This is the Cato Dilly Podcast for Tuesday, December 20th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

Civil Asset Forefeitcher is an American travesty, but the federal government is standing in the way of getting access to the most basic information about the property

they've taken from Americans.

Lisa Nepper is Director of Strategic Research at the Institute for Justice, which has recently

sued both the Internal Revenue Service and Customs and Border Patrol

over public access to their forfeiture databases.

You've spent a lot of time studying asset forfeiture as an issue and how states and the federal government

undertake that activity. What do we know about it generally and what is left to know about how police at the state and federal level

engage in forfeiture?

Really we know very little in comparison to what we ought to know.

So we know overall numbers at the federal level

that the federal government is engaging

in billions of dollars worth of forfeiture annually.

We have similar information at the state level where the numbers are in the hundreds of millions.

But there's a lot of states where we're missing

all kinds of information.

And at the federal level, there's a lot of detail

that we don't know.

How many forfeitures are happening?

Are they civil? Are they criminal uh... and that matters these

kinds of things matter because civil forfeiture

uh... is so much easier for the police and so much harder

...