I read the whole WaPo article hoping they'd stop listing the things purchased with the funds (who cares?) and instead talk about where they got the funds and what percentage of seizures are dubious / fraudulent.

The Chicago link provides a narrow window into that question, and it doesn't look good.

For instance I have a nice painting on the wall that a friend created. There's no paper trail of how I got it. Does that mean I continue to own it only at the pleasure of the police?

I'm less worried about my major assets, but what if someone decided I could have been using my house as a venue to write code that could be used for illegal purposes? Do I have to prove every library on my Github account can only be used for legal purposes or risk having my house and laptop seized?

Is the reason the answers to those questions is "no" merely because I'm white, prominent, and a political donor? How is this different from Putin's Russia? (Aside from in degree.)

The reason the answer to these questions is "no" is because ownership in a civil forfeiture proceeding must be proved by a "preponderance of the evidence" standard. The difference between a car trunk full of $100 bills and a painting on your wall is proving that, "more likely than not" the item is the fruit of criminal activity.

"preponderance of the evidence" is a low standard compared to the "presumed innocent" standard of criminal trials. It's not helped by the fact that the judge in civil forfeiture proceedings sometimes has a clear conflict of interest: cf. Coutroom 478. http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/08/26/p...

The key distinction is between punishing you by taking property that is yours (criminal penalty) and taking property that is not yours in the first place (civil forfeiture). In a civil context, preponderance of the evidence is the typical standard. E.g. If I sue you for embezzling my money, I don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in order to get my money back.

I think civil forfeiture has major problems with how it's applied, but it's pretty internally consistent with the rest of the law.

There are at least two major difference between civil asset forfeiture and civil litigation. First, the plaintiff is the government, and the government has vastly more powers and resources than typical plaintiffs, making it more difficult for ordinary people to defend against them and more reasonable to demand from them a higher standard of proof. Second, in typical civil litigation, the plaintiffs don't seize your house/car/money first and put the burden on you to initiate litigation to get it all back now that you no longer have any resources with which to fight that battle.

I wonder if the police are assuming the blacks stole what is clearly not stolen...

or if the police simply realize they can steal from the blacks ?

Those are two different problems at heart. Of course, it doesn't make much of a difference for the blacks.

I'm slightly surprised the parent link hasn't been substituted yet.