This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 11th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

When the Justice Department suspended so-called equitable sharing in their Civil Asset

Forefiture program, they did so for all the wrong reasons.

So says Adam Bates, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, he explains why Civil Asset Forefeiture needs to go entirely.

It was about a year ago when Eric Holder shortly before leaving the Attorney general post issued a statement saying we are no longer going to engage

in adoptions, which is a specific procedure of civil asset forfeiture.

And he left office, it turns out that that probably will affect very few forfeitures.

Loretta Lynch becomes a new attorney general, and when she was quizzed about asset forfeiture,

she drew essentially no distinction between criminal asset forfeiture for sure and civil asset forfeiture.

She said it was a great tool,, wonderful tool, but now the DOJ has said they will be, in their

words, deferring for the time being any equitable sharing payments from the federal civil asset forfeiture

program. So what does that mean? That means that for the time being the DOJ is suspending or they will not be giving the up to

80% returns on state and local law enforcement contributions to the federal equitable sharing fund.

State and local, or should say mostly local police agencies essentially bring in the feds at some point to actually

execute a seizure and then get a kickback of up to 80% of those funds as you mentioned.

Right, as opposed to the adoptive seizures that you mentioned,

the alternate route and the much more common route for the use of the equitable sharing program is through what are called joint task forces which is

cooperation between local law enforcement and the DEA or some federal law enforcement agency

and then going through that way through the joint task force route which and of course the

joint task force method of equitable sharing was was untouched by the holder reforms.

Now this is from the statement issued by the Department of Justice.

The department does not take this step lightly. issued by the Department of Justice.

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