A dismayingly predictable finding appears to exist in this academic paper, if I understand the abstract properly. Although the abstract doesn’t label it as such, it’s about civil asset forfeiture, an old interest of mine. By Alex Tabarrok, Michael Makowsky, and Thomas Stratmann on SSRN:
We exploit local deficits and state-level differences in police revenue retention from civil asset forfeitures to estimate how incentives to raise revenue influence policing. In a national sample, we find that local fine and forfeiture revenue increases at a faster rate with drug arrests than arrests for violent crimes. Revenues also increase at a faster rate with black and Hispanic drug arrests than white drug arrests. Concomitant with higher rates of revenue generation, we find that black and Hispanic drug, DUI, and prostitution arrests, and associated property seizures, increase with local deficits when institutions allow officials to more easily retain revenues from forfeited property. White drug and DUI arrests are insensitive to these institutions. We do, however, observe comparable increases in white prostitution arrests. Our results show how revenue-driven law enforcement can distort police behavior.
That last sentence should be unsurprising to long-time readers, because revenue-driven law enforcement means there are now two goals of law enforcement, the first being justice[1], but this new goal of collecting revenue for law enforcement is not constrained by the first goal. As independent goals, in the abstract they may affect each other, but in the real world, where law enforcement agents are compensated primarily with money, which just happens to also be the content of revenue, the distorter is the revenue, and the distorted is the authentic goal of law-enforcement, justice.
This is the wrong way to run a societal sector.
Kevin Drum interprets (no doubt from the paper, which I’ve chosen not to read):
The more black (and Hispanic) an area is, the more likely it is that strapped local governments will turn to civil asset forfeitures to raise revenue. But the more white an area is, the less likely they are to increase the use of civil asset forfeitures.
Just to make it a bit worse.
Ban civil asset forfeiture now!
1 I know, I know, law enforcement is rarely or never concerned with justice, but all the same it should be, and hopefully we’ll continue to move that way as society continues to evolve towards justice and away from arbitrary laws.
