From [HERE] Just how common, and exactly how much money the NYPD is currently taking from low-income New Yorkers, is the basis of a lawsuit filed last week against the NYPD by the Bronx Defenders, alleging effective denial of the public defender’s FOIL requests on how much money the NYPD is seizing from New Yorkers and under what specific justification it's doing so. After years of stonewalling by the NYPD, it finally released to the Bronx Defenders just a single year’s worth of property clerk’s data, revealing that it had more than $68 million in seized cash on hand, only $6.5 million of which had been legally forfeited that year. The department still gave no specific accounting of where the money came from or through which process it was taken.

Since 2014, there have been multiple efforts made to try to rein in the NYPD’s cash grabs — a bill introduced last year by Bronx councilman Ritchie Torres would mandate that the NYPD provide a full accounting of the items it seizes from those it arrests, how much money it takes in from them, and where, exactly, that money goes. That legislation is scheduled to come to a vote this fall, but considering the de Blasio administration’s hesitance to legislate any police reform whatsoever, it might never see the light of day. A separate lawsuit by the Bronx Defenders did find some success, however. A federal case against the Bronx district attorney is now on hold after the D.A. agreed to streamline its property release process, just one of a series of hurdles that people have to go through to retrieve their money or possessions.

Breaking the story in 2014, I wrote about how, for decades, the NYPD has been taking the money and possessions of anyone it arrests, or even stops on the street, under the legal pretense of civil forfeiture. The idea of seizing money or goods during an arrest originally became popular in the 1970s to take money and yachts out of the hands of drug dealers, even if they ended up beating the case anyway. Law enforcement was able to make a case against the money — possible criminals would have to prove exactly how they came to possess such amounts. Now, however, the NYPD uses the practice primarily to take money and property from the pockets of those who can least afford to get it back. Almost all of the time, the NYPD and the district attorney decline to actually pursue any type of forfeiture after they’ve seized it during an arrest. Typically, the NYPD never had a reason to take the money in the first place, and certainly not a good enough reason to hold up in court. But the process of getting your money back from the NYPD’s convoluted and arcane bureaucracy, even if you were never charged with a crime, can be so labor-intensive and maddening that many people give up.

“Because you’re not provided with a lawyer for this type of case, almost everyone tries to navigate it pro se,” said Adam Shoop, an attorney with the Bronx Defenders, stressing that those who can afford lawyers are the most likely to be able to retrieve their cash. [MORE]