Thomas O’Brien, an attorney with The Legal Aid Society, penned an op-ed in today’s New York Law Journal which takes aim at the barriers erected by the New York Police Department (NYPD) that prevents millions of dollars of property seized from arrested people from being reclaimed.

In reality, the reclamation process proves so confusing that many arrested people simply give up on it, leading to a situation in which over $60 million in seized money had passed into the NYPD’s custody in recent years.

O’Brien notes that without reform the department will continue to accumulate “millions of dollars of citizens’ seized property, totally outside the budgeting process.”

“The City Council can surely amend the forfeiture provisions . . . to provide for due process and to control the abuse of the Police Department’s “forfeiture” regime,” the op-ed states, “which really just amounts to seizure and confiscation of citizens’ valuable property with no due process of law.”

Read the full piece here.