This potential for abuse is compounded by the strong financial incentive that law enforcement has to make seizures--since they benefit directly from forfeited property. It was the passage of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, part of the Reagan-era ramp-up in the war on drugs, that first made this possible. At a federal level, the law established two new forfeiture funds: one at the U.S. Department of Justice, which gets revenue from forfeitures done by agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and another now run by the U.S. Treasury, which gets revenue from agencies like Customs and the Coast Guard. These funds could now be used for forfeiture-related expenses, payments to informants, prison building, equipment purchase, and other general law enforcement purposes.
But equally important, local law enforcement would now get a piece of the pie. Within the 1984 Act was a provision for so-called "equitable sharing", which allows local law enforcement agencies to receive a portion of the net proceeds of forfeitures they help make under federal law--and under current policy, that can be up to 80%. Previously, seized assets had been handed over to the federal government in their entirety.
Immediately following passage of the Act, federal forfeitures increased dramatically. The amount of revenue deposited into the Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund, for example, soared from $27 million in 1985 to $644 million in 1991--a more than twenty-fold increase. And as forfeitures increased, so did the amount of money flowing back to state and local law enforcement through equitable sharing.
Some say that because of the resulting windfall, state and local law enforcement has become as addicted to forfeiture as an addict is to drugs--making property seizure no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself. In 1999 alone, approximately $300 million of the $957 million that the Treasury and Justice Department funds took in went back to the state and local departments that helped with the seizures. And since 1986, the Department of Justice's equitable sharing program has distributed over $2 billion in cash and property. Additional revenue comes from forfeitures done under state law, which adds to the total intake. According to a study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, state and local law enforcement reported receiving a total of over $700 million in drug-related asset forfeiture revenue in 1997 alone--with some departments single-handedly taking in several million dollars for their own use.
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