Introduction
Asset forfeiture is one of the largest tools used by law enforcement that nobody has heard of. Asset forfeiture is when law enforcement seizes someone’s property (cars, houses, and even cash) if they can prove in court that it connected to a crime. It is used by almost every local, state, and federal law enforcement organization in the country. All federal asset forfeiture is siphoned into a multi-million-dollar fund run by the Department of Justice called the Asset Forfeiture Fund, AFF, which comfortably operates unnoticed by major news organizations. According to the yearly audit conducted by KPMG in 2019, the Asset Forfeiture Fund net assets were valued at $6,762.7 million dollars.[1]
If state and local law enforcement agencies help in the seizure of federal assets, they can receive a portion of the revenue from the federal forfeiture through the Equitable Sharing Program. Law enforcement agencies can use this Equitable Sharing money to buy more guns, radios, cars, and almost everything in between. This money is intended to help law enforcement agencies accomplish three goals: punish or deter criminals through enforcement, enhance cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement, and compensate victims. Although compensation of victims is where most of the assets in the AFF go, Equitable Sharing payments still make up around $350 million dollars every year.
The act of modern asset forfeiture began with passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act in 1970 which allowed law enforcement to seize and forfeit drugs and equipment used by drug organizations which was major tool in the “war on drugs”.[2] It was based on the idea that property can be charged for a crime. Unlike people, property does not have the presumption of innocence thus law enforcement has a much lower bar to clear in court. After law enforcement seizes the property, proves in court that the property is tangentially connected to crime, and depending on the state, they get to keep a portion if not all the proceeds from said property. If it is a house or car, it gets sold at auction. If involved in a federal forfeiture, the proceeds from the sale gets put into the Asset Forfeiture fund then are re-dispersed to state and local law enforcement through the Equitable Sharing Program.
With the right interpretation, these guidelines declare the funds can be used for almost everything and they have been. In Camden County, Georgia, a $90,000 Dodge Viper was purchased for the county’s DARE program. In Fulton County, Georgia, football tickets were purchased for the district attorney office. In Kimble County, Texas, $14,000 were used for a “training seminar” in Hawaii for the staff of the district attorney’s office.[3] As previously mentioned, this money is not meant to buy tickets or flashy news cars. It is meant to provide law enforcement with the tools they need to deter criminals through informant activities–in more concise words, to lower crime.
With the millions of dollars being siphoned in and out into state and local agencies, there poses a legitimate question as to whether the money is being used where it can benefit society at large. I found that there is little to no connection between the amount of Equitable Sharing Payments and crime reduction. Additionally, I found there is no connection between Equitable Sharing Payments and total arrests as well as drug abuse arrests.
Data
This study used a cross-sectional analysis to study the effectiveness of money coming from the Equitable Sharing program and its effect on crime. A national cross-sectional analysis allowed me to study every state in the United States from 2015-2019 since this is the only data available on the Department of Justice website. I had to control for other variables that are known to cause crime such as population, unemployment, number of police officers, gross national product, and illicit drug use. My independent variable was the money provided back to state and local law enforcement through the Equitable Sharing program while my dependent variable was the amount of Part 1 crimes reported per state in the Uniform Crime Report. This was all an effort to deduce if Equitable Sharing payments given to states has any statistical effect on crime.
Due to the manpower available and time constraints, I focused the study on the state level data. With this being the case, I had to focus on trends over time within states. I personally downloaded data that was collected by various government agencies and used it within my own research. Specifically referring to the type of data and their sources, I began by downloading the Equitable Sharing data which can be found on the Asset Forfeiture Fund’s website . The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 and 28 USC 524 (c) requires that reports be provided to Congress and made available to the public at the end of each fiscal year. The summaries reflect Asset Forfeiture Program annual statistics including Assets Forfeiture Fund (AFF) expenditures and deposits, as well as Official Use and Equitable Sharing activity. Through their annual reports to Congress, I downloaded the amount of money the Equitable Sharing program handed out to states from 2015-2019. I choose 2015-2019 because those years are the only data available on the Department of Justice’s website when this study was being conducted. I excluded from my research US territories such as Guam, Virgin Islands, Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico because asset forfeiture laws and regulations are very obscure, and they receive a negligible amount of money from the Asset Forfeiture Fund. I also collected net deposits that states put into the Fund for 2015-2019 which can also be found within the annual reports to Congress.
For crime statistics, I downloaded crime statistics from the Uniform Crime Report. Because the UCR collects large amounts of data on all sorts of crime, I wanted this research to have narrower view of crime. The UCR collects two types of data: Part 1 and Part 2 data. Part I crimes include: Criminal Homicide, Forcible Rape, Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Burglary, Larceny, Motor Vehicle Theft, Arson. The “crime” variable within the study is Part I data because it is personally collected by the FBI which makes the data more trustworthy. However, I also collected Part II data, specifically number and type of arrests, which are collected by state and local law enforcement agencies and reported to the FBI to provide peripheral data points.
To account for outside circumstances that may affect the study, I have collected covariance data. I had to think about what other factors incite crime or are correlated to crime and included them in the study to ensure my independent variable and dependent variable show causation and not just correlation. I collected population estimates from United States Census Bureau to account for population size and diversity in each state for 2015-2019. To account unemployment rates, I downloaded data collected by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. The United States Department of Commerce has personal income and expenditures by country and year as well as gross domestic product data by year which I included in the study. Finally, I downloaded the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, sub state series, from the United States Department of Health and Human Services to account for drug use within the study. Since asset forfeiture was galvanized in the 1970s to be used as a tool in the war on drugs, it is very important to see if there is any major correlation between Equitable Sharing payments and drug use within states.
All the data mentioned was aggregated on multiple Microsoft excel spreadsheets and congregated into one very large master table. The rows of the table represented the states, all US states not including US territories, while the columns contained every other piece of data being analyzed: Equitable Sharing data to the states, deposits from the states into the Fund, population estimates, unemployment statistics, UCR data, gross domestic product, personal income, annual expenditures, and drug usage. Once all the data was neatly inside the table, I exported the data into SPSS. Once in SPSS, I could manipulate and parse through the data to find correlation and possible causation between all the variables I described above.
Conclusions
Through a combination of Pearson correlation analyses and linear regression tests, I found there is no statistical correlation between Equitable Sharing Payments and crime. The Pearson correlation is too low, and the p-values and B correlations indicate no connection. Going off the conclusion of the findings, it is evident the millions of dollars being sent back to state and local law enforcement is not being used efficiently. As with everything in life, we want our money to be spent in the most effective way possible. We want to see change, and change is not what we see with Equitable Sharing payments.
As I mentioned before, the scope of my research is very limited. I only managed to collect and analyze state level data. There is also the problem with only measuring 50 states leaving the possibilities of what is called, “ a small n problem.” Only having 50 variables limits the accuracy of many different types of statistical analysis.
For future research on the topic of asset forfeiture and the Asset Forfeiture Fund, there should be more focus on the types of crimes associated with organized crime and drugs such as prostitution, racketeering, etc… I believe it may prove important in determining the effectiveness of the Equitable Sharing Program. I would also urge those on both sides of political spectrum, preferably those with institutional accreditation, to research this topic to give it the unbiased research it deserves. Further research should be conducted to determine if the states that force all the revenue of asset forfeiture into education are better off than those who do not. Even better would be research to determine where Equitable Sharing payments could go to have the greatest impact on society. With some states, all asset forfeiture revenue award in local courts is put towards education or infrastructure. Why should Equitable Sharing payments be any different? Maybe the money could go to fund infrastructure projects, fund new welfare policies, or more.
Conversation About Asset Forfeiture
Even though my project focused solely on the effectiveness of the Equitable Sharing payments, there needs to be a larger conversation about the general use of asset forfeiture. There are two fields of thought when it comes to asset forfeiture at large. The pro-forfeiture group emphasize that even though law enforcement profit off asset forfeiture, the money is being used wisely and it is helping law enforcement close more cases. They are less worried about budget cuts and can focus more on valuable police work. With more money coming in from forfeitures, law enforcement can use this money to buy more equipment, pay overtime, and improve the life of law enforcement officers overall thus allowing them to focus more on solving more crimes and getting more criminals off the streets. The financial benefit of asset forfeiture is a social benefit which provides more funding for law enforcement while making the public safer as a result. These assertions fall away when faced with legitimate criticism.
Those in opposite group propose that asset forfeiture is solely for financial benefit of law enforcement agencies and it undermines the practice of having democratically elected officials create the budget for law enforcement. As an example, if a city council wanted to change the way policing is used in a community it would take away money from the police budget and use it somewhere else. With asset forfeiture, police can make up the lost money from their budget by prioritizing policing that would bring in more money and continue to police the way it wants which undermines the whole process entirely. Critics also say that asset forfeiture changes the way policing is conducted. An investigation by Channel 5 News in Tennessee provides a striking example. They investigated the rate in which traffic stops were made by police officers on Interstate 40. It is conventional wisdom that drugs would come into Nashville using the eastbound lane from Mexico and the money from those drug deals leave through the westbound side. Knowing this, you would expect that law enforcement would want to prioritize the eastbound lane to stop as many drugs as possible from entering the city. However, they found that officers are 10 times more likely to make traffic stops in the westbound lane where the money is most likely located.[4] Instead of focusing on the drugs, Tennessee law enforcement are more likely to pursue the cash instead of the drugs.
Even though this is just one law enforcement agency in one state, it does illustrate how asset forfeiture changes the way enforcement is conducted. Asset Forfeiture is one of the most important tools used in modern law enforcement, but that does not mean it is without fault. If there is a solution where policing for profit is no longer an issue and asset forfeiture can still be used, we must start a conversation between our law enforcement agencies, legislators, and community leaders to try and find a compromise.
[1] Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, (2019). Audit of the Assets Forfeiture Fund and Seized Asset Deposit Fund Annual Financial Statements Fiscal Year 2019. Retrieved from https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/a20014.pdf#page=1.
[2] “Here’s a Brief History of Civil Asset Forfeiture”, Morgan & Morgan, Nov. 22, 2017, https://www.forthepeople.com/blog/history-behind-civil-asset-forfeiture/.
[3] “Part I: Policing for Profit”, Institute for Justice, Mar 2010, https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-first-edition/part-i-policing-for-profit/.
[4] Phil Williams, “Are Middle Tennessee Police Profiting Off Drug Trade?”, Jan 17, 2017, https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/policing-for-profit/are-middle-tennessee-police-profiting-off-drug-trade.
Reid Shanks is a senior at Indiana University.
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