Minneapolis police are buying license plate readers with forfeiture money

The Minneapolis Police Department is buying mobile license plate readers, the kind mounted on squad cars, and paying for them with forfeiture money. An internal MPD email from a commander in the Administrative Services Division, marked high importance, says it in one line: "I need this completed in order for us to use forfeiture funds to purchase the mobile LPRs." The rest of the email is compliance paperwork the vendor has to sign before the money can move.

Forfeiture is how police keep cash, cars, and property tied to a crime. In Minnesota, 70 percent of the proceeds go to the agency that seized it, and the agency decides what to buy. That incentive is why the Institute for Justice grades the state's forfeiture law a D. Minnesota's conviction requirement only covers judicial forfeitures under $50,000, requires that "a person" be convicted rather than the owner, and disappears if the owner never files a challenge. In 2024, 88 percent of the state's DUI and drug forfeitures went uncontested.

The numbers are going up. Minnesota agencies seized over $6 million in 2024, 14 percent more than the year before, according to State Auditor data reported by the Minnesota Reformer. MPD nearly tripled its take, from $157,375 in 2023 to $469,566 in 2024, and spent over $500,000 of forfeiture money that year on two vehicles.

Money seized this way sits outside the regular budget. A camera bought with it never has to compete with anything else the city wants to fund.

Minneapolis is where Minnesota's plate reader law started. A 2012 Star Tribune records request showed MPD's cameras had logged the mayor's own cars, and the legislature wrote Minn. Stat. 13.824 in the years after. Mobile readers go wherever the squad goes, and everything they scan lands in the same retention and sharing system the state has argued about ever since.

One loose thread. The compliance form MPD sent the vendor is 2 CFR 200.216, a rule that only applies to federal money. That points to federal equitable sharing dollars rather than state forfeiture proceeds. The email doesn't say. The purchase order and the forfeiture account it drew from will.

If you have MPD forfeiture spending records, send them to tips@fineprint.report.

Sources: MPD internal email, July 2025 (reviewed by FinePrint); Minnesota Reformer, "Minnesota law enforcement asset seizures up last year," Oct. 9, 2025; Institute for Justice, Policing for Profit, Minnesota profile; Minnesota House Research, "Minnesota's Forfeiture Laws" (July 2022); 2 CFR 200.216 (ecfr.gov).