When Joseph Rivers set out for Los Angeles with $16,000 in his pocket to kick-start his career in the music industry, the last thing he expected was to lose his family’s hard-earned money—at the hands of a federal law enforcement officer.
Rivers was never arrested or charged with a crime, but thanks to federal civil asset forfeiture laws, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents could still seize his money and leave him stranded in Albuquerque, more than 1,500 miles from home.
Now, Rivers is fighting to get his money back. Last week, he got the chance to visit Capitol Hill to tell his story. Alongside him at the legislative briefing was a bipartisan panel of experts—including a former head of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office—uniformly calling for reforms to federal civil forfeiture laws.
Civil asset forfeiture is the legal practice that allows law enforcement officials to seize private property and money that is suspected of aiding, or resulting from, criminal activity. Federal forfeiture laws were ramped up in the 1980s to aid law enforcement in cutting the illegal profits of organized crime and drug kingpins.
To incentivize federal law enforcement officers to seize “dirty” assets using forfeiture laws, law enforcement agencies were permitted to retain the proceeds of these seizures to subsidize their budgets. State and local agencies were given a piece of the pie as well, through a program known as “equitable sharing.” That program promised seizing agencies up to 80 percent of the proceeds of forfeiture cases they transferred to the federal government.
This profit incentive worked well—perhaps too well—resulting in an exponential growth in the use of civil forfeiture. In 1985, the first year that federal agencies were allowed to keep forfeiture proceeds, a mere $27 million was deposited into the Assets Forfeiture Fund. Today, annual deposits are measured in the billions. And all of it is used exclusively by law enforcement agencies, with little outside oversight or accountability.
Darpana Sheth, an attorney with the Institute for Justice and a panelist at last week’s briefing, noted that such vast sums of money can distort law enforcement priorities. Sheth pointed to Tennessee, where a Nashville news investigation revealed that drug task force officers were 10 times more likely to conduct traffic stops on the westbound route of I-40 than the eastbound route. Why? While illegal drugs were transported eastward, the illegal proceeds would return to Mexico along the westbound lanes, and it is simply easier and far more lucrative to target cash rather than criminals.
This practice, not uncommon elsewhere, is a clear example of police emphasizing profit over public safety.
