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The NYPD arrested a mom and took her kids' Christmas gifts. She never got them back.
By
Samantha Max
Published Oct 22, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. ET
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Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
By
Samantha Max
Published Oct 22, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. ET
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On Christmas Eve 2024, Andrea Smith-Taylor went shopping for presents for her five children.
The single mom was staying with her kids at a domestic violence shelter at the time, and felt a sense of accomplishment as she bought her kids clothing, boots, jewelry and a PlayStation — enough to fill two heaping shopping bags.
But before she could give her children their gifts, police arrested her and took everything.
The case against Smith-Taylor was later dismissed and sealed, and she did not want to say what it was about. But even after the charge was dropped, police never returned the gifts, or $3,500 in cash she had with her that day, according to court records.
“I apologized so much to my children,” she said. “I felt so weak, so broken, because there was nothing that I could do about it.”
Smith-Taylor is one of six people suing New York City, the NYPD property clerk and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. In the suit, they describe a "labyrinthine, time-intensive and burdensome” process that makes it nearly impossible for hundreds of thousands of people who are arrested or witness a crime each year to reclaim belongings seized during their interaction with law enforcement. The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed by Brooklyn Defender Services and White & Case LLP, accuses the police department of violating people’s due process rights and upholding a convoluted system that courts have said for decades is unconstitutional.
In one case, the lawsuit alleges, police took a shooting victim’s necklace while he was unconscious in the back of an ambulance. The necklace held the ashes of the shooting victim’s dead son.
Another plaintiff alleges that officers seized laptop computers, keys, $11,000 in cash and more than 200 other personal belongings crammed into a car for a cross-country road trip. Police also often seize vehicles, identification documents, cellphones and other valuable possessions, according to the lawsuit.
Sometimes, people are able to get their belongings back after days, weeks or months of searching. But the property is often lost, destroyed or auctioned off before they can find it. In 2025, the NYPD held onto more than $5 million that it said no one retrieved, according to an annual report on seized property. That same year, the city made almost $1 million from items it auctioned off on the website Propertyroom.com, according to the report.
“For better or for worse, our belongings define us, and that's protected under the Constitution,” said Anca Grigore, director of the seizure and surveillance defense project at Brooklyn Defender Services. “An arrest is already dehumanizing enough, and we have a system in place for an already difficult process for the consequences of an arrest. And then there's this totally separate side system that hides under the shadows.”
An NYPD spokesperson declined to comment, saying the department had yet to receive a copy of the lawsuit and therefore could not properly review it or respond.
‘A lot of it was gone’
There are various ways the NYPD can seize someone’s property. Officers sometimes find stolen or abandoned cars on the street. They take belongings someone has with them when they’re arrested. They also seize items that are illegal or that they believe have been used as part of a crime.
To get back personal property, New Yorkers have to endure a “bureaucratic scavenger hunt riddled with contradictory instructions, arbitrary requirements and dead ends,” Brooklyn Defender Services said in its lawsuit. Part of the problem is that there are multiple protocols on the books for how to return property, and they don’t all agree with one another, according to the civil complaint.
One city law governing the property return process was deemed unconstitutional in federal court more than 50 years ago. A federal judge ordered officials to improve the city’s protocols, including by giving vouchers for all property seized — other than illegal contraband — and providing instructions for how to retrieve belongings, the lawsuit states. But for years, the city didn’t update its procedures to reflect the court order, according to the lawsuit.
In the 1990s, the city responded to the judge’s order and adopted new rules for seized property. But judges have also expressed concerns about the updated procedures, according to rulings cited in the lawsuit. Meanwhile, the old policy has yet to be repealed, “leaving claimants mired in overlapping and contradictory procedures,” the lawsuit states.
The NYPD also has its own protocols, which the lawsuit describes as “arbitrary and unregulated.” Often, the lawsuit alleges, police fail to follow even their own rules. Sometimes, officers don’t give people invoices for their property or fill out the paperwork incorrectly, adding obstacles for people to retrieve their belongings, according to the civil complaint. In other cases, they arbitrarily decide to hold onto or destroy belongings. Cars sometimes get parked on the street or towed to a third-party yard or auto shop, with no record of where the vehicle went, the lawsuit states.
”Our clients don't understand it. We don't understand it,” Grigore said. “We are attorneys who specialize in this and have been practicing this for so long and, and we can barely understand it.”
Nygee Rogers-Green, 26, said it felt like officers were “beating around the bush” when he tried to get back his property after an arrest last October.
Police pulled him over and said they were looking for drugs, he said. Rogers-Green said he had “no reason to get stopped” and declined to comment on his charges, which were later dismissed and sealed.
Officers took Rogers-Green’s car, which he had recently bought for $1,800 and was using to store his valuables, he said. He was staying at a homeless shelter at the time, so the car offered a more secure place to keep clothing, shoes and contact lenses, as well as a backpack and boxing gear from his grandmother, who had died a few months earlier.
“That was, like, the last piece of something that I had left of her, you know, that I could hold onto,” he said.
The day after his arrest, Rogers-Green went to the precinct to try to get his belongings back. But officers told him they didn’t know where the items from his car were, according to the lawsuit. He found some of his belongings in bags by the dumpsters outside the station.
“I found what I could,” he said. “A lot of it was gone.”
Rogers-Green never got the car back, he said. The person who sold it to him had filled out the title incorrectly, so police wouldn’t turn it over.
“I ended up just chalking it up as a loss,” he said.
‘Lost to the system’
The new lawsuit also alleges that there’s a financial incentive for the NYPD to hold onto the property, because the department can auction it off or keep it.
Last year, the NYPD held onto 42 vehicles that no one retrieved, according to the annual seized property report. The department said 13 vehicles became NYPD property because of a settlement or judgment in a civil forfeiture proceedings. More than 9,200 vehicles were auctioned off in 2025, generating nearly $900,000 in revenue, according to the report.
Last year, the NYPD returned about 460,000 — or around 70% — of more than 630,000 cellphones, clothing items, wallets, keys, ID documents and property seized from vendors, department records show. Data in the seized property report doesn’t specify what happened to the other 30% of those items.
Brooklyn Defender Services wants the city to overhaul its property return protocols to make them less confusing and more likely to reunite people with their belongings.
“ Such large amounts of property and big sums of money are just lost to the system every year, because there's not enough advocates to guide people through the system, despite the fact that the system shouldn't need advocates for people to go through it,” said Talia Kamran, a Brooklyn Defender Services attorney who helps clients track down their belongings.
Smith-Taylor, whose Christmas gifts were seized during an arrest, said she felt like police had robbed her and her children, who are now 5, 6, 11, 14 and 18. Months later, a police officer told her lawyer that the department had given the gifts away, “out of the Christmas spirit,” according to the lawsuit.
“ If I'm already in a [domestic violence] shelter with all my children, how do you feel it's right for you to donate anything that you did not pay for?” she said in an interview. “How can I explain that to my children?”
Tagged
new york city
nypd
public safety
Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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