Police departments seizing the property of drug dealers is nothing new. The idea of using cars taken from dirtbags as some type of community vehicle isn’t new either. One sheriff in Saginaw, Michigan, has come up with a new idea though, using those cars to replace aging vehicles in the police motorpool for every day duty. It seems weird at first but in the end, it kind of makes sense.

Michigan is as cash strapped as any state in the union and we can only imagine how bad municipal budgets are hurting. At first blush the idea of the Sheriff tooling around town in a 2007 Mustang GT seems like a big waste of taxpayer money, that is until you hear that they paid nothing for it.

Sheriff William L. Federspiel likes the idea so much that he wants to outfit his captains, lieutenants, and sergents with freebie seized stuff.

There’s a school of thought out there that seizing property is the wrong thing to do. We’d argue that dealing drugs is about the lowest thing a person can do and entering into that line of work carries a large set of risks. Losing your junk if you get caught seems fair enough to us.

It can be debated whether or not the sheriff is actually saving anyone any money. Yes, he is saving the city money by keeping them from buying new police cars, but he is also costing them. Prosecuting those drug dealers isn’t free and auctioning the cars, like lots of departments do, can help to defray some of that cost.

So the question remains, should the police keep the cars? What say you?

Source — MLive.com — Muscle-bound Mustang sends a message to drug dealers