By Delvin Davis | SPLC Senior Policy Analyst
Introduction
Alabama residents Greg and Teresa Almond lost their home, business and reputation, and were forced to live in a utility shed without running water, after law enforcement raided their home over $50 worth of marijuana that was allegedly not even theirs — all stemming from the practice of civil asset forfeiture.
Civil asset forfeiture — a procedure where law enforcement is allowed “to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime” — has become more commonplace in Alabama in recent years. For the Almonds, members of Randolph County’s drug task force came to their home in 2018 after law enforcement reported smelling marijuana on the premises during an earlier attempt to serve paperwork related to a civil matter. The task force proceeded to kick in their door, throw in a flash-bang grenade, and detain Greg and Teresa at gunpoint as they searched their home.
Even though the drug search only turned up $50 worth of marijuana that the Almonds’ adult son would later claim was his, and one prescribed Lunesta pill outside of the bottle, deputies used the event as an opportunity to arrest the Almonds and charge them with second-degree marijuana possession, which is a misdemeanor, and felony possession of a controlled substance for the single Lunesta pill. In the process, the task force also seized approximately $8,000 in cash, Teresa’s wedding rings, Greg’s sizeable gun collection, and other personal items. Their jail stint caused them to miss a meeting with the bank to discuss refinancing their mortgage and business loans, causing them to go into foreclosure and have to live in a storage shed.
In 2024, six years after these traumatic events, Greg and Teresa Almond would eventually win $1 million in punitive and compensatory damages after a federal jury determined the drug raid was conducted illegally. However, for most Alabamians subject to civil asset forfeitures, there are no such positive outcomes.
Explaining Civil Asset Forfeitures
What happened to the Almonds is the result of a pervasive practice called civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture is by nature a civil matter, meaning that unlike the Almonds’ case, the property owner need not be arrested or criminally charged for the seizure to occur — challenging the notion of being innocent until proven guilty. As a civil case, the state need only prove the property — generally cash, cars or firearms, according to state reports — was criminally involved by a “preponderance of the evidence” — a lower burden of proof than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal cases. Many property owners eventually forfeit their ownership of the seized property through the courts without contest due to the costly and time-consuming nature of prolonged litigation, allowing local government to assume ownership and benefit from the proceeds.
The original purpose of this practice was to give law enforcement the ability to “cripple large-scale criminal enterprises by diverting their resources,” becoming more popular “in the 1970s and 1980s with the federal government’s war against organized crime and drugs.” However, forfeitures also create a financial incentive to use proceeds from forfeited cash and property as an additional revenue stream for local governments. According to the Institute for Justice, in 2018 alone, people across the country experienced over $3 billion in forfeitures. As such, the institute claims that the practice of civil asset forfeitures “risks biasing law enforcement priorities toward the pursuit of property over justice and enables agencies to self-fund outside normal legislative appropriations.” In a 2018 report, Forfeiting Your Rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice also highlighted how law enforcement agencies have historically often been the largest profiteers from seized cash in Alabama. Recent events, as described in the following section about Brookside, Alabama, strongly suggest that this is still the case today, justifying the need for greater data transparency.
Consequently, forfeitures create a temptation for local governments to lean on the practice during times of financial distress. It also incentivizes officers to abuse their discretionary power enforcing petty charges against poor, marginalized or vulnerable communities, as the legal process necessary to reclaim seized property is usually cumbersome and cost-prohibitive. In Alabama, this abusive policing-for-profit scheme became especially fraught in recent years in the small town of Brookside.
The Case of Brookside, Alabama
A Town and Police Department Dependent on Forfeiture and Fees
Brookside, Alabama, a small town north of Birmingham with no traffic lights and a median household income of less than $40,000, had a minuscule police presence until 2018 when town leaders prioritized creating a “big, professional police department.” After hiring Mike Jones as its new police chief for his “more aggressive approach,” Jones would then sell the town on “a vision of how to turn a sleepy department into an intimidating and lucrative force.” Chief Jones would go on a hiring binge for new officers, even though Brookside was a town with a scarce history of violent crime — including zero homicides or rapes from 2011 to 2018.
According to a class action lawsuit filed against the town, Jones’ investment in aggressive policing produced misdemeanor arrests that increased from 90 in 2018 to 1,273 in 2020 in a town of less than 1,300 people, and an increase in vehicle tows from 50 to 789 in that same timeframe — 1.7 tows per Brookside household. This corresponded with a sharp increase in revenue, totaling $487 in fines and forfeitures for every man, woman and child in Brookside in 2020 — a 640% increase from two years prior, and nearly half of the town’s $1.2 million budget. The $610,307 in fines and forfeitures collected in 2020 was more than all revenues collected by the town in 2018 combined ($586,065).
Forfeitures came with police harassment and intimidation of Brookside residents, including stops for frivolous or fictitious traffic violations, and personal threats to residents who complained. Some residents alleged being stranded on the side of the road after having their cars towed and then charged by both the town and the impound company to get their vehicles back. Ramon Perez, a Latinx resident, was stopped for rolling through a stop sign and speeding, allegations he disputed. The incident resulted in him being threatened with jail and having his car towed because a passenger in his car could not produce identification — something that is not even a crime. Likewise, when the Rev. Vincent Witt, a Black man, questioned why he was pulled over while riding through Brookside, the officer allegedly responded, “Look, you f---ing n-----, just stay out of Brookside.” As Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr described it, Brookside’s predatory policing created a “black hole” that many residents found easy to get into, but hard to escape.
AL.com would win a Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper’s media exposure of Brookside’s reliance on predatory policing — leading to concerns at both ends of the political spectrum. Alabama Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, a Republican, proclaimed, “Law-abiding citizens should not fall prey to a renegade police department that is accountable to no one.” Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Shanta Owens, a Democrat, dismissed 40 cases where Brookside police were the sole witnesses, citing their “lack of credibility and public trust” after their policing-for-profit scheme was exposed. Even after the ousting of Mike Jones as police chief, the scandal left his immediate replacement with the challenge of “build[ing] trust with all the residents of Brookside.”
Recent Legislation and Litigation on Civil Asset Forfeitures
Recent legislation, boosted by the bipartisan scrutiny of Brookside’s conduct, has aimed to curb the practice of civil asset forfeitures. In 2021, Alabama passed a law prohibiting the forfeiture of small amounts of cash ($250 or less) and vehicles with low market values (less than $5,000), while also improving due process protections for people who have had their property taken. In 2022, the Alabama legislature also limited the amount of revenue a municipality can gain from traffic fines and penalties to 10% of the municipal budget.
However, in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Culley v. Marshall that while the due process clause requires a timely forfeiture hearing in civil asset forfeiture cases involving personal property, it does not require a separate preliminary hearing. In 2019, Alabama residents Halima Culley and Lena Sutton loaned their cars to people who would later be arrested on drug charges. Their cars were subsequently seized without a preliminary hearing to allow them an opportunity to make a case to retain their property. Requiring a preliminary hearing before seizing property would have added a layer of protection against law enforcement tempted to arbitrarily confiscate a person’s possessions.
Justice Gorsuch would note in his concurring opinion in Culley that “For Alabama, this was business as usual.” Indeed, Justices who both concurred and dissented with the Culley decision shared concerns about how civil asset forfeitures could be legally problematic. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that “officers have a financial incentive to target marginalized groups, such as low-income communities of color, who are less likely to have the resources to challenge the forfeiture in court.” In his concurring opinion, Justice Gorsuch said he “agree[d] with the dissent that this case leaves many larger questions unresolved about whether, and to what extent, contemporary civil forfeiture practices can be squared with the Constitution’s promise of due process.” Gorsuch concluded by expressing his hope that the court would use future cases to begin the task of assessing how well the profound changes in civil asset forfeiture practices we have witnessed in recent decades” comport with constitutional due process.
Thus, despite recent legislative reforms and judicial agreement on the pervasiveness of civil asset forfeitures, more must be done to increase civil asset forfeiture transparency to protect Alabamians from this harmful practice.
The Need for Increased Civil Asset Forfeiture Data Transparency
Even before the Brookside policing scheme was exposed, Alabama recognized that data reporting was necessary as a means of accountability for civil asset forfeitures. After much advocacy for reform, Alabama passed legislation in 2019 mandating local law enforcement to report detailed data on property seized from civil asset forfeitures to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) on behalf of the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center, with an annual report provided to legislative leadership and the governor. The publicly available annual report provides a summarized view of aggregated data, including overall cash, vehicles and firearms seized and forfeited, and which court district or law enforcement agency the forfeitures come from.
However, there is no easily accessible data on civil asset forfeitures that allows the public a more granular view beyond a summary level. Without disaggregated data, policymakers and the public need to use alternative methods to assess compliance with the law, how the practice continues to be used, and which communities are most vulnerable to being targeted by predatory policing. In the SPLC’s experience in trying to obtain data for this report, this information is not easily obtained through public information requests, a process that can be time-consuming and expensive — making direct reporting from law enforcement much more necessary.
In FY 2023, ALEA reported that, between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2023, Alabama opened 983 civil asset forfeiture cases and closed 537 while 505 cases involved arrests. During that same period, the state reported a total of over $9.4 million in seized currency from Alabama residents. Of that amount, over $4.6 million (49.6%) has been forfeited to the state, compared to only $96,338 (1.0%) awarded back to defendants. Also, in that same fiscal year, 159 vehicles were seized, with 54 forfeited and only 10 (6.3%) returned, and 565 firearms were seized, with 297 forfeited and only three (0.5%) returned.
The amount of seized money in FY 2023 represents a 17.5% decline from the over $11.4 million taken in FY 2021. However, for the 41 judicial circuits in Alabama, we see disparities for circuits that represent counties with higher Black populations. For judicial circuits representing county populations over 30% Black, law enforcement seized 42.6% more money in FY 2023 compared to FY 2021, while all other areas saw a decrease in seized money. Judicial circuits over 30% Black also had higher amounts seized per 100 residents in FY 2023.
ALEA also details the forfeited money and property resulting from default judgments where a property owner fails to challenge the seizure in court, leaving the property forfeited. Of the 537 closed civil asset forfeiture cases in FY 2023, 468 of them (87.2%) concluded in a default judgment. The high rate of default judgments is important given that the expense of hiring an attorney could make it cost-prohibitive to pursue reclaiming a small amount of cash or low-value property.
The lack of deeper data availability has also become a concern for state legislators, including State Sen. Arthur Orr, who has expressed concerns about the completeness and accuracy of reported civil asset forfeiture data. In 2024 Orr shared, “… there’s no seizure address reported, the name of the defendant is not given, or the civil case number didn’t match up with the Alacourt system. So, those are things we want to get rectified, the reporting from the locals — inaccurate reporting at that.” Further, Orr has noted that it is difficult to understand from available data how many forfeitures are tied to an actual arrest or charge, pointing out that “[a] lot of times there’s no related criminal arrest or charge. … All we can find is the default judgment where the items are taken, but no arrest or charge. So, that’s a concern.” In FY 2021 and FY 2023, ALEA reported that barely more than half of all forfeiture cases involved an arrest — 55.9% and 51.4%, respectively. These low arrest rates counter the narrative that civil asset forfeitures are necessary for disrupting criminal enterprises.
Orr’s concerns about civil asset forfeiture in Alabama data speak to the need for improvement in transparency, accessibility, accountability, and collection methods. A legislator voicing these concerns shows how acquiring more detail to assess a fuller picture through research and public records requests would likely be even more difficult for the average Alabamian. Even where data is available, the concern stands that the data collected may be incomplete and contain inconsistencies, allowing predatory forfeiture practices to go unreported. Publicly available disaggregated data would therefore be instrumental in creating accountability for the practice of police forfeitures.
Jefferson County — Case Study on Racial Targeting
A case study of Jefferson County demonstrates why detailed publicly available and accurate civil asset forfeiture data is so important. Jefferson County — Alabama’s most populous county, and home of Brookside — records the greatest amounts of seized currency in FY 2021 and FY 2023 as the sole county in the 10th Judicial Circuit. Given Jefferson County’s volume and Brookside’s recent history, a deeper exploration into the county’s civil asset forfeiture landscape can provide an illuminating example of the practice in Alabama — and how civil asset forfeiture can potentially target certain communities as a means of predatory policing. However, the aggregated data provided through ALEA annual reports only provides a limited view. By contrast, Alacourt, the Alabama court’s online system for organizing case filings, provides more detailed information on defendants who have had property seized — including details on the seized items and defendant addresses. While additional information derived directly from Alacourt’s court filings helps to fill in gaps in the aggregated data, the process to collect this data is cumbersome, time-consuming, and only available to those with subscription access to the Alacourt site.
Nevertheless, the following map of Jefferson County displays available Alacourt FY 2023 data of defendants subject to civil asset forfeiture overlaid with communities with higher percentages of Black residents according to census data.[i] The result is a map suggesting a strong pattern of forfeitures taken from residents living in majority-Black areas. The mere possibility of racial targeting at play necessitates increased civil asset forfeiture data transparency and accountability.
Policy Recommendation
Alabama Must Make Publicly Available Disaggregated Civil Asset Forfeiture Data That Is Accurate and Complete
The Southern Poverty Law Center recommends that Alabama increase the availability, accuracy and transparency of its civil asset forfeiture data, given the perverse financial incentives and potential harm to vulnerable communities caused by the process in the state. Importantly, Alabama should require disaggregated civil asset forfeiture data to be made fully accessible to the public, which would create an additional level of accountability for law enforcement to ensure its reporting is complete and accurate. Free, comprehensive, and open data would be an important deterrent to future policing-for-profit schemes in Alabama.
Appendix: Currency Seized by Alabama Judicial Circuit, FY 2021 to FY 2023
Acknowledgments
The SPLC would like to acknowledge the contributions of the organization’s Policy and Legal teams for their feedback and review of this brief — specifically Andrea McChristian, Jerome Dees, Katie Glenn, Shay Farley and Micah West, as well as Amber Colquhoun, SPLC intern, for her contributions to the initial research, and Monica Bray for her fact-checking support.
This report includes hyperlinked citations instead of full endnote citations. Full endnote citations, however, are available here.
Illustration at top by Harol Bustos
[i] SPLC compiled information for Jefferson County forfeitures by searching Alabama’s Alacourt system for currencies, vehicles, and certain brands of firearms in civil cases during FY 2023. These searches produced a nonexhaustive list of 143 cases where property was seized, as well as the names of property owners and their residential addresses. Addresses were then geocoded into GIS software and overlayed onto census tract data displaying the percentage of Black residents. While searches for every make and model of vehicle and firearm are not feasible, we believe the 143 cases present a representative sample of seizures in the county.