Is sharing really caring? Estimating the effects of federal asset forfeiture revenue sharing on local policing outcomes

Abstract

Civil asset forfeiture, whereby police agencies may profit from seized assets without a criminal conviction, is a contentious practice. Despite high-profile instances of abuse, law enforcement has made strong claims that forfeiture provides a critical funding mechanism for police departments. This paper offers a unique strategy to identify the causal relationship between asset forfeiture revenue and local policing outcomes, measured by crime reports and clearances (a standard proxy for police effort). I estimate the impact of a temporary suspension of Equitable Sharing, a program allowing local police agencies to financially benefit from asset forfeitures done in collaboration with federal law enforcement. The suspension was a plausibly exogenous shock to the forfeiture revenue received by participating police agencies. I exploit pre-suspension variation in program participation to study this interruption as a quasi-experiment; using a difference-in-differences design, my model estimates the differential impact of the suspension on participating agencies (treated) relative to non-participating agencies (control). My results indicate that the suspension led to a 4.7% increase in the number of violent crimes reported within participating agency jurisdictions relative to the baseline mean, but it also offers suggestive evidence of a small (2.5%) decrease in property crime reports as a result of the suspension. These effects appear to cancel out, producing a consistent null effect on total crime reports. While my results for violent crime are quite robust, the results for property crimes are more sensitive to model specification. My results for crime clearances also turn out to be inconclusive; as such, further research is required to determine whether the suspension's impact on crime reports stems from a change in police effort or an alternative explanatory mechanism.