Under federal rules, the departments got to keep the forfeitures. IE: the cop who pulled you over could literally pocket the cash. 0 oversight.

Under State rules, in almost all states, the money goes into the general fund. And there is due process to actually seize the asset. We're essentially removing the incentive from the police officers to pull people over. It does them no good to take your stuff if it just goes into one big pot that they'll never see again.

The Missouri Sate constitution requires that any proceeds from seizures go to an education fund. In Missouri, not a penny should go to the local cops. Unfortunately, local cops would frequently violate the state's constitution by turning over the seizures to the feds, who would then keep a percent and give the rest back to the local cops. Of course, the local cops should have turned it over to education, as that is clearly what the state constitution requires, but they would routinely violate the constitution and keep the proceeds for themselves.

Ah yes, Missouri. The state where, as a teenager, a highway patrolman bragged to me that he pulled a guy over and arrested him because "he was Mexican and looked at me wrong." Oh, and that guy was on the school board. And he was a church youth pastor, telling this story to the youth group.

If true, then I know of at least one local police force in Missouri that's in egregious violation of this. Can you drop a link to the relevant state code?

Well, parent said "Constitution", so the link would have to be this: http://www.sos.mo.gov/pubs/missouri_constitution.pdf

That said, I'm not finding it with a little searching and skimming. I do see gaming revenues restricted to education...

This policy adjustment is in regard to a federal program that shared the seized proceeds with the state and local police that made the seizures using federal laws.

That is, the laws that were 'suspected' broken were federal laws, and properly the seized goods belonged to the feds. The feds then shared a large portion of that back to the state and local cops. They will no longer do so.

This removes a great deal of the incentive for locals to use federal laws for seizures.

Many states require seizures go into the state general fund, so there's no incentive there for cops to overstep, at least not financial incentives.

So in theory this should result in a pretty big reduction in unwarranted seizures.

Or seizures just not worth the effort.

It's actually more significant than that.

At some point in the past 10 or 15 years, Minnesota (I think) passed a law barring police in that state from doing so.

The police didn't stop... they just filed it under the federal civil forfeiture program, took their 80% cut and it continued.

So stopping the federal program will let states fix this, when until now it was futile to try.

This was the easiest way for most of the proceeds to get laundered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H sent back to the police who made the seizure. Many states have clauses where any seizures go to the General Fund, not the Police budget.

This is the biggest problem - police officers have a huge incentive to seize money when most of it goes directly to their department, and often times there is there is little to no oversight on how this money is spent: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-police-bought-with...

"One audit examined about $3.4 million in Equitable Sharing funds that the Oklahoma Highway Patrol spent from July 2009 to June 2012.

The audit found $1.9 million in unallowable and unsupported expenditures relating to salaries, overtime pay, construction, fees paid to contractors and the use of two Ford F-150 pickup trucks by non-law enforcement personnel."

There are both state and federal laws for the practice. So this will slightly decrease the situations in which the state/local police can do this. Likely to be compensated for by new state laws. And of course this doesn't stop the Federal law enforcement from doing this. Civil forfiture needs to be abolished period. It boggles my mind, as a layman, that this is considered to satisfy the requirement of "due process" and is therefore constitutional. Sure, there's a process, but it's not the due process.

> Likely to be compensated for by new state laws.

Police departments may lobby for "agency keeps the proceeds" state laws, but because states usually are constitutionally required to balance their budgets, they are reluctant to move general fund things out to dedicated funds, and if the feds are moving in part due to public outcry over the practice, the same pressure out to be able to be brought on states if they start to consider mirroring the discontinued federal practice.

Money only has rights when it is being given anonymously to PACs.