Working Paper: NBER ID: w23873
Authors: Shawn Kantor; Carl Kitchens; Steven Pawlowski
Abstract: The 1984 federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CCCA) included a provision that permitted local law enforcement agencies to share up to 80 percent of the proceeds derived from civil asset forfeitures obtained in joint operations with federal authorities. This procedure became known as “equitable sharing.” In this paper we investigate how this rule governing forfeited assets influenced crime and police incentives by taking advantage of pre-existing differences in state level civil asset forfeiture law and the timing of the CCCA. We find that after the CCCA was enacted crime fell about 17 percent in places where the federal law allowed police to retain more of their seized assets than state law previously allowed. Equitable sharing also led police agencies to reallocate their effort toward the policing of drug crimes. We estimate that drug arrests increased by about 37 percent in the years after the enactment of the CCCA, indicating that it was profitable for police agencies to reallocate their efforts. Such a reallocation of effort, however, brought an unintended cost in the form of increased roadway fatalities, seemingly from reduced enforcement of traffic laws.
Keywords: Civil Asset Forfeiture; Crime; Police Incentives; Comprehensive Crime Control Act
JEL Codes: K15; K42
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| enactment of the CCCA (Z18) | reduction in crime (K42) |
| enactment of the CCCA (Z18) | decrease in property crimes (K42) |
| enactment of the CCCA (Z18) | increase in drug arrests (K42) |
| increase in drug arrests (K42) | increase in roadway fatalities (R48) |
| enactment of the CCCA (Z18) | distortion of police incentives (H31) |