When New Mexico Abolished Civil Forfeiture 5 Years Ago, Cops Predicted Crime Would Soar. It Didn’t

By Nick Sibilla of Forbes.

"One of the government’s most egregious powers is civil forfeiture, which lets police confiscate—and even keep—private property without ever charging the owner with a crime. But in 2015, New Mexico completely (and unanimously) abolished the practice and replaced it with criminal forfeiture, which requires a criminal conviction to forfeit property. Just as important, New Mexico banned agencies from padding their budgets with forfeiture revenue, and instead directed all proceeds to the general fund. 

Law enforcement was apoplectic and warned of dire consequences. The New Mexico Department of Public Safety feared that the bill would have “a negative impact on public safety,” and could trigger a “reduction in criminal investigations.” “This bill directly jeopardizes the most basic and fundamental key to successful narcotics investigations,” the department claimed in a 2015 bill analysis. 

The chair of the New Mexico Sheriff’s Association was even more blunt, warning that without civil forfeiture, “You’ll get less law enforcement.” “The end result of this is the cartels are going to ramp up their money laundering and cash exchanges in the state of New Mexico tenfold,” he predicted.

Thankfully, those predictions haven’t come true. Five years later, reality is quite different. A new study from the Institute for Justice, Policing for Profit, “detected no significant increase in crime rates that could be attributed to the reforms, indicating the reforms had no negative effect on public safety—and strongly suggesting civil forfeiture is not an essential crime-fighting tool.”

The study analyzed monthly crime and arrest data in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas before and after the reform took effect. (Since Arizona enacted modest forfeiture reforms during the study period, it was excluded.) More specifically, the IJ study examined five separate measures from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program within each state: all crimes committed, all arrests, arrests for driving under the influence, drug possession arrests, and arrests for selling drugs. 

If abolishing civil forfeiture really did leave law enforcement powerless to deter and solve crime, one would expect to see New Mexico’s crime rates surge (because criminals would be less deterred from committing crimes in New Mexico) and arrests plummet (because law enforcement would have fewer resources with which to fight crime) compared to its neighbors. Neither happened.

Instead, “crime rates remained fairly consistent before and after reform,” while the overall trend for New Mexico’s offense rate was “even flatter than those for the control states.”  In fact, the only perceivable negative change was that border counties in New Mexico reported slightly fewer arrests for selling drugs—about three fewer arrests per one million residents. But this result was “inconsistent with the findings across all other models and crime measures, suggesting it is mere statistical noise.”

“Compared to Colorado and Texas, New Mexico’s overall crime rate did not rise following the implementation of strong forfeiture reform in 2015, nor did arrest rates drop,” the study concluded. Meanwhile, there’s been dramatically less forfeiture activity in the Land of Enchantment. Between 2015 and 2017, New Mexico agencies forfeited just under $350,000. But during that same period, Colorado law enforcement forfeited over $1.76 million, while Texas obtained a staggering windfall of nearly $155 million. 

“New Mexico’s experience shows that strong forfeiture reform does not sacrifice public safety,” noted Institute for Justice Senior Research Analyst and report co-author Jennifer McDonald. “As states and Congress look for ways to create a fairer criminal justice system, one reform everyone should be able to agree on is ending civil forfeiture and the perverse profit incentive that fuels it.”"