Smith’s dissertation explores how police and prosecutors use civil forfeiture to wage the drug war in Philadelphia. Forfeiture operates through the legal fiction of guilty property, meaning that property can be seized even if its owner is not charged with a crime. The practice was adopted by law enforcement officials in Philadelphia during the 1980s to seize cash, cars, and homes allegedly implicated in criminalized narcotics transactions. The city has used these seized assets to fund more intensive policing in the racially segregated and disinvested neighborhoods where forfeitures are spatially concentrated. Public officials defend forfeiture by claiming that seized assets have the capacity to cause harm. However, through ethnographic research on police practices and in forfeiture courtrooms, he found that forfeiture operated through a racializing framework of moral remediation and punitive dispossession. Based on my extensive archival research, he also found that Philadelphia prosecutors forfeited 1,696 homes—many taken from Black and Latinx women and auctioned to developers—and earned over $80 million through the seizure of cash between the early 1990s and 2018. The Digital Humanities Graduate Student Summer Fellowship was used to map incidents of home and cash forfeiture in Philadelphia in relation to spatial measures of racial inequality. These GIS products aimed to visually convey a central thesis of his dissertation: that police manage, maintain, and reproduce racial inequality in the contemporary American city. He ultimately argues that forfeiture represents a regulatory state intervention into the urban drug economy that reproduces racial segregation and fuels urban redevelopment.

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