This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 16, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is announced an end at least temporarily to what is known as equitable sharing, a federal program

that allows local police to profit more directly from assets seized by often innocent property

owners.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice, offers

his thoughts.

Eric Holder's announcement today says that he's going to bar federal law enforcement agencies from adopting civil asset forfeiture seizures

from state and local police. A lot of people are not aware of this connection between the federal law and what the local police are doing,

seizing property at the local level, but it's an important connection and Holder's announcement today is an important step

in the direction of reform.

But don't you think it's fairly limited?

I mean, it's great news for people who might otherwise be victimized by state

and local cops that are just looking for essentially a payday for their local law enforcement agency, but how big an impact

with this really have? It's hard to say we just got the announcement about an

hour ago so we need to study the details of exactly what the terms of Holder's executive order says.

But I don't think that there's any question that this is good news because there's been mounting criticism over the past two or three years about civil forfeiture practices.

And the fact that Holder took this action today I think is a reflection of that mounting criticism.

I hope it's not going to preempt legislative reform from the Congress because things do need to go further

than what Holder has ordered.

But the fact that he's moving in that direction I think is very good news for civil asset

forfeiture reform. This is a huge PR win for our friends at the Institute for

...