Philly man charged by rogue cops lost his home to DA's civil-forfeiture program

Bad cops, dropped charges, a family left out in the cold. What's so civil about civil forfeiture?

Kevin Floyd and his family outside their new apartment in Carroll Park.
Mark Stehle

It was raining on the day in November 2012 when Kevin Floyd and his wife, Chevelle, opened the door of their Carroll Park house to find a team of deputy sheriffs standing outside.

When Floyd asked the officers what they wanted, he was told that he, his wife and their three children — the youngest was three months old — were being ordered to leave right away.

The house belonged to Floyd's father, who died in 2009. Floyd had been raised there, and had lived there with his wife and children since 2010.

If they did not leave right away, the deputy told them, they would be arrested for trespassing. There would be no time to gather their belongings, nor to arrange shelter. So the family left, abandoning their possessions — everything from furniture to personal items to their birth certificates and Social Security cards — and walked out into the rain.

"Nothing but the clothes on our back," Floyd recalls, choking back tears at the memory. "No bottles for the baby, nothing."

The Floyds' house had been seized, it turned out, by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office through a legal process known as civil-asset forfeiture, which allows law-enforcement officials to take a property and sell it based on an alleged link to criminal activity, whether the property's owner, or anyone else, has actually been charged, much less convicted, of a crime. The D.A. then keeps the assets, selling seized houses at auction, sharing some of the revenue with the Philadelphia Police Department and keeping the rest in a separate fund it controls. That fund, according to the most recent report available, had a balance of $9.5 million.

In Floyd's case, the D.A. had justified seizing the house based on a single criminal case against Floyd from two years prior, alleging drug possession with intent to deliver. Floyd had yet to have his day in court to answer the charges when his family was sent packing.

Less than three months later, on Jan. 14, 2013, the D.A. declined to prosecute those charges, and similarly reversed its decisions on hundreds more charges brought by the same police officers who had charged Floyd. The reason became clear this July, when six officers, including the four who arrested Floyd, were themselves arrested and charged with running a drug-ridden "racketeering" operation from right inside the police force, one of the biggest scandals to hit the department in decades.

Floyd may have gotten his good name back — but the D.A. didn't give his family back its home. The D.A. has made no apology, and offered no admission of error. The District Attorney's Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Floyds' case is full of twists and turns that raise questions about how the D.A. goes about forfeiting a property. In this case, Floyd was charged with a drug crime in February 2010. The D.A.'s Office filed for forfeiture six months later, long before his criminal case was cleared up. A motion granting the forfeiture was approved in April 2012. The home, valued at $50,000, sold for a mere $5,500 in December 2012, a month after the Floyds were forced to leave.

Floyd claims he and his family weren't given any notice of the forfeiture action until a few weeks prior to the eviction, at which point he contacted his lawyer, to no avail. Geoffrey Seay, the attorney in a civil lawsuit Floyd filed against the D.A., points out that the title didn't belong to him anyway — it was in his deceased father's name and, as the lawsuit puts it, Floyd's father "had been dead for 330 days when the alleged criminal activity took place," making him "the quintessential innocent owner" — the "innocent owner" defense being a common legal challenge to forfeiture.

But Floyd's case also has wider implications. His was just one of hundreds of criminal cases voluntarily thrown out because of the involvement of the now-indicted officers; and many of those cases also led to civil forfeiture actions.
Even as the D.A's office tries to clean its hands of these officers' police work, Floyd's case raises questions: How many houses have been seized based on bogus police work? How much money did the D.A. make for itself in the process?

And if the police officers' cases were indeed "tainted," isn't that the basis for some of the money filling the D.A.'s coffers right now?

City Paper first wrote about the Philadelphia D.A.'s use of civil forfeiture in 2012, when it reported that Philly D.A. Seth Williams was operating what appears to be one of the largest, most efficient and least discriminating civil-forfeiture programs of any big city in the country.

This summer, the Philly D.A. was sued in a class-action lawsuit, brought by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning civil rights group, and the well-known local law firm Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg. Citing many of the findings first reported in City Paper, the suit claims that the Philadelphia D.A's forfeiture practices violate property owners' constitutional rights to due process.

But while that class-action lawsuit attacks the D.A.'s forfeiture program on the broadest level possible, individual lawsuits, such as Floyd's, against the D.A. and Police Department train a smaller light on the darker corners of the D.A.'s money-making forfeiture program.

The charges against Kevin Floyd, for example, stem from an incident in 2010 in which four city narcotics officers — all of them now convicted or indicted — entered his house and claimed to have found prescription pills, marijuana and cocaine.

Floyd denied all this, adding that officers also pocketed $2,000 his wife had stored in a drawer and some $200 or $300 he'd had on his person. (He also says that just before his arrest, Officer Jeffrey Walker told him to give him more cash or the names of drug dealers for Walker to shake down. Walker recently pled guilty to corruption charges.)

Why the District Attorney's office decided, based on this charge, to permanently take Floyd's home isn't clear, but many of the real-estate forfeiture cases pursued by the D.A. originate from a single alleged drug crime.

How many more individuals' and families' houses were seized based on reports written by officers whose credibility has been rejected by the D.A.'s Office itself? The answer ranges from at least quite a few to dozens or more.

Pinning down the number isn't easy: Forfeiture dockets don't include police officer information, and police reports don't generally include forfeiture information. But between 2006 and 2012 alone, the time during which the now-indicted officers allegedly ran their criminal enterprise, the District Attorney's Office took in in more than $9 million via the seizure by forfeiture of 571 houses. And even a cursory survey by City Paper of reports completed by those officers shows that the cases they worked on regularly resulted in later moves by the D.A. to seize a house by forfeiture.

None of that means that officials within the office believed the officers' cases to be tainted when they brought the forfeitures.

But it does raise the question of how long officials within that office knew something was wrong. And what, if anything, the D.A. plans to do about the houses that were seized and auctioned off based on information supplied by officers now alleged to have been engaged in criminal conspiracy.

For some critics of forfeiture, these cases illustrate a systemic problem created when law-enforcement agencies are empowered to increase their own revenue via a seize-first-ask-later policy requiring neither criminal convictions or charges.

"The indicted officers are certainly bad apples [but] the problem is one of bad laws," says Institute for Justice attorney Darpana Sheth, who is helping to head up the class-action lawsuit against the D.A.'s forfeiture program. Cases like Floyd's, she says, are "the inevitable result of the perverse profit incentive" created by civil forfeiture.

Scott Kelly, an attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania working on forfeitures issues, agrees. "When law enforcement can forfeit people's property without a conviction and then keep it for their own budgets, it leads to unjust outcomes," he says.

In August, Floyd sued the D.A.'s Office and the City of Philadel­phia over the forfeiture in federal court.

Asked if, given the recent formal indictments of the officers involved, the D.A.'s Office had perhaps reached out to work with his client, Seay, Floyd's lawyer, shook his head. "Not at all," he said.