Research Update

I've fully compiled the available data on equitable sharing payments from the Department of Justice's website. The dataset includes more than 34,000 payments made to state and local law enforcement agencies between 2000 and 2012. I've begun cleaning up and verifying the data, making sure it was all copied correctly. Due to differences in rounding, some of the totals in the data set are different than the totals listed on the DOJ site, so I've begun the process of double checking the totals to make sure nothing was copied incorrectly. I've also begun coding agency locations, cleaning up typos from the source data, and consolidating cases where the same agency appears under multiple names. Here are a few quick takeaways from first glances at the data.

• The DOJ made more than $4 billion in equitable sharing payments between 2000 and 2012.
• California has by far been the largest recipient of equitable sharing revenue, recording more than $600 million dollars in the time period covered, nearly 15% of the total. Over that time period payments exploded from $29 million in fiscal year 2000 to over $82 million in 2012, an increase of more than 181%.
• The top 10 recipient states are California, New York, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan, raking in a combined $2.6 billion.
• The largest payments to individual departments were paid out to the agencies in Virginia and West Virginia, which was revenue from a federal settlement with Purdue Pharmaceuticals regarding their marketing and sale of oxycontin. 
• There are a number of puzzlingly small amounts paid out, which are particularly confusing given the stated requirements for a case to be federally adoped. For exampe, Marion Police Department in Indiana received a payment of $4 from sales proceeds. In fact, there were 151 equitable sharing payments made that totaled less than $100 dollars, begging the questions how and what kind of seizures and forfeitures taken on by federal agencies would result in such small pay outs.

All told, I have barely scratched the surface of this massive pile of data and will be periodically updating the site with observations as I make my way through the correction and clean up process. Stay tuned for some big news coming up as I seek to expand the scope of my research and build a proper website and develop a real online presence. 

Introduction

Welcome to the new Forfeiture Report. I thought long and hard after my hiatus from the previous iteration of this site and decided that a relaunch was in order. Why? Well, the answer is simple; the blog was a mess. It needed some trimming, some tightening, and a new focus. I’ve washed the previous posts from the site and I will sort through them to salvage what I can, but from here on out I will be focused on new content.

The new Forfeiture Report will be research focused, with a smattering of news commentary and legal analysis. Back in 2009, when my interest in drug policy led me down the trail of civil asset forfeiture, one of the first setbacks I ran in to was the lack of readily available data and research. My searches through JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, Westlaw, and Lexis-Nexis yielded disappointing results. There were many notable scholarly articles on the legal processes and constitutional issues, but only a couple of empirical studies. 

In terms of visible public organizations, the Institute for Justice, who published the excellent Policing for Profit when I well in to the first draft of my thesis, appears to be the only national group conducting research on asset forfeiture. There are smaller groups, such as Forfeiture Endangers American Rights (FEAR) and my former employer Americans for Forfeiture Reform (AFR), who do excellent work on the issue but are not actively pursuing a research agenda. The Cato Institute, who published the late Henry Hyde’s seminal treatise Forfeiting Our Property Rights, likewise does an excellent job publicizing the problems of forfeiture, but does not seem to be working on any kind of data projects or empirical studies. 

The focus of this site will be on combing through the available data and analyzing it. There is a proverbial mountain of data available publicly from the federal Department of Justice and several state agencies, such as California’s Attorney General, that sits ignored and unaddressed. In the coming weeks and months I will be using DOJ data to create Equitable Sharing Profiles of each of the 50 states. Commentary on current forfeiture related news will be mixed in, as well as discussion of the many Supreme Court decisions and the legal reasoning behind them that has led us to this point. 

The intent here is to go beyond activist horror stories of abuse and contribute something more to the criminal justice research community. My ultimate goal is to create a searchable database that can be used by activists and academics, as well as ordinary citizens and law makers, who find themselves as I did 4 years ago, wandering through the dark in search of information. The information is out there just waiting to be turned in to something consumable. If not me, then who?