Pubdate: Thu, 16 Jun 2016
Source: Orange County Register, The (CA)
Copyright: 2016 The Orange County Register
Contact:  http://www.ocregister.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/321
Author: Jesse Hathaway
Note: Jesse Hathaway  is a research fellow 
with The Heartland Institute.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/af.htm (Asset Forfeiture)

PLAYING BOTH 'COPS AND ROBBERS' ON ASSET FORFEITURE

A new digital system unveiled by Oklahoma government police is just 
the latest example of civil asset forfeiture laws encouraging cops to 
become the robbers they're supposed to be catching.

Since May, the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol has been deploying 
"Electronic Recovery and Access to Data" systems. ERADs allow highway 
patrolmen to use civil asset forfeiture laws to seize individuals' 
assets stored in bank accounts or on prepaid debit cards at the press 
of a button.

Civil asset forfeiture is a legal process by which government law 
enforcement agents seize private property, including money, believed 
to have been used in the commission of a crime, even if no criminal 
conviction has occurred.

Before the 1980s, when there was a brief "tough-on-crime" fad, civil 
asset forfeiture was relatively obscure. In 1984, Congress passed the 
Comprehensive Crime Control Act, permitting local and national law 
enforcement agencies to share the rewards of seized assets and cash 
with one another. Between the law's passage and 1993, a total of $3 
billion in cash and property flowed through the nationalized Asset 
Forfeiture Program to local and national law enforcement agencies.

Instead of using civil asset forfeiture as it was originally 
intended, police in many jurisdictions have used civil asset 
forfeiture to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers.

Studying asset forfeiture rates and law enforcement budgets from 
government datasets across five states, Harvard School of Public 
Health professor Katherine Baicker and UC Irvine associate economics 
professor Mireille Jacobson uncovered an interesting link between 
asset forfeiture rates and local government budgets. When government 
police carry out more asset forfeitures, Baicker and Jacobson found, 
local lawmakers reduce spending on law enforcement, treating the 
proceeds from law enforcement actions as revenue. In turn, asset 
forfeiture rates increase, because government police begin treating 
forfeiture as a fundraising activity.

Baicker and Jacobson write that just as a living thing responds to 
stimuli, government agencies, such as police departments and county 
commissioner boards, respond to incentives in complex, interconnected ways.

"Counties and police respond to incentives driven by seizures laws in 
a sophisticated way that depends both on the reaction of the other 
party and on the fiscal circumstances that affect their marginal 
utility of the funds," Baicker and Jacobson write. "We find that 
local governments do indeed capture a significant fraction of the 
seizures that police make by reducing their other allocations to 
policing, undermining the statutory incentive created by state 
seizure laws. They are more likely to do so in times of fiscal distress."

To guard against this unfair and immoral form of taxation, states 
must reform their laws to require a criminal conviction before 
private property can be seized and to require that asset forfeiture 
proceeds be deposited into the general fund, not funneled directly to 
law enforcement budgets.

Civil asset forfeiture creates too many perverse economic incentives. 
However well-intentioned the idea may be, the practice of civil asset 
forfeiture has been corrupted and now infringes on Americans' right 
to be free from harassment by money-hungry agents of the government.

The U.S. government's law enforcement agencies are supposed to be the 
cops - not the robbers - and it needs to stop now.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom