Records of police scheme to seize travelers’ cash uncovered
The records of a police department scheme to stop travelers and seize whatever cash they might be carrying with them have been uncovered by the work of the Institute for Justice.
The organization confirmed it has obtained records about cash seizures, drug seizures not involving cash, and other cases.
The fight, a “prolonged” dispute the organization, said involves an annual search-and-seizure blitz on Interstate 85 in Spartanburg County, South Carolina.
During a five-day campaign, law enforcement officers confiscated nearly $1 million in cash from travelers along that route.
The institute said it requested records from the series of seizures just days after the 2022 campaign, but it took until now, and a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, to get them.
The lawsuit over the 2022 events were filed by lawyers Adrianne Turner and Jake Erwin.
Spartanburg County responded to the lawsuit by releasing 262 pages of records it had previously attempted to withhold, the institute explained. “The documents, which include all available incident reports from Oct. 2-6, 2022, show a systemic program of pretextual traffic stops. Since these operations began in 2006, the search-and-seizure machine has ensnared potentially thousands of innocent drivers.”
“Operation Rolling Thunder turns traffic enforcement into a ruse,” explained institute lawyer Rob Johnson said. “The primary goal is not road safety, but to pull over and search as many vehicles as possible to find drugs and cash. When law enforcement found cash, they seized it – whether they had evidence of wrongdoing or not.”
The report from the institute pointed out that the Supreme Court, in a 2000 ruling, said “mass enforcement schemes like this are impermissible under the Fourth Amendment.”
“Although individual pretextual stops are permissible, the Supreme Court has held the opposite when it comes to a systematic program of roadside stops,” Johnson said.
The records now reveal, the institute said, that “When claiming probable cause for a search, officers frequently guess wrong. More than 70% of vehicle searches produced nothing illegal.”
Further, “Officers rely heavily on speculation and innuendo. If people look nervous or avoid eye contact, the police count this as evidence of guilt. One officer faulted a driver for simultaneously talking too much and not enough. ‘While being vague about his trip, [the driver] would overexplain other things,’ the officer wrote.”
And the participating agencies refused to keep records of every search, confirmed by the fact that officers searched 144 vehicles but generated only 42 incident reports.
The institute confirmed, “Officers stopped and searched as many as 45 commercial buses. The precise number is unavailable due to the lack of recordkeeping. Officers found drugs on 11 buses and identified six criminal suspects. Yet the police treated all bus passengers—potentially hundreds—like criminals.”
The fact is that carrying “any amount” of cash is actually legal, but officers treated any currency “as contraband,” the report said. In every case officers found money, they confiscated it, and then pressured the owners to sign “roadside abandonment forms,” in which they would give up their right to reclaim it.
“The police treat law enforcement like a competitive sport when they rush to pull over and search as many vehicles as possible within a set timeframe,” Johnson said. “This is not how policing should work.”
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