CHANUTE — Mary Leonard wasn’t expecting to be pulled over by a Chanute Police Department officer in the early morning hours of Dec. 21, 2021.
“It was my father’s car. My headlights weren’t turned on,” she said. “It was only the second time I had ever driven that car, and I thought they were automatic since it was a newer car.”
That set off a chain reaction. Because of a prior drunk driving arrest, she was not allowed to drive a vehicle without an ignition interlock. Now she was under arrest for doing just that.
“I told them that this is my purse, and I have a vape pen in here, and I got arrested for marijuana,” she said.
Soon everybody was out of the car and getting searched.
“And the people who were with me had other drugs on them,” she said.
Then the police told her they were seizing the car.
“They held it for forfeiture,” she said.
Her father tried to get the car back the next day but couldn’t.
“He tried multiple times,” she said.
A week later the car was released.
“They had torn through the whole car,” she said. “The console in it was torn up. The trunk was torn up. There was nothing in that car.”
To recover the car, her father had to pay $500.
This is a scenario that plays out in Chanute with remarkable frequency. The basics have a familiar contour — a traffic stop for a minor infraction, discovery of trace amounts of marijuana or methamphetamine, an arrest, seizure of the vehicle, and then a fee that must be paid to recover it.
The legal authority for seizing the car is a process known as civil forfeiture, which allows law enforcement agencies to seize any assets they suspect were involved in the committing of a crime — in these cases, possession of illegal drugs.
In Kansas, such seizures must be reported to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and information from these incident reports is available on a public website.
In 2021, the Chanute Police Department reported 46 such seizures, of which 41 were resolved with a settlement agreement. Statewide, there were only seven other seizures in 2021 resolved by settlement.
Civil forfeiture seizures are relatively rare in Kansas. Nearly 300 law enforcement agencies — 80% of those in the state — reported none in 2021.
