A public defender organization is suing the NYPD in an attempt to force it to disclose what it does with the millions of dollars in cash and property it seizes from civilians every year—primarily from people who have not been charged with a crime. The Bronx Defenders sued the city in Manhattan state court on Thursday for failing to turn over records about its civil asset forfeiture process, after police officials stalled for a year and seven months in responding to a public records request.

"NYPD property seizures affect tens of thousands of New Yorkers every year and generate millions of dollars in revenue for the City," lawyer Adam Shoop of the Bronx Defenders said in a statement. "The public has a right to know what the NYPD is doing with this money and the internal policies governing these practices."

A 2014 Gothamist report, cited in the lawsuit, spotlighted the problems posed by civil forfeiture. The procedure for getting one's property back remains byzantine, and what the NYPD does with the money is still secret, even though federal judges found in 1972 and again in 2001 that the 1881 law used as the basis for civil forfeiture is unconstitutional. (Both judges demanded that city legislators rewrite it.)

In one case profiled in the Gothamist report, a Bronx man named Gerald Bryan lost $4,800 in a raid that resulted in drug-trafficking charges. The charges were later dropped, but when Bryan went to retrieve his money, he was told that the sum had been placed into the police pension fund. He fought and eventually got reimbursed, but the city paid out of its taxpayer-financed general account, not the police pension fund.

"The answers lie in the [NYPD's] books," Bryan told us. "You open that up, and it's going to be a Pandora's box on just how much the NYPD has illegally taken from New Yorkers."

The Bronx Defenders filed its public records request six months after publication of the Gothamist story, seeking a comprehensive accounting of the seized funds and property, as well as the guidelines governing the process. According to the lawsuit, the NYPD blew deadlines for responding repeatedly or ignored requests entirely, in violation of the state's Freedom of Information Law.

In March of this year, the department turned over a property clerk "accounting summary" for 2013 and a revenue report for fiscal year 2013. The two documents, totaling 14 pages, were accompanied by a copy of the NYPD patrol guide. As for the rest, the NYPD claimed it could not find ”additional records responsive to the request," according to the lawsuit.

The lawyers seeking the documents called bullshit.

"At no time did the NYPD seek clarification or otherwise seek to assist petitioner to identify the records sought with greater specificity, nor did the NYPD certify that it does not possess the records or that it performed a diligent search to locate additional records, as required," lawyers from the Bronx Defenders wrote in a memo in support of the suit. "In any event, an assertion that the NYPD could not locate any further responsive documents would not be credible given the paltry amount of detail contained in the documents the NYPD did produce (which, as the documents’ names suggest were 'summaries' and 'reports' of information contained in other records)."

The documents the NYPD provided show that in 2013, the department listed $6.5 million in revenue from forfeited assets. Of that, $1 million was auction proceeds, and the rest was cash. The documents also show that the department maintained a balance of more than $68 million in seized money alone from one month to the next in 2013. The city projects it will make $5.3 million from taking people's stuff this year.

As Bronx Defenders’ suit outlines, the NYPD regularly seizes the property of individuals it arrests. When a criminal case is over, the person needs a signed release from prosecutors to get the money back. If the city ignores the request, the person whose money has been taken has no recourse. (Earlier this year, the Bronx Defenders filed a separate class-action lawsuit challenging the practice of civil asset forfeiture.)

In a filing from the latest case, lawyers for the Bronx Defenders accused the city of violating due process by “improperly forcing property owners to bear the burden of [the city] retaining personal property long after the justification for doing so has expired.”

A bill that would require the NYPD to report annually on what kind of property it's holding onto and why has been stalled in a City Council committee since Councilman Ritchie Torres introduced it last November.

City agencies of all kinds regularly disregard the time limits and requirements of laws governing public records requests, and the NYPD has a well-established reputation as the worst offender. When he was public advocate, Bill de Blasio gave the department an F grade for transparency (as mayor, he has frequently resisted routine disclosures himself). Legislation that de Blasio introduced in 2010 calling for mayoral agencies to issue monthly reports on FOIL compliance died on the vine.

Also in 2010, the New York Times sued the NYPD in state court, demanding that it provide documents in relation to several requests it had been ignoring or stalling on. In a decision on the case, Judge Jane Solomon observed that the "NYPD acknowledges that it has routinely failed to comply with FOIL," and "apparently believes it can continue" to ignore a 20-day time limit for providing documents. The Times had asked for an order banning the NYPD's practice of obstructing records requests, but Solomon concluded that the only recourse available within the law is individual lawsuits about specific requests.

In 2014, after fighting the disclosure of its internal guide on responding to public records requests, the NYPD released the guide, revealing that for years it had instructed officers that the deadline for an initial response to a request was 10 days, when in fact it is 5 business days.

A Law Department spokeswoman said the city will review the lawsuit when it gets served.