DA restricts seizure of property

Under old system, police gathered $1.1M over four years from people who weren’t charged

MARTINEZ >> Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton has officially ended a controversial practice of allowing police to seize assets and money from people who are not charged with a crime.

This week’s announcement came roughly 18 months after she implemented an interim ban of the practice following a Bay Area News Group investigation that found, from 2015 to 2018, police had raked in $1.1 million from people who were not criminally charged.

The practice, known as civil asset forfeiture, allows law enforcement to seize cash or property from people suspected of committing crimes — usually involving drugs — and transfer it to the government. It’s different than criminal asset forfeiture, in which a person’s crime-related property is seized after a conviction.

Since Becton pledged to reform civil asset forfeiture proceedings last year, the number of cases in which property was seized without criminal charges being filed dropped significantly, according to public records obtained by this news organization.

Becton also raised the asset threshold for initiating cases from $500 to $1,000, her office announced. The new policy exempts situations where the property is abandoned or not claimed or is claimed by a third party who does not appear to own the property or have an interest in it.

Last year, this news organization found that Contra Costa County law enforcement agencies seize a total of $1.1 million over four years from people suspected of committing drug-related crimes but who were never charged, according to county records.

Including those who were charged with crimes, the total amount seized was $3.48 million. Drug cases accounted for the overwhelming majority of the seizures. Where only a single drug was involved, marijuana cases were by far the most common, accounting for up to $1.2 million of the cash forfeiture petitions, compared with around $306,000 in methamphetamine cases, $268,000 in heroin cases, $182,000 in cocaine cases, $81,000 in crack cocaine cases and $6,000 in prescription pill cases.

As a result of Becton’s interim policy change, the amount of money taken from people who weren’t charged dropped to about $71,000 in 2019 from nine cases and to $7,800 in the first half of this year. For cases with charges filed, law enforcement agencies seized more than $2 million in 2019 — including a large drug bust in Walnut Creek — and $259,000 in the first half of 2020.

California law allows cash or property to be subject to forfeiture if it has been used to buy drugs, for instance, or if it is traceable to drug trafficking, as long as the owner of the property or cash knew it was being used for that purpose. While state law does not require criminal charges to be filed in order for authorities to seize assets except in certain circumstances, the practice has long drawn criticism from those who say seizing property from people who are not convicted of any crime doesn’t serve the interest of justice.

Civil asset forfeiture draws in a lot of money collectively, most of which goes to the state or local police agencies that seized the property. A study released this month by the Institute for Justice found that since 2000, states and the federal government collected a combined total of at least $68.8 billion.

California law enforcement collected more than $440 million total from 2002 to 2018 through civil forfeiture, according to the study. Police took an additional $1.3 billion from 2000 to 2019 through the federal equitable sharing program, a loophole in which local or state law enforcement agencies can hand seized property to the federal government for forfeiture and get back up to 80% of the proceeds. Because federal laws are more lenient than state laws about civil forfeiture, the sharing program has often been used when seizures are conducted through a task force partnership with federal authorities.

California legislators have enacted some reforms to curb that practice:

In 2016, the Legislature approved a law saying that law enforcement cannot get a cut from proceeds through the federal equitable sharing program unless the case involves $40,000 or more in cash or there is a federal conviction in the case.

The same legislation increased burden of proof and conviction requirements for state cases.

But critics of civil forfeiture want the state to abolish it entirely.

“Most laws—including California’s—still stack the deck against property owners and give law enforcement perverse financial incentives to pursue property over justice,” Lisa Knepper, the co-author of the report from the Institute of Justice, said in a news release about the report.

Despite its widespread practice, there is not much available evidence to show that civil forfeiture reduces crime.

And while some proponents of civil forfeiture say crime could rise without it as a deterrent, research from the Institute for Justice found no such evidence after New Mexico abolished the practice in 2015.