It's not just criminals though, the police can stop anyone with reasonable 'suspicion' and they do. It's legalised highway robbery. Canada issued a travel advisory to their citizens over it, and the police in New York don't even keep records of what they steal.
They do keep records. The article that you were referring to was about how the NY police claimed that the system that they store those records in couldn't handle something like calculating the total amount of cash seized across all records.
Basically, it couldn't handle the equivalent of SELECT SUM(cash) FROM loot but it could handle SELECT * FROM loot WHERE victim = "John Smith"
