This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 27th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Civil Asset Forfeiture often requires little more than a police officer's suspicion that property has been used in or are the proceeds of a crime.

And it's up to property owners to prove somehow that their property was not involved.

Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan says he would like to change that.

We spoke last week.

How did you come to see civil asset forfeiture, not to be confused with criminal asset forfeiture

as a problem in the United States.

Well, we began hearing more reports coming from organizations like Heritage and others and

then some newspapers doing some investigative reporting on what was going on.

It began to hit the headlines.

In Michigan, the Daco case of a grocer that had his assets virtually stolen from him simply because he was doing what the insurance company required him to do and that they wouldn't insure anything beyond $10,000 of receipts in his store.

He's taking it each day to the bank and all of a sudden, there he is stopped, has $35,000 of assets frozen and spends the next better part of a year trying to get it back,

never being charged with anything illegal.

His assets were charged with potential of money laundering illegalities,

found out that that wasn't the case.

So as we began looking into it, last year, we were encouraged to put a marker down and a bill that would move that direction of saying,

we don't see a problem with having a tool that law enforcement can use

to get at drug running money laundering that goes with it. But let's do it the legal way

and make sure that people are considered innocent until proven guilty.

And don't use a loophole that says your assets are guilty.

And oh by the way, we're going to seize them from you. And then, oh by the way we're going to seize them from you and then oh by the way law enforcement

...