Equitable sharing is the practice, described across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, by which the federal government returns proceeds from seized assets to cooperating state and local agencies as a way of enticing them to cooperate in the War on Drugs. Guests in the 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2023 episodes each describe the same basic mechanism: local or state police seize property, pass it to federal authorities, and receive a portion of the proceeds back.
The federalism problem it solves
In the July 2017 episode, economist Jeffrey Miron placed equitable sharing inside a broader argument about the Controlled Substances Act. Miron told Bob Zadek that the federal law does not require states to criminalize drugs, and that states are entitled to repeal their own drug laws; during alcohol prohibition, he noted, many states never outlawed alcohol and enforcement came only from the federal government. Because the federal government has a limited ability to force states to enforce drug prohibition, Miron said, it operates a policy of returning the proceeds from seized assets to cooperating state and local agencies as a way of enticing them to cooperate in the War on Drugs Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017).
Zadek named the policy — “So-called ‘equitable sharing.’ That’s called equitable sharing” — and Miron confirmed the term. Zadek then offered his own framing: equitable sharing encourages municipalities and state governments to enforce federal drug laws by confiscation of property, with states retaining a portion of confiscated property that would otherwise go to Washington. He called this, in broad terms, “policing for profit,” said it had been the subject of prior shows of his, and described it as a pretty insidious process. The reason it exists, in Zadek’s account, is that the federal government lacks the resources to enforce its own laws — it has too many of them — so it must dragoon or incentivize state and local governments by almost bribery, by paying them money, by hiring them as subcontractors to enforce federal law Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017).
Civil forfeiture and the equitable sharing work-around
The December 2018 episode, built around Tyson Timbs v. Indiana, treated equitable sharing as a facet of civil asset forfeiture. Zadek introduced Sam Gedge, an attorney at the Institute for Justice who represented Timbs in the Supreme Court, as a litigator of civil asset forfeiture cases and licensing cases since joining IJ in 2015 Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
Gedge described civil forfeiture as one of the greatest threats to property rights in the nation today, allowing state, local and federal governments to take cars, cash and homes oftentimes without even convicting or charging a person with a crime. Its history, he said, dates to the 19th century with pirate ships and smugglers, but it has exploded in recent decades. Zadek put the federal role in blunt terms, calling the federal government the “uber fence” and describing equitable sharing as a statutory inducement of local law enforcement to seize property under a policy called policing for profit Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
Gedge’s account of the work-around is the episode’s most concrete contribution. Some states, he said, have recognized the problem with financially incentivizing law enforcement and tried to create state law checks on the worst abuses of civil forfeiture. The federal government, however, has a work-around: local or state police who seize property, if they do not want to proceed through more onerous state law procedures, can hand the money to the federal government, which proceeds under more lenient federal procedures and then funnels a lot of that money right back to those same state and local law enforcement agencies. He also noted that the very police and prosecutors deciding whether to take property are often the same agencies that stand to benefit financially, with money going straight back into the coffers of the agencies responsible for the seizures Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
The data project
The December 2019 episode featured Brian D. Kelly, whom Zadek introduced as an economist rather than an attorney. Kelly said he had been working on forfeiture in one aspect or another since 2010, and that about two years before the broadcast the Institute for Justice contacted him to take a careful look at equitable sharing — the program the feds have with state and local police. He described it as a big data-intensive project, roughly a 12-month effort, with IJ providing financial support, research assistance and data sets Brian D. Kelly on the False Promise of Policing-for-Profit (2019).
Zadek supplied the definitional frame: civil asset forfeiture is a process by which law enforcement confiscates private property belonging to citizens who have not been convicted and perhaps not even formally accused, property suspected or believed to have been used in a crime or to be its fruits — no trial, no jury, no conviction, just suspicion, with the burden on the owner to sue to get the property back. He called it pretty offensive. He then characterized equitable sharing as a sinister federal program: because the government has punitive drug laws and no official federal police force, it tells local law enforcement to use forfeiture and keep what they confiscate. Kelly agreed that the point of equitable sharing is to get state and local cooperation with the feds, while correcting one detail — the state and local folks do not get to keep all the money; some of it goes to the feds Brian D. Kelly on the False Promise of Policing-for-Profit (2019).
Policing for profit and the loophole
The January 2023 episode returned to the topic with Mike Greenberg. Zadek’s setup distinguished the core mission of local police — protecting citizens from bad acts, which is why they are paid — from policing for profit, which encourages departments to look for activities where they can seize property. His example was a traffic stop for a broken headlight or taillight, a police dog alerting for drugs, a search, a joint and a thousand dollars seized, with the driver left to go to court to get the money back — and often not bothering, because he does not live there Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
Greenberg described equitable sharing as a system allowing proceeds from forfeited cash, cars and other property to be split among state and federal law enforcement agencies. State and local officials engage in the roadside stop, take the thousand dollars or the car, and pass the asset to the federal government to prosecute the forfeiture case; the federal government handles the paperwork and judicial proceedings and then remits a fair share of the proceeds back to the local agency. Greenberg called it doubling down on the perverse financial incentives, and described equitable sharing as in effect the federal government paying a commission to local government for doing the work at the street level Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
Greenberg added a detail absent from the earlier episodes: many state legislatures have ended the causal connection between a traffic stop and money going directly to the seizing agency, requiring instead that proceeds go into a general fund rather than directly to the law enforcement agency or the prosecutor’s office. The equitable sharing loophole, he said, still lets those agencies get a cut back from the federal government directly rather than its going to the state general fund the way the legislature intended Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
Across episodes: no development
Four episodes touch the topic — 2017 with Jeffrey Miron, 2018 with Sam Gedge, 2019 with Brian D. Kelly and 2023 with Mike Greenberg — and the excerpts show no development in the underlying account: each describes the same inducement, the same pass-through of seized property to federal authorities, and the same return of a share to local agencies. What changes is the surrounding argument. Miron embeds equitable sharing in a federalism and Controlled Substances Act discussion; Gedge treats it as a work-around to state forfeiture checks; Kelly supplies the data-project frame; Greenberg adds the state-general-fund loophole. Zadek’s own characterization — policing for profit, bribery, subcontracting — is consistent across all four.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the statutory basis of equitable sharing, the name of any bill or program authorization, or the dollar amounts involved in any particular case. They do not say what Timbs v. Indiana held, which amendment it turned on, or how the Court ruled; the 2018 excerpt breaks off before the Eighth Amendment discussion develops. The 2019 and 2023 excerpts end mid-sentence or at a section break, and the 2017 excerpt’s final section is empty. No excerpt states the outcome of any forfeiture proceeding discussed.