The federal government just extracted $390 million from Alibaba and a tied payment platform without convicting anyone of anything, and Rhode Island police departments are lining up for their cut like it's Christmas morning.

This is civil asset forfeiture, and it's the most dangerous racket in American law enforcement. The government seizes property—it doesn't charge a person, doesn't need to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, doesn't need a conviction at all. Then it distributes the spoils to the very agencies that did the seizing. The Providence Journal reported that Alibaba's China-based parent company agreed to forfeit $200 million and a firm tied to Alipay agreed to forfeit $190 million, both for failing to prevent illegal online sales. Note the language: "agreed to forfeit." That's what settlement looks like when the government has your money hostage and the cost of fighting exceeds the cost of surrendering.

The Projo framed this as a budget windfall for struggling departments, and buried what it actually reveals about the forfeiture machine. Warwick, East Providence, Hopkinton, and Rhode Island state police all supplied investigators and are now waiting on the DOJ to determine their cuts. Hopkinton Police Chief Mark Carrier was blunt: "We've been waiting for this for a long time." He called any big forfeiture "life-changing" for his department.

Here's the part that should make every American's blood run cold. Carrier admitted that Hopkinton deliberately hired a retired officer, Michael Marcotte, in 2019 specifically to keep him on a federal task force—and the town was, in Carrier's words, "fully aware of the potential for large-scale forfeitures." The estimated cost to taxpayers: $700,000. That's an investment, not an expenditure. Hopkinton spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars positioning itself to collect forfeiture revenue.

This is policing for profit, and it's exactly what the Founders drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. The British used general warrants and writs of assistance to seize colonists' property without cause. We fought a revolution over that principle. Now American police departments are making calculated investments in forfeiture task forces and treating the proceeds like found money.

The Projo notes this has happened before: forfeitures from a previous action against Google "financed a wave of spending at police agencies in the 2010s, funding major expenditures and rescuing at least one pension program." Let that sink in. A pension program—ongoing obligations to retirees—was rescued with money seized from a company that was never convicted of a crime. That's not law enforcement. That's a shakedown dressed up in a badge.

When police budgets depend on forfeiture revenue, every citizen's property becomes a potential revenue stream. The incentive structure is backwards: departments don't just enforce the law, they hunt for assets to fund themselves. Hopkinton's $700,000 bet on a task force seat wasn't an investment in public safety—it was an investment in the seizure pipeline.

The question isn't whether Alibaba or Alipay are sympathetic characters. The question is whether the government should be able to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from any entity without a criminal conviction and then hand that money to the agencies that made it happen. The Founders knew the answer. We've apparently forgotten it.