It would not be up to the police to define but a court.
And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can.
Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.
That's all very convenient for the police, but not at all for the individual. Real life of an individual does have hard time caps, for the duration of their expected life, for how many days they can go without food, without a livelihood, etc. When the police seizes property, they affect these things for an individual. There are time caps to each of these things for the individual.
Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the individual for as long as the prison wants.
Well, I agree, but it is a significant improvement over the current status of indefinite asset seizure being essentially the law of the land everywhere.
Some amount of asset seizure is legitimate. Cops do need to hold evidence, for instance. Money seized from drug dealers can’t be given back to them while they await trial. Etc.
You couldn’t really effectively put a 90 day cap (or any hard number) on asset retention without either having it be too short or too long in many cases. It’s not a court’s job (and shouldn’t be) to do so, it’s a court’s job to rule that a seizure that happened was or was not unconstitutional.
It is my hope (and has been for a long time) that the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, but they rarely would do anything even remotely like setting a hard limit. They’ll leave that to states and lower courts to determine what makes sense and then possibly hear future challenges as necessary.
This is an example, I think, of the system working well to correct an issue. It does seem to me inline with the intention of the amendment to consider indefinite asset seizure unconstitutional, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a Supreme Court Justice so we’ll see. They’re likely to grant certiorari here.
And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can.
Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.