police department they are not personally stealing the money although in some cases they do and that abuse unfortunately is very broadly tolerated by the political system and the legal system and adjust points out many weaknesses in the legal system. as i said earlier the fact is that the idea that we are a rule

of law society is largely a myth in many parts of this country. >> host: mike is in hyattsville maryland the independent line. mike you are on with david smith talking about civil forfeiture. >> caller: good morning it's a pleasure speaking with you today in the greatest country in the world. you will rarely hear this on tv when you mention the sheriff and the judge are considered the only law enforcement. as it relates to forfeiture and the malum prohibit him city state and federal codes according to the bass ruling when this city was incorporated in 1882 that makes it a corporation like any other corporation as it relates to forfeiture in being afraid to sue local or state jurisdictions. can you repeat when you said the sheriff and the judge were the only law enforcement if you

are a tissue or american citizen who has five or $10,000 in his car but did you mean when you said the sheriff and the judge are the only law enforcement? bear in mind that 3000 municipality cities are nothing more than corporations for-profit. >> host: mike, are you an attorney? >> caller: no no, i read a lot. guess who i guess i would refer to the viewers to the ferguson uproar in and what that is revealed. ferguson there's a real direct parallel between what i'm talking about in the area of forfeiture and with the recent department of justice report on ferguson revealed. ferguson was being run according to the department of justice's report for-profit. the police were handing out traffic tickets and other things

that incurred fines just to raise money for the police department and the municipal court system in ferguson. it was terribly abusive. i mean they were just looking people for as much money as they could and threatening them legally to throw them in jail if they did not pay all the fines that piled up because of these abusive practices. and threatening them with debtors prison which is illegal. we don't have debtors prisons in this country. we are not supposed to but actually do. it's another example of what i was talking about. we have laws and we have supreme court decisions but they are often not followed in practice by the local government. this is a tremendous problem and it's not just in the area of

forfeiture. so whenever governments are supporting themselves through fines or forfeitures you are going to have tremendous abuses. >> host: mr. smith who used to be in charge of getting these assets from people. did you see abuses at that time? is that why you are now on the other side? >> guest: no, not at all. as i said earlier in the program back then this forfeiture was kind of a hack water and the reason that congress in 1984 pass what we call that you're marking statute, which earmarked for proceeds of forfeitures berlon enforcement purposes was to try to get law enforcement interested in doing forfeitures. up until then, there was very little law enforcement interests. it was something that they didn't know about, it was

newfangled and it was technical. there were problems with it and it was thought we needed this additional incentive to incentivize law enforcement to learn about forfeiture and to start using it. and so it was done with good intentions far from being -- there wasn't a lot of abuse and forfeiture back then. law enforcement attitudes were very different. there wasn't a profit-making venture and unfortunately we are talking about the early 80s now. over the years, american attitudes towards it became more and more harsh. we have this mass incarceration situation now that didn't exist in 1980. and it was just beginning been actually. like forfeiture and now what

has happened as the pendulum went too far in that direction and now it has swung back and fortunately the climate is ripe now for many other criminal justice reforms that we are seeing great it's one of the few issues that there is a huge bipartisan agreement on and congress and this is you know the forfeiture reform is a totally bipartisan effort and it has been for many years. >> host: time for a couple more calls. paul is an williams oregon on our republican line. please go ahead with her -- her question or comment for david smith. >> caller: regarding the stacking principle and deposits or withdrawals is this a statute, a federal statute or is it it and administratively developed law meant to enhance the investigation of money laundering? if so why is it being used against people who would otherwise be innocent?

it's almost like entrapment purposefully at not letting someone know about the love. i can understand using it but when they use it against people that don't want to make a deposit because of safety or the bank teller tells them in the dank teller is complicitous. i will take my answer off the air. anything you can comment on that. host. >> guest: it is a statute, u.s. code section 3324 enacted in the early 90s. it makes structuring a felony offense. at the time it was enacted it started to be necessary to deal with major drug organizations that were avoiding the money laundering laws by breaking down the deposits of millions and millions of dollars and so the

law was aimed essentially at major drug organizations. today it's being used just largely to go after innocent people who didn't know they were doing anything wrong. and it's just another way to make money for law enforcement agencies. the government will tie you differently but that's really what it amounts to. and it's very abusive. i believe congress is going to do something about that law pretty soon. >> host: just to follow-up on that caller's comments, this tweet from kah08 so an innocent person who deposits $10,000 in 2000-dollar increments to five accounts at a bank can lose his or her heard account and suffer persecution? >> guest: absolutely. the forfeiture makes all of the

money that is structured subject to forfeiture so if an incense businessman has deposited $500,000 over period of years because he has got a small business that is cash intensive like a corner store, he is liable for $500,000 to the government and criminal prosecution even though he didn't know he was doing anything wrong. that's a statute that mr. holder just two days ago decided should be reined in. now he says they are only going to use the statute if the money was from an illegal source or there is some other related crime involved not with just the structuring itself is a violation but that reform doesn't go far enough. it's just an administrative change.

the next attorney general could change it back so congress is going to deal with that. >> host: like you said liberals and conservatives have teamed up on this issue. >> guest: absolutely. the irs is one of the agencies that used to enforce this law and the structuring law and there was a hearing on capitol hill in front of the house ways & means committee which has supervision over the irs on february 11, just a month ago well two months ago almost, which excoriated the irs and the irs six months ago backed off on this and adopted a new policy. it took the justice department until two days ago to do the same. and it's a bit late in the game to be adopting reforms. i would like to know why this program went on for four years

with nobody at a higher level of the justice department doing anything about it. >> host: the last call for david smith comes from david in egg harbor city new jersey. >> caller: hi mr. smith. i have two questions. how do you keep a police officer from having their way with you at a traffic stop because oftentimes they are very insistent and it's very frightening and also could you just tell me again what the statute is on this forfeiture for banking? >> guest: yes. the statute is 31 united states code section 5324. and your first question is a very difficult question. how do you deal with one of those police stops on the highway? it is very intimidating and it's

very difficult for the average citizen to tell a police officer no you can't search my car which is what they are trying to do. but you should. you should stick to your rights. but what you can do to avoid getting in trouble is never bring any drugs in a car even a marijuana joint. do not do that and also never travel with large amounts of currency in a car if you can possibly avoid it. so you know even though that's perfectly legal, if you are stopped there's a very good chance that the police will seize your money and they won't care what you say or what your explanation is. you will have to get a lawyer to try to get your money back and you know that is the situation

in today's america. you cannot safely drive around with a large amount of cash. of course if you are a senator you are probably pretty safe driving around with a large amount of cash because once they find out you are a united states senator they are not going to take your money. i could drive alone -- around with a large amount of cash and probably get away with it. >> host: why? >> guest: why? because it's a notorious fact that the cops pick on people who they believe they can rob with impunity. that's why the vast majority of the people involved in these cases of victims are minority members to. ..

. they can't call their local representative because they are not in that state and complain. if you are a local guy, you are little bit more protected, but not much. host: david smith. former justice department official on civil asset forfeiture. we appreciate that the and hope you will come back