When forfeiture is used as a cash cow, everything can look like drug money. Everything can look like a prize.

And as other counties have scaled up the practice — as Daisilee Cruz’s case and others uncovered through our investigation show — seemingly innocent people are getting caught in the crossfire.

…“As long as forfeiture money is being used to self-fund law enforcement agencies, there is always going to be an abuse of forfeiture practices,” said Darpana Sheth with the Washington-based Institute of Justice, which has been litigating civil asset forfeiture cases for years.

“Law enforcement has a direct financial incentive to not only seize property but pursue forfeiture even when there is a very tangential relationship to criminal activity,” she said.

…Investigators didn’t find any drugs in their sweep, but they did find something else — $3,000 that Smith says she had just cashed from a tax refund. It was days away from her son’s senior prom, and she had hoped to use the money to pay for his suit and rent a limousine.

But, to investigators, the stack of cash was probable drug money.

“They were like, ‘Well, I need to prove it’s not illegal gains,’ and I said, ‘Well, you’re not proving that it is illegal gains. You’re not proving that,’” Smith recalled saying to police, at the time. “I was really, really angry that they took my money.”

…A review of several months of court filings from 2018 shows that small amounts of cash are routinely taken from people never charged with crimes.

…Adams conceded that cases like these do occur, but referred to the money as “abandoned property,” because the individuals didn’t show up to court hearings to contest the takings.

…Police confiscated a piggy bank containing about $98 of birthday money belonging to a suspect drug dealer’s youngest daughter. Neither the target nor the daughter were ever charged with criminal wrongdoing. Still, the process of getting the piggy bank back was arduous.

“It took us over a year to get that $98 back,” he said.

Civil asset forfeiture has quietly expanded across Pa., led by Berks County

sigh…