Philly cops plant drugs, seize houses under asset forfeiture

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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