“It was ransacked,” Anna Ortiz, his mother, told the Village Voice, describing her return that night to the rent-stabilized apartment she had been renting for more than 25 years. “They destroyed that apartment.”
Even worse than the destruction, the $2,651 in cash that Ms. Ortiz had left in the apartment, which was going toward that month’s rent (as well as some back rent they owed), was missing. No one else could have taken it, except the New York City Police Department. Her son’s arrest was now just the beginning of their problems. The Ortiz family (whose names have been altered due to ongoing legal proceedings) would now have to navigate the NYPD’s hellish and unjustifiably punitive civil forfeiture system, under which low-income New Yorkers have lost millions of dollars because of nothing less than daylight robberies committed by the very police meant to protect them. Even though Nate was only charged with a disorderly conduct violation, the NYPD still has the family’s desperately needed money. Last week, the Ortizes were in housing court to try to stave off eviction, with Anna, who works at a hospital, unable to make up the shortfall with her salary.
“You try to be such a hardworking person, and then something like this happens, and it’s such an embarrassment,” said Ms. Ortiz. “The problem is that it’s just so common.”
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.