The real lesson here is you can use mental gymnastics to interpret the constitution any way you want. As such, judges are inherently political actors.

Civil asset forfeiture should be a direct and obvious breach of the Fourth Amendment, specificially "unreasonable search and seizure" but no, the law has contorted civil asset forfeiture to be OK because money is property and property has no constitutional rights.

The police exist to protect the wealthy and their property. The police as an institution began as slave catchers (ie returning slaves, being "property", to their owners). Even the FBI has its origin in the Mann Act [1], also known as the White Slave Traffic Act. Basically, it was anti-misagenation.

More generally, if you look at any important course case, mainly Supreme Court precedents, just look at a decision with the lens of how the wealthy will benefit and you'll be able to prodict the outcome with at least a 90% accuracy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act

The police are muscle that applies violence to advance the interests of the state. They only protect the wealthy insofar as that serves the interest of the state. The interests of the wealthy are generally fairly aligned with the state for various reasons. There is a subtle but important distinction between that and "serving the rich".

>The police exist to protect the wealthy and their property.

As a thought experiment, what would happen if they existed to protect the inverse segment and their property?

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