By Ghost Zero

There is a courtroom on the seventeenth floor of the Daley Center in downtown Chicago. Courtroom 1707. It does not try people. It tries property: cash, cars, phones, the things police took off someone who was often never charged with anything.

In 2022, court watchers sat in on more than 230 of those cases. Two out of three property owners stood there with no lawyer. For many of them, the money they would have paid a lawyer with was the money being taken.

Part 1 of this series covered the people at the top, who get deals, settlements and bailouts. This is what the other set of rules looks like.

Guilty Until You Prove Otherwise

It is called civil asset forfeiture, and here is how it works. Police seize property they say is connected to a crime. They do not have to charge you. They do not have to convict you. The case is filed against the property itself, and you have to go to court and prove it is clean to get it back.

Data obtained from the Cook County State's Attorney showed more than 23,000 seizures from 2012 to 2017. Roughly 11,000 were for less than $1,000. Nearly 1,500 were for less than $100. They clustered in the poorer neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Nobody runs a drug cartel on $100.

Follow the money and you find the motive. Under Illinois law, drug forfeiture money in Cook County is split three ways: 65 percent to the agency that seized it, 25 percent to the State's Attorney who prosecutes it, and 10 percent to the State Police. Ninety percent goes back to the people who took it and the office that decides whether they keep it.

The federal government runs its own version, called equitable sharing. Local police hand a seizure to federal agents, and up to 80 percent comes back to the local department, even where state law would have limited it. The Institute for Justice, which fights these cases in court, counts at least $68.8 billion forfeited across the country since 2000.

It is not just street cash. In 2013, the IRS emptied $35,000 from the bank account of Terry Dehko, a Michigan grocery store owner, because his deposits were under $10,000. He was never charged with a crime. He got his money back only after a public legal fight.

Even a Supreme Court justice has called it out. In 2017, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that this "system, where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use, has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses." The Court has since chipped at the edges. In 2019, it ruled states cannot impose excessive fines, after Indiana took a man's $42,000 Land Rover over a small heroin sale. But in 2024, it ruled you get a timely hearing eventually, not a quick one to get your car back while you wait.

And who loses most? An Institute for Justice survey of people caught in Philadelphia's forfeiture system found 67 percent were Black, in a city that is 43 percent Black.

The Ticket Trap

Chicago found another way to collect.

In 2012, the city raised the fine for not having a city vehicle sticker from $120 to $200. Miss the payment and late penalties and collections could push a single ticket to $488. By 2018, drivers owed about $275 million in sticker tickets alone. Three unpaid tickets, or two more than a year old, and the city could boot your car. Then came towing fees and daily storage charges on a car you needed to get to work to pay the tickets.

People did the only thing left. They filed for bankruptcy. In 2007, about 1,000 Chapter 13 bankruptcies in the area involved debt to the city. By 2017, it was more than 10,000. Families went bankrupt over parking tickets.

And when they filed, the city held onto their cars anyway. Bankruptcy is supposed to freeze collections. Chicago argued it could keep impounded cars until the debt was dealt with, and in 2021 the Supreme Court sided with the city.

To be fair, the record shows Chicago changed some rules after the reporting came out, including a debt relief program for sticker tickets in 2019. Take that for what it is: relief offered after a decade of collections and thousands of bankruptcies, not before.

The Badge Shield

When the government is the one who does wrong, the rules change again.

It is called qualified immunity. Starting in 1967, the Supreme Court gave police a good-faith defense against civil rights lawsuits. In 1982, it turned that into the modern rule: officials cannot be sued unless they violated a "clearly established" right. In practice, courts often require an earlier case with nearly the same facts. If nobody has been wronged that exact way before, the officer walks.

In Georgia, a sheriff's deputy fired at a family's dog and hit a 10-year-old boy lying on the ground in the knee. In 2019, a federal appeals court granted the deputy immunity. It never decided whether the boy's rights were violated at all.

In Fresno, California, officers were accused of stealing more than $225,000 in cash and rare coins they had seized under a search warrant. The appeals court said the allegation of theft was "deeply disturbing." Then it granted immunity, because no earlier case had clearly established that police stealing seized property violates the Constitution.

Closer to home, there is Jon Burge. Chicago police's own 1990 investigation found that abuse under Commander Burge "did occur and that it was systematic," with at least 50 potential victims. In 2006, special prosecutors concluded the evidence would justify indicting and convicting him for torturing a suspect. But the deadline to charge him had passed. So in 2010, federal prosecutors convicted him of lying about it instead. He got four and a half years. The police pension board split 4 to 4 on cutting off his pension, so he kept it. The city later created a $5.5 million fund for the men he tortured. Fifty-seven were approved.

The deadline ran out for the commander. It never runs out on a car payment.

Down the Street at 26th and Cal

Now go to the Cook County criminal courthouse at 26th and California. Under Illinois law, possessing a small amount of most controlled substances is a Class 4 felony, carrying one to three years in prison. For at least two decades, most felony drug cases there have been charged directly by local police, without a prosecutor reviewing them first.

To be fair, Cook County now offers a diversion program for some qualifying cases involving five grams or less, and finishing it gets the charge dismissed. That is a real off-ramp. But it is a program you have to qualify for and complete, with a felony waiting if you slip.

Compare that to Part 1, where a company pleaded guilty to felonies twice and the family that owned it was never charged.

What You Can Do

The system counts on you not knowing the rules. Learn them.

– If police take your property, do not miss a deadline. Forfeiture cases are lost on paperwork as often as on facts. Contact the Institute for Justice or a local legal aid clinic the same week.
– At a traffic stop, stay calm and polite, and say clearly that you do not consent to a search. Ask if you are free to go.
– Keep receipts and bank records for any large amount of cash you carry. Better yet, do not carry it.
– In Chicago, check whether you qualify for city debt relief before a ticket turns into a boot.
– Call your state legislators and ask one question: will you vote to require a criminal conviction before police can keep someone's property, and to send that money to the general fund instead of the department that seized it? Make them answer on the record.

Start today. Look up whether your state requires a conviction before police can keep what they take. Most people are surprised by the answer.

The full research is in Second Class Citizen: We See the System and We Are Done With It, free in the Red Pill Library. Part 1 of Two Sets of Rules, Too Big to Jail, covers how the people at the top get deals, settlements and bailouts. Part 3 will cover what happens when the same act gets a different outcome depending on who you are. I also put this subject into song form, released by Vigilant Protocol as LOPSIDED JUSTICE, with songs from The Valkyrie Project, Redline Republic and Axiom on the way. Protocol Media is building an archive for every topic it covers: books, briefs, music, art and short-form video, backed by the Evidence, Founding and Acts Records. The work is underway and the documents are still being added, so the page keeps growing.

ART AS THE WEAPON. TRUTH AS THE AMMUNITION.