Executive Summary

When police seize property for civil forfeiture—cash, cars, even homes—the Constitution promises owners a prompt and meaningful opportunity to be heard before a neutral judge. The U.S. Supreme Court recently reaffirmed this basic guarantee. Yet as this fourth edition of Policing for Profit shows, timely judicial review is the exception, not the rule, and in many cases, there is no hearing at all. In effect, civil forfeiture has sidelined the judiciary as the protector of Americans’ due process and property rights.

Those concerns compound long-standing problems documented in earlier editions. Most state and federal forfeiture laws allow police and prosecutors to take and permanently keep property without ever proving the owner committed a crime—and then spend the proceeds themselves, thus earning a D+ or worse in our grading rubric. Only four states have abolished civil forfeiture in favor of criminal forfeiture, and just two states also eliminated law enforcement’s financial stake, earning them an A. On top of this, few states meaningfully restrict agencies from using the controversial federal “equitable sharing” program to generate additional proceeds from property forfeited under lax federal laws.

Forfeiture remains big business. In 2023 alone, 45 states collected nearly $300 million, on top of $4.5 billion at the federal level. Since 2000, forfeiture has generated at least $82 billion nationwide, including more than $10 billion forfeited federally and returned to state and local agencies through equitable sharing. And these figures are likely undercounts, as data remain limited.

Forfeiture Without a Judge

Most forfeitures never reach a courtroom, available data show. For example, in a large sample of Indiana cases, just 4% were decided by a judge. Instead, forfeiture typically happens by default: The government keeps seized property without a judge deciding, after hearing from both the owner and the government, that the forfeiture was legally justified—even under civil forfeiture’s minimal standards.

New analyses help explain why. Government notices, when provided at all, are often confusing and opaque. Very few owners who contest forfeiture have legal representation—just 6% in Arizona and 7% in Oregon—likely because it is prohibitively expensive. A straightforward state-court forfeiture case costs an estimated $3,300, nearly twice the median cash forfeiture of $1,678 across 24 states.

To even reach a judge, owners must navigate convoluted procedures that may require filing one, two, or three legal documents under deadlines often measured in weeks (while the government typically has more generous deadlines or none at all). These procedural hurdles can effectively screen owners’ cases out of the judicial process altogether, as a single misstep almost guarantees forfeiture by default.

A Long Road to Court

Even owners who successfully reach a judge typically wait months. Adding together statutory deadlines, the median forfeiture process takes more than six months on paper just to reach a courtroom. Only about half of civil forfeiture laws specify a procedure that might allow owners a quicker pretrial hearing, and these are often limited.

In practice, cases frequently take far longer. In Virginia, for example, half of successful challenges lasted more than nine months, and a quarter stretched beyond 16 months. Losing access to cash or a vehicle for months can cause severe hardship, especially for people already struggling financially, and creates strong pressure to settle—even when the owner did nothing wrong. More than 86% of contested cases in the Indiana sample ended with owners settling, usually getting back at least half the value of the property and giving up the rest in return for not pressing their case in court.

Little Evidence of Crime-Fighting Benefits

As in prior editions, this report finds little evidence that civil forfeiture meaningfully improves public safety. Most forfeitures involve modest sums of cash, not the proceeds of major criminal enterprises. In states with usable data, nearly half of forfeitures occur without anyone—let alone the owner—being convicted of a crime. And available data suggest many forfeitures stem from opportunistic seizures rather than deliberate investigations aimed at rooting out criminal activity. Previous research likewise finds that forfeiture does little to reduce crime, enhance police effectiveness, or curb drug use.

At Odds With Fundamental Rights

Scholars and advocates have long warned that civil forfeiture’s low burden of proof and financial incentives encourage the pursuit of property over justice. This edition of Policing for Profit adds a new and troubling dimension: Meaningful judicial oversight—the core safeguard against government abuse—is often absent. That absence magnifies the risk to innocent owners while offering little or no benefit to public safety.

Courts are increasingly recognizing what the evidence shows: Civil forfeiture is fundamentally at odds with due process and property rights. The remedy is clear. If the government seeks to take a person’s property, it should be required to prove that person’s guilt through ordinary criminal procedures—and without a financial interest in the outcome.