The 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act expanded federal and local law enforcement power to seize cash and assets they suspected were involved with illegal activity. Critics note the act, and its generous guidelines, perversely incentivized law enforcement to “police for profit,” or use civil asset forfeiture (CAF) as a way to fund their activities. Drawing on racial threat theory and related ideas, I theorize that law enforcement added CAF seizures to the list of techniques, such as stop and frisk and excessive force, disproportionately used to police areas that have large minority populations. I examine these predictions with an analysis of 19 years of CAF data from the California Attorney General. Consistent with my expectations, the number of forfeitures is positively associated with the percent Black and percent poor in a jurisdiction, despite those seizures garnering smaller financial returns. Conversely, LatinX communities have more wealth extracted, despite experiencing average numbers of seizures. Despite the narrative that CAF is a potent tool against crime, I find that it is used less often in jurisdictions with higher crime rates. These factors invite a reconsideration of the utility and equity of the asset forfeiture process.

The crime of corruption ranges from politicians involved in high-profile scandals to low-level bureaucrats granting contracts and police officers demanding bribes. Corruption occurs when state actors criminally leverage their positions of power for financial gain. Our study examines how corruption varies by political power position and within criminal contexts by measuring the embeddedness of corruption within Chicago historical organized crime. We analyze Chicago’s organized crime network before and during Prohibition (1900-1919 and 1920-1933) to compare differences across embedded network positions between political, law enforcement, and non-state actors. Our findings show that more police were in organized crime than politicians before Prohibition, but the small group of politicians had higher embeddedness in organized crime. During Prohibition, when organized crime grew and centralized, law enforcement decreased in proportion and became less embedded in organized crime. Politicians, however, maintained their proportion and high level of embeddedness. We argue that everyday corruption is more frequent but less embedded when criminal contexts are moderately profitable. However, as criminal contexts increase in profitability, corruption moves up the political ladder to include fewer people who are more highly embedded. This work has theoretical implications for the symbiotic relationship between corruption and criminal organizations.