A Large and Lucrative Program

Thanks to strong financial incentives and lenient federal forfeiture law, equitable sharing is both widespread and lucrative for state and local law enforcement agencies. Equitable sharing has a foothold in every part of the country, with participating agencies ranging from the tiny North Slope Police Department in rural Alaska to the New York City Police Department. On average, about a third of state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States—over 5,000 agencies—were certified to participate in the program each year from 2019 to 2023. ¹

There is substantial variation in agency participation by state, however. ²  On one end of the spectrum, almost 80% of agencies in Rhode Island and 65% of agencies in Florida were certified for equitable sharing. ³  On the other end, South Dakota averaged less than 10% agency participation, while New Mexico and District of Columbia agencies are functionally banned from equitable sharing by state law, as described below, and thus do not participate. ⁴  (See Figure 24.)

Figure 24: Average percent of agencies participating in equitable sharing by state, 2019–2023

Not only is participation in equitable sharing widespread, but the volume of forfeiture proceeds shared is substantial. Since 2000, over $10 billion of federal forfeiture revenue has found its way to state and local agencies through equitable sharing. This means that of the $57 billion the federal government has forfeited since 2000, including purely federal forfeitures and those in conjunction with state and local agencies, nearly a fifth has been passed to states and localities.

Of the $10 billion shared with state and local governments, 77% comes from the Assets Forfeiture Fund, which collects proceeds from forfeitures carried out by Department of Justice agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The remaining 23% comes from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, the receipt account for non-tax forfeitures conducted by Department of the Treasury agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Department of Homeland Security agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service. ⁵

Both the DOJ and Treasury saw increases in sharing in the early to mid-2010s but have since seen declines, notwithstanding a 2023 resurgence of DOJ revenue. (See Figure 25.) Interestingly, the 2023 DOJ increase appeared broad based, with 40 states seeing increases in DOJ sharing from 2022 to 2023 and five states (New York, Virginia, California, West Virginia, and Kentucky) seeing increases of at least $10 million.

Figure 25: Equitable sharing payments to states, 2000–2023

The overwhelming majority of assets forfeited through equitable sharing are forfeited without judicial oversight: Between 2000 and 2023, about 79% were forfeited administratively. This means property owners did not even get the full measure of process available under federal forfeiture law, meager though it is.

As with agency participation, there is substantial variation in equitable sharing revenues by state. Not surprisingly, the equitable sharing totals are strongly correlated with population, as the top four states in equitable sharing revenue from 2019 to 2023—New York, California, Texas, and Florida—are also the four most populous states.

After controlling for population, however, Rhode Island has the highest per capita rate of equitable sharing revenue at $23 per resident. This is nearly double the rate of the next closest state, Nebraska. Rhode Island appears to be a particularly active state for forfeiture, as it also ranks first in the percentage of agencies participating in equitable sharing and in the per capita amount forfeited under state law.

Meanwhile, South Dakota, which also had the lowest rate of agency participation, ranks at the bottom for per capita equitable sharing revenue, receiving less than a dollar per resident from 2019 to 2023. And by 2023, New Mexico and the District of Columbia had virtually no equitable sharing revenue. ⁶