UC Davis

Research on street crime such as violent, property, and drug offenses saturates the criminological literature. Sociological criminologists have long called for a focus on other forms of crime and broader wrongdoing by the powerful (Sutherland, 1940). In this dissertation, I studied one group of powerful actors, California Law Enforcement agencies and their use of Civil Asset Forfeiture (CAF), using a bespoke dataset encompassing nearly two decades of CAF data. I present my work in three chapters. The first, To Protect and Seize: Two Decades of Asset Forfeiture in California, examines the disproportionate use of CAF in California. The second, Policing Profit: Policy Effects on Exploitive Revenue in California, works from the patterns evident in the first paper and examines an attempt to reform CAF in California, Senate Bill 443 (2015-2016). My third, Officer, Police Thyself: Law Enforcement Agency Policy and the Use of Asset Forfeiture, goes another step deeper, examining agency level policy documents related to CAF. My findings support the proposition that law and policy can matter for controlling law enforcement behavior. However, persistent inequalities remain in the application of CAF, despite attempts to control it. While both law and policy have attempted to regulate the use of CAF, and activists hoped this would result in more equity, I find only limited effects. While department level policy and law appear to have reduced the overall application of CAF, reforms failed to eliminate the disproportionate use of CAF in minority communities. The resilient disparities in CAF usage signal that interventions targeted at administrative pathways are not inherently more effective at reducing the unequal application of CAF.