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.