“Policing for Profit” is the title of a report by the Institute for Justice (IJ) on civil asset forfeiture, described by Bob Zadek as a data-filled compendium that pointed out an abuse existing throughout the country in communities large and small Abusive Fines and Fees (2022). The phrase names a system in which law enforcement is allowed to keep and enjoy the benefits of property obtained through forfeiture The Hidden Cause of BLM Riots (2022). Zadek’s guests across four episodes describe how forfeiture works, what financial incentives drive it, and how it has been litigated.
The mechanics of civil asset forfeiture
Sam Gedge, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, told the show that civil forfeiture allows state, local, and federal governments to take cars, cash, and homes, oftentimes without even convicting a person of a crime or even charging them with a crime Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018). He said the practice has a long history dating back to the 19th century with pirate ships and smugglers, but that in recent decades it has exploded, with law enforcement officers in virtually every state and at the federal level holding the power to strip people of their property.
Mike Greenberg, in a later episode, described civil forfeiture as a device that allows law enforcement to seize and permanently confiscate things such as cash, cars, real property, and jewelry by arguing that the property was merely involved in or the proceeds of criminal activity Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023). He stressed that the government does not have to prove that the owner committed a crime, or that anybody committed a crime, or convict anyone beyond a reasonable doubt. Zadek added that the property is not merely seized but seized and retained, with the burden falling on the citizen to get it back. Greenberg agreed that this is exactly right, and described two chief buckets of problems. The first is due process: because forfeiture is a civil case, there is no right to a lawyer and often no right to a jury, and the procedures to contest a forfeiture are often Kafkaesque. He also noted that the value of seized property is often not high enough to justify hiring a lawyer, so people rationally walk away rather than prove their own innocence. The second problem is that the agencies deciding whether to seize and forfeit property are the same agencies that receive the proceeds back into their budgets, giving them seriously perverse incentives to focus on seizing cash and cars rather than on threats to public health and safety.
Equitable sharing and fiscal incentives
Zadek raised the related process of equitable sharing, under which the federal government acts as a behind-the-scenes cheerleader for local seizures Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018). Gedge confirmed that some states have tried to create state law checks on the worst abuses of civil forfeiture, but that the federal government has a work-around: local or state police who seize property can hand the money to the federal government, which proceeds under more lenient federal procedures and then funnels much of the money back to those same state and local agencies. Zadek characterized the federal government in this role as the “uber fence.”
Brian D. Kelly, an economist, told the show that he had not been a big believer in the policing for profit aspect because what he had read was always anecdotes, and that as someone data-driven he regarded anecdotes as single data points Brian D. Kelly on the False Promise of Policing-for-Profit (2019). He therefore took a systematic look at whether municipalities undergoing fiscal stress would increase forfeiture policing. Using the unemployment rate as a correlate of fiscal stress, he examined hundreds or thousands of municipalities over a period of 10 to 12 years. To his surprise, he found a very powerful yes: as the unemployment rate goes up, the number of forfeiture actions, the number of assets seized, and the value of those assets goes up as well. He reported that a 1% increase in unemployment predicts an 8.5% increase in the value of forfeited assets and a 9.5% increase in the number of forfeited assets, and that a 4% increase in unemployment predicts over a 30% increase in forfeiture actions.
Municipal fines and fees
In two episodes, Zadek and Bill Maurer of the Institute for Justice discussed abusive fines and fees as a companion practice to forfeiture. Zadek described a system by which municipalities, mostly small but some large cities as well, have learned to live off fines and fees paid by the portion of their voters least able to afford it, taking property through the back door rather than through taxation The Hidden Cause of BLM Riots (2022). He said the property of a law-abiding citizen — one who has not committed a crime and is not accused of committing one — is taken and retained by the police department or municipality without any crime being accused and without any conviction at all, creating distrust and anger between citizens and law enforcement.
Maurer described Brookside, Alabama, a town of about 1,500 people just outside Birmingham, which in about 2018 decided to start getting a large amount of revenue from ticketing its citizens The Hidden Cause of BLM Riots (2022). He said the town had an explosion of ticketing that did not coincide with any explosion of actual criminal activity; from 2011 to 2018 it recorded only 55 serious crimes, with no rape and no murder, and in 2017 to 2018 it had no serious crimes at all. After hiring a new police chief in 2018, the number of tickets issued and the revenue they produced went up by 640%. One person ticketed was Brittany Coleman, a young mom on the way to a birthday party with her boyfriend; she was pulled over for following too closely, issued a ticket, and had her car towed, leaving her standing on the side of the road. Maurer said this sort of policing for profit is not just unconstitutional but oftentimes extraordinarily cruel.
Constitutional litigation
The Timbs case arose from the seizure of a car from Tyson Timbs, a factory worker in rural Indiana who became addicted to painkillers after a foot injury and whose addiction escalated to heroin Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018). Gedge recounted that after Timbs’s father died, he received a $70,000 life insurance policy and spent about half of it on a new car. A few months later, an encounter with someone who turned out to be a confidential informant led him to sell a very small amount of heroin to undercover police officers. He was convicted of a low-level drug offense, and police in Indiana decided to seize his new car as well. Zadek described Timbs as a low-level drug dealer whose case was likely to extend the reach of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and to help bring back into balance the relationship between citizens and their government. Gedge was one of Timbs’s counsel in the Supreme Court.
In the later forfeiture episode, Zadek framed the discussion around the Fourth Amendment, quoting its guarantee that the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and saying that this sacred right is routinely violated by government for no other reason than to allow government to take and retain private property Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023). He noted that the case to be discussed was entitled US Private Vaults.
Across episodes: what changed
The excerpts show the same question argued across episodes, with the treatment shifting from a single case to a broader empirical and municipal focus. In the 2018 episode, Gedge and Zadek examined forfeiture through the story of Tyson Timbs and the Eighth Amendment; in the 2019 episode, Kelly turned to data on fiscal stress as a predictor of forfeiture activity; and in the 2022 and 2023 episodes, Maurer and Greenberg addressed municipal fines and fees, the Brookside and Pagedale examples, and the US Private Vaults case. The through-line is the Institute for Justice’s “Policing for Profit” report, which Zadek cites as the origin of the phrase and the frame.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of Timbs v. Indiana, the holding or amendment at issue in US Private Vaults, or the details of the Pagedale litigation beyond Zadek’s introduction. They do not give the founding date of the Institute for Justice, the full text of any statute, or the names of the bills involved. Several sections break off mid-sentence, and the excerpts do not supply the missing conclusions.