90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, May 1, 2015

As the internal investigation continues into the death of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray, a document has leaked that claims a fellow prisoner in the van with Gray told police that the deceased man was “trying to injure himself.”

According to The Washington Post a prisoner who was also being transported in the police van on April 12 said he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” and said that he felt that Gray “was intentionally trying to injure himself.”

Until now there has been no speculation on how Gray could have entered the police van in perfectly functional condition only to be found unresponsive by the time the transport van arrived at the police station a half-hour later.

Gray was arrested on April 12 on a gun related charge but died seven days later after suffering a spinal cord injury in the van.

The unnamed prisoner could not see Gray, as a metal partition separated the two inside the vehicle.

Gray’s family attorney has disputed the document...

In a small number of cities clustered in Los Angeles County, Calif., people are seeing their property and money seized by law enforcement through civil asset forfeiture, and it’s making police departments tens of millions of dollars.

California has safeguards in place to protect innocent people from the harmful practices of civil asset forfeiture. However, a new report from the Drug Policy Alliance found that such measures haven’t stopped law enforcement agencies from using federal forfeiture laws to circumvent state policies.

The Drug Policy Alliance, an organization focused on drug policy reforms, examined the cities that lead California in seizures per capita. The cities—Baldwin Park, Beverly Hills, Gardena, Irwindale, La Verne, Pomona, South Gate, Vernon and West Covina—are all located around Los Angeles County and collected more than $43 million in revenue from forfeitures between 2006 and 2013.

“We use federal forfeiture,” Baldwin Park Police Capt. David Reynoso told the Drug Policy Alliance. “It’s just more beneficial to us.”

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Baldwin Park, with a population of 75,390, collected $4.9 million in federal forfeiture revenue from 2006 to 2013 and participated in 565 seizures from 2008 to 2013.

The city of Irwindale, meanwhile, saw $802,800 in revenue from the Justice Department’s forfeiture program and has a population of 1,422.

According to the Drug Policy Alliance’s findings, law enforcement agencies in the California cities studied used revenue from civil asset forfeiture to pay for...