The B.C. Civil Forfeiture office has seized almost $11 million in assets from suspected criminals over the last year, double its take from the previous year.
B.C. Justice Minister Shirley Bond highlighted the success of the six-year-old program Thursday as she pledged $5.5 million earned from civil forfeiture to community crime prevention programs.
Bond made the announcement in Richmond, standing in front of a helicopter seized in the Kootenays last year from suspected cocaine smugglers and a Hummer once owned by a Victoria drug dealer. The vehicle now serves as an anti-gang billboard in Abbotsford.
Community groups can start applying for the money as early as today, Bond said.
Bond said that in the current fiscal year, the office seized assets worth $10.8 million, compared with $4.8 million total in the 2010-11 fiscal year.
"It is a tool that has been supporting police officers in British Columbia since 2006," Bond said of civil forfeiture. "From our perspective, it is a new way to discourage unlawful activity by targeting the profit motive behind it."
RCMP Supt. Brian Cantera, who heads the Federal Drug Enforcement Branch, said police are still dedicated to collecting evidence that leads to criminal charges.
"Unfortunately there are times when sufficient admissible evidence to support criminal convictions is not available," he said, adding that investigators refer such files to the Civil Forfeiture Office.
Since 2006, police have sent more than 850 cases to the program, of which 609 files were started. Of those, about 400 have been concluded and the remaining are continuing.
Cantera said, "the civil process, which has a lower burden of proof than criminal trials, is a way to disrupt the ongoing cycle of criminal activity by allowing the civil courts to decide to order criminal profits forfeited."
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