Police in Chandler, Ariz., have used money seized in drug stings to buy a new vehicle for the agency’s SWAT team, new guns for its officers, surveillance equipment, even a dog for its canine unit.
They use it to pay confidential informants, who work in the drug underworld putting together new drug deals that will lead to more cash being confiscated and converted to the exclusive use of the agency. In an 18-month period, one confidential informant was paid $248,598, according to city records. Another received $193,568 and a third $81,575 during that same time frame.
Forfeited money is kept in separate accounts under the exclusive control of department administrators. By law it must be used to supplement the agency’s regular budget, not to replace funds budgeted for normal operations.
In the last five years, Chandler police have raised more than $6.8 million through forfeitures. About $3.2 million of that came in the year leading up to the fatal shooting of an undercover narcotics officer engaged in a “reverse sting,” a lucrative but risky operation in which police pose as drug sellers rather than buyers. Chandler police staged 20 reverse stings in those 12 months, all but four of them far outside the city’s boundaries, according to court records.
There are few reporting requirements. Quarterly disclosure statements compiled by the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission do not list the amount of money collected by each agency, or details on how it is spent beyond broad categories.
Agencies are not required to report details of individual cases, including whether criminal charges were filed.
The result is that police have a financial incentive to target certain crimes, there is little control over how the money is spent, and there are inadequate safeguards to protect innocent property owners from abuse, according to separate studies by the Goldwater Institute and the Institute for Justice.
Both non-profit government watchdog organizations advocate changing forfeiture laws to require money seized by police be put into a neutral account, such as the state’s general fund.
“What should be driving law enforcement in all their decision making should be justice and not whether we are going to make money off all of this,” said Scott Bullock, senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm based in Virginia. “If you removed the profit incentive, then you would go far in assuring that if police have to go so far outside of their jurisdiction, they will be doing it for reasons related to public safety.”
Some states have reformed their forfeiture laws, either by adding protections for innocent property owners or limiting the amount of money police departments are allowed to keep for themselves, according to a March 2010 study by the Institute for Justice.
Eight states bar the use of forfeited money by law enforcement agencies, the study reported. The other 42 states allow at least half of the money to be kept by those agencies. Most states, including Arizona, allow all of the proceeds from forfeitures to be used by law enforcement.
The report singles out reverse stings, such as the one in which Chandler police Detective Carlos Ledesma was killed in July 2010, as the most blatant example of the “addiction” that law enforcement has to forfeiture money.
Supporters of the existing law say prohibiting police from using the money they seize could damage legitimate law enforcement efforts because it takes away the incentive to target certain crimes.
Allowing agencies to keep the assets they seize may create an incentive to go after certain crimes, said Peter Spaw, head of the Asset Recovery Bureau at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. That is not necessarily a bad thing, he said. Police departments with limited resources might not otherwise have the capacity to target more sophisticated organizations, including drug rings, without the money they get through forfeitures, he said.
David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said putting the proceeds into the general fund of the state or county would ensure that police set their priorities based on crimes that have an impact on the communities they serve, rather than the potential profits they will reap.
If forfeiture laws are an effective mechanism for dismantling the financial resources of criminal gangs, then that alone should justify the operations, Harris said. It should not matter to police who gets the money, he said.
“You want them to try to break the drug mobs and the drug gangs,” Harris said. “But if enforcing the law and breaking the gangs is not enough incentive, I don’t know what would be. That’s their mission.”
Mark Flatten is an investigation reporter for the Goldwater Institute, an independent government watchdog based in Phoenix, Ariz. To read this complete report, visit “Risk vs. Rewards: Chandler police raise risk to officers as they chase lucrative out-of-town drug deals.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.