Quote:
Reby was driving down Interstate 40, heading west through Putnam County, when he was stopped for speeding.
A Monterey police officer wanted to know if he was carrying any large amounts of cash.
"I said, 'Around $20,000,'" he recalled. "Then, at the point, he said, 'Do you mind if I search your vehicle?' I said, 'No, I don't mind.' I certainly didn't feel I was doing anything wrong. It was my money."
That's when Officer Larry Bates confiscated the cash based on his suspicion that it was drug money.
"Why didn't you arrest him?" we asked Bates.
"Because he hadn't committed a criminal law," the officer answered.
Bates said the amount of money and the way it was packed gave him reason to be suspicious.
"The safest place to put your money if it's legitimate is in a bank account," he explained. "He stated he had two. I would put it in a bank account. It draws interest and it's safer."
"But it's not illegal to carry cash," we noted.
"No, it's not illegal to carry cash," Bates said. "Again, it's what the cash is being used for to facilitate or what it is being utilized for."
NewsChannel 5 Investigates noted, "But you had no proof that money was being used for drug trafficking, correct? No proof?"
"And he couldn't prove it was legitimate," Bates insisted.
It gets worse in the rest of the article.
Quote:
When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.
She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer's wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer's bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. "The police specifically told us to bring cash," Greer says. "Not a cashier's check or a credit card. They said cash."
So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she'd be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.
Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers' cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills -- and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.
...
It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family's money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. "The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money," Williams says. "Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money."
Wisconsin is one of four states (along with Illinois, Kentucky, and Oregon) that prohibits bail bondsmen. So bail must be paid either in cash, with a registered check, cashier's check or credit card. In fact, Donna Kuchler, a Wisconsin criminal defense attorney based in Waukesha, said police aren't allowed to insist on cash.
"I would be suspicious of why they would do that," Kuchler says. "I had a case last year in Fond du Lac County where they tried to say my client could only pay in cash. My guess is that they probably intended to do the same thing that happened here. We brought a cashier's check anyway, and they knew they had to accept it."
...
Stephen Downing, a retired narcotics cop who served as assistant police chief in Los Angeles, says it isn't surprising that a drug dog would alert to a pile of cash, since it usually has traces of drugs.
"I'd call these cases direct theft. They're hijackings," says Downing, who is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of former police and prosecutors who advocate ending the drug war.
Downing says he recently consulted a medical marijuana activist in California who was told to bring his bail money in cash, despite the fact that state law allows payment with a cashier's check, a registered check or a credit card. "It makes me wonder if this seizing of bail is a new idea getting shopped around in law enforcement circles."
I have to wonder if these cops still even have a veneer of thinking they're doing good work, or if they have abandoned that too.
