"Except in rare cases, the murderer's red hand falls on one victim only, however grim the blow; but the foul hand of the drug dealer blights life after life and, like the vampire of fable, creates others in its owner's evil image - others who create others still, across our land and down our generations, sparing not even the unborn."

That quote,

, is also a motto of the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force, and if drug dealers are the vampires of the Tuscaloosa area, the agents of WANTF are vampire hunters.

, WANTF made 1,677 arrests and brought 3,121 criminal charges against suspects. They took 90 pounds of marijuana off the streets, along with more than 1000 grams of cocaine, 82 firearms and 70 other kinds of illegal drugs with a total street value of $1,125,290, according to a task force spokesman.

One of the many tools the task force uses in their battle against drugs is civil asset seizure, a sometimes controversial process that's been recently reformed in other parts of the country.

Civil asset seizures involve taking cash and other property from suspected drug dealers. In most of the country, including Alabama, police are not required to criminally charge an individual in order to seize property suspected of being related to illegal activity, although in Tuscaloosa, the lion's share of suspects are charged at the time of the seizure.

In Alabama, the legal paperwork related to seizures is filed in civil courts, not criminal, and against the property itself, not the suspect from whom it was seized. Because property has no constitutional rights, the seized assets are often considered 'guilty until proven innocent,' and are redistributed in the criminal justice system long before the related suspect is convicted of a crime.

In 2014,

from suspected dealers.

After money is seized, a judge must issue an order that mandates how and where it will be awarded. In Tuscaloosa, generally 75 percent is given to the city police department and the 25 percent goes to the district attorney's office.

Sometimes the process of awarding that money takes place within a week of the original seizure. In other cases, it can take months or years. Suspects often admit to agents at the time of the seizure that the money or property is the fruit of crime, which expedites the legal process involved in awarding it to law enforcement agencies.

According to documents obtained by AL.com through an open records request, judges awarded WANTF $347,331 in 2014 before the money was split with the DA. Nearly $116,000 of that was then given to the district attorney's office.

The remaining $230,000 was spent to pay for various task force needs, including almost $150,000 in equipment purchases and nearly $50,000 to pay confidential informants or make controlled drug buys to make cases against suspect dealers.

WANTF came under scrutiny in 2013, when

.

WANTF has had a new commander since December 2012, and new safeguards in place to guarantee seized funds aren't abused again, although police officials declined to discuss those safeguards specifically.

Forfeitures remain a regular practice in Tuscaloosa and across the country, but two states in the recent past have enacted major reforms to the process.

The changes came in New Mexico in April and earlier this month in Montana. In Montana,

, which requires that before a suspect's property can be seized by police agencies in the state, they must be convicted of a criminal offense and the property must be found to be clearly connected to the crime in question.

New Mexico's reforms are even stricter.

requires the same burden of proof before a seizure, but also mandates that the proceeds seized be deposited in the state's general fund, not awarded to the agencies responsible for the seizures.

The reforms in New Mexico are meant to take away departmental profit as a motive for law enforcement agencies conducting civil asset seizures.

Sources in the task force and other parts of the Tuscaloosa Police Department declined to be interviewed on the record for this story.