Philadelphia civil asset forfeiture scam to sell homes to "speculators and cops"
Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 12:47 pm
Inside the Philadelphia DA’s side hustle — selling seized homes to speculators and cops
Policing for profit may end due to the SCOTUSIn neighborhoods across Philadelphia, the city sells homes that owe back taxes, or have fallen into foreclosure. But the sales in Vazquez’s neighborhood were different. Here, police seized properties after drug raids. Once they were taken, the district attorney auctioned them off to the highest bidder, for cash that went back to the law enforcement agencies. The legal process is known as civil asset forfeiture.
Vazquez has never heard this term, she just watched as neighbors were taken away in cuffs and their homes sold by the DA –– controversially, with no guilty verdict required. She doesn’t know exactly how many of the two-story rowhomes on her block were forfeited, but she knows it was a lot.
In fact, the number of seized homes on Vazquez’s block was more than anywhere else in Pennsylvania. No other jurisdiction in Pennsylvania took as much property as Philadelphia and no other block in the city saw as many forfeiture petitions as this narrow stretch of two-story rowhomes on Waterloo Street. On Vazquez’s block, the DA attempted to seize nearly one-quarter of the properties between 2011 and 2015 alone.