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NYPD: Revealing total cash seized from civilians would crash our computers

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The NYPD was finally forced to shed some light on its use of civil forfeiture Thursday morning at a City Council hearing. But instead of coming clean, they blamed their lack of transparency on antiquated technology.

A proposed bill would require the department to release annual reports of just how much money it takes from the pockets of low-income New Yorkers, and the NYPD claimed that following the law would be near impossible.

“Attempts to perform the types of searches envisioned in the bill will lead to system crashes and significant delays during the intake and release process,” said Assistant Deputy Commissioner Robert Messner, while testifying in front of the council’s Public Safety Committee. “The only way the department could possibly comply with the bill would be a manual count of over half a million invoices each year.”

When asked by councilmember Dan Garodnick whether the NYPD had come to the hearing with any sort of accounting for how much money it has seized from New Yorkers this past year, the NYPD higher-ups testifying simply answered “no.”

The admission by the NYPD that it has no idea how much money it has taken from New Yorkers shows just how badly transparency is needed in its use civil forfeiture, which the NYPD testified is an important tool to “remove both the incentive and the means of committing crime.”

The NYPD's testimony was also disingenuous: As part of a FOIL request filed by the Bronx Defenders, the NYPD had already compiled and released figures that show the staggering amounts that it has seized.

As the Voice reported earlier this year, the NYPD has been taking millions of dollars out of the pockets of low-income New Yorkers under the guise of civil forfeiture proceedings. During either an arrest or stop, the NYPD seizes money and possessions from New Yorkers, often the ones least capable of getting their money back, many of whom are then never even charged with a crime.

At the hearing, the NYPD claimed that it only legally forfeited $11,653 in currency last year — that is, gone to court and actually made a case as to why the NYPD should be taking this money. The NYPD then went on to explain that an annual accounting of the full amount of money the department had seized, but not pursued civil forfeiture, would be technologically impossible. NYPD officials referred to the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS) as antiquated, even though it was only put in place in 2012. At the time, the NYPD was proud enough of the new tracking system that it entered it in technology competitions and claimed that it provided “the cradle-to-grave life cycle of property and evidence... visible upon demand."

In the accounting summaries which the Bronx Defenders submitted as part of its testimony, the NYPD reports that as of December 2013, its property clerk had almost $69 million in seized cash on hand. This amount had been carried over from previous years, showing an annual accumulation of seized cash that has reached an enormous amount. The documents also show that each month, the five property clerk’s offices across the city took in tens of thousands of dollars in cash, ultimately generating over $6 million in revenue for the department. The report that the NYPD released appears to have been generated through the same use of their database that the department now claims is technologically impossible.

Without further explanation by the NYPD, the type of which committee members hoped to be getting at the hearing on Thursday, there’s no way to truly know the full extent of these cash and property seizures and how the numbers break down exactly.

“I find it strange that the most technologically sophisticated police force in the world cannot track its own property seizures. I just have trouble imagining that that’s the case,” said councilmember Ritchie Torres during the hearing. “I’m skeptical about the NYPD’s testimony.”

Testifying in front of committee members, lawyers and advocates from the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, and Legal Aid Society relayed a litany of horrors experienced by clients who had become trapped by the NYPD’s unjust civil forfeiture process. Anca Grigore, a staff attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services, told the story of one client who was arrested while a passenger in another person’s car. The NYPD then went to the BDS client’s home, told their brother that they needed to move the client’s own car because it was blocking a driveway, and then seized the car. The BDS client eventually paid $500 to get the car back from the NYPD six months later. In another case, a BDS client had hundreds of dollars vouchered under the name of a co-defendant, whose criminal case was ongoing — the process took months to play out, and the client had to jump through several hoops just to prove the money was hers.

Each case that the attorneys testified about ended with the client getting their property back, but that’s only because, as the lawyers stressed, they were able to get free legal assistance. Because forfeiture and property seizure is done through civil courts, defendants aren’t provided a lawyer by the state, making it near impossible to retrieve money and property through the NYPD’s arcane and confusing system.

“Can a lay person be reasonably expected to defend themselves against the NYPD in their efforts to retrieve their property?” Asked council member Torres during the hearing.

“I don’t think a person can reasonably be expected to go through any of the administrative steps required to go about retrieving their property,” answered Bronx Defenders attorney Adam Shoop.

“So what you’re telling me is that property retrieval is reserved for those that can afford it?” Torres asked.

“Yes,” Shoop testified.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/ny...e-seize-would-lead-to-systems-crashes-9114344
 

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The Autumn Wind
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Wilsongt

Member
Business as usual. The poor funding the vacations of the weathy elites like Trump and Clinton. Nothing to see here.

This news was released soon after Bratton decided to retire, also, lol.
 

Casimir

Unconfirmed Member
Absolutely disgusting. Where's the republicans going crazy about this gubbamint intrusion?

Disproportionately affects minorities who are thugs or thugs in training. Or, just poor blue collar whites who are too dumb to realize that conservative policies are negatively impacting them in addition to the fact that two homosexuals want to get married or women want access to low cost heath care and family planning.

Just remember that you all don't know what police go through every day and are in no position to question what they do.
 
HA HA OH WOW! What a mess!

It really boggles my mind that some people can see all these issues and still think the police force is being targeted by some sort of malicious group whenever someone tries to fix the system.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
"The only way the department could possibly comply with the bill would be a manual count of over half a million invoices each year.”

So automating the processing of half a million invoices will crash their systems? Are they running PCs from 1992?
 

Kinitari

Black Canada Mafia
... what sort of DB architecture does the NYPD have that this would be a thing? I mean, obviously shitty lie of an excuse, but also I just don't understand what they're saying. That it would take them that long to write a query? That they don't already have built in triggers that give them reports and running totals on this sort of thing? That any query they would write would take.... What, days to complete?
 
Over here, our NATIONAL police has just scraped together a small budget increase of about 10 million USD which is actually only a reduction of budget cuts totalling 70 million over the next five years.)

Damn, we should just take that money directly out of our citizens' pockets.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
How many citations do you think they process per year?

I would imagine, at best, maybe hundreds of millions? That still wouldn't be a problem for any modern system. Especially since they wouldn't be processing all these citations all at once, sequentially.

This is precisely what Database software is for. There is an entire class of business solutions dedicated to solving this "problem."
 

Link

The Autumn Wind
I would imagine, at best, maybe hundreds of millions? That still wouldn't be a problem for any modern system. Especially since they wouldn't be processing all these citations all at once, sequentially.

This is precisely what Database software is for. There is an entire class of business solutions dedicated to solving this "problem."
That's my point. I'm agreeing with you. It's a shit excuse.
 

Oppo

Member
... what sort of DB architecture does the NYPD have that this would be a thing? I mean, obviously shitty lie of an excuse, but also I just don't understand what they're saying. That it would take them that long to write a query? That they don't already have built in triggers that give them reports and running totals on this sort of thing? That any query they would write would take.... What, days to complete?

not only that

but surely a tiny fraction of this vast sum of seized money

would pay for the counting of itself

like, ok NYPD, splurge for the 32 GB
 
Absolutely disgusting. Where's the republicans going crazy about this gubbamint intrusion?

The majority of civil asset forfeiture cases are federal.

The previous attorney general, Eric Holder, reversed the federal asset forfeiture guidelines in 2015 to sharply curb the usage, limiting it only to bank accounts when there are documented illegal transactions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ounces-new-limits-on-civil-asset-forfeitures/

The new attorney general, Loretta Lynch, appointed by Obama, brought back the asset forfeiture program in full quietly this year. While she was AG of Eastern New York her office seized nearly $1b of assets from private citizens.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/artic...ts-back-justice-with-asset-forfeiture-program

Senator Paul Ryan (R) tried to bring in a rollback of the forfeiture program last year along with Cory Booker (D), the FAIR act, but it died on the floor due to the filibuster rules.

Loretta Lynch is a strong proponent of the laws and systems that are ripping citizens off, and herself institutionalized many of the systems in New York while she worked there for years.
 

commedieu

Banned
So automating the processing of half a million invoices will crash their systems? Are they running PCs from 1992?

No JP morgan chase gave them an unprecedented 4.6 million for new computers.. before the occupy Wallstreet protest went full steam. So that can't be it.

Surely they used that money for computers.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
Guess, the IQ limits in the police force , also apply to their IT department.

My dad is an architect, and does permitting as a contract service, meaning he has to deal with City of Houston code enforcement regularly as his job. About 3 years ago, the city of Houston decided to "modernize" their queue structure. What this amounted to was the installation of a bunch of pretty expensive computer kiosks that dispense tickets for appointments when you arrive.

Now, normal, intelligent people would assume that, if you grab a ticket from the kiosk, you are automatically entered in a queue, because that should be the point, right? Except the kiosk does nothing but dispenses tickets. You then take your ticket across the room to a small box in front of the receptionist, and put your piece of paper in the box while writing your name on it. Periodically, but at their own discretion, the receptionist will empty out the box, and sort the tickets into groups according to who you need to see, then will manually call people one by one to see the person they took a ticket for.

I actually put in a bid to write the software for their queue system but didn't get the job. But I know the person who did get the job - he charged well into 6 figures for his software. But you step back and realize that they still have a manual queue system. Why pay for a computer to do this shit if the bottle neck is still a woman at a desk manually sorting the queue and calling people? The computer should do that shit automatically! And the guy who wrote the software agrees, absolutely every step in the chain could be automated.

But the senior personnel at the city explicitly don't want pure automation. "I don't trust computers" they say.

This is just a peak into what literally every municipal IT department is like. Bunch of old out of touch men "not trusting" computers.
 

Iorv3th

Member
It would then come out that a lot of the money they 'seize' is probably not entered into the system and just goes straight into many of their pockets. Hard to do a database query on something you don't enter in.
 

MCN

Banned
Absolutely disgusting. Where's the republicans going crazy about this gubbamint intrusion?

Republicans only care about preventing government intrusion if it happens to benefit the poor, or females, or minorities, or LGBT people, or basically anyone other than rich white men.

If the intrusion is screwing those people over, however, it's all good.

Literally evil.
 

Mistake

Gold Member
I don't know how else you can cut it, but taking money from people as a type of organized group means you're a gang. There should be protests over this
 
Who needs accountability? Someone could whistleblow the figure and you'd have an insane number of people asking for the whistleblower to be punished and not the NYPD.
 

Timedog

good credit (by proxy)
Makes sense. I definitely couldn't write a program that calculates far more information with way more zeros, on a 15 year old computer, and have it compiled and running 10 minutes from now.
 
I refuse to believe running a query could crash the system. And if that's their excuse then you get people in there to fix the system to prevent this
 
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