Without a trial, it isn't "real" drug money. It's accused drug money. In the United States, we nominally presume innocence until guilt is proven. Since civil forfeiture uses kangaroo courts, there is no proof and so it isn't "real" drug money.

I don't understand. If a cop pulls over a drug dealer and happens to find drugs and $1M, isn't that still counted in the graph as forfeiture? Let's assume the drug dealer is convicted.

In that case it's likely justified. But then you can link the forfeiture to an actual person being tried in a court of law. Many, many, many of these cases are things like "State Court vs $12,348.45". In those cases there's no defense and the owner of the property has to interject as a third party to attempt to get their property back. In many cases it'll cost more to retrieve the property than the value of the property in the first place.

Also, I would assume that even if the alleged drug dealer is found not guilty for some reason they won't get their $1M back.

I would imagine the people responsible for tracking such statistics are not motivated to flag the differences.

The problem with civil forfeiture isn't actual criminals, it is what happens to everyone who is profiled as a potential criminal.

Today, we have it pretty good, but imagine being Italian during the hay-day of the NY Mafia busts. If civil forfeiture existed during that time, any man or woman or Italian decent could have been reasonably pulled over accused of being involved in mafia activities (gambling, prostitution, intimidation, etc) and have whatever cash they had on their persons seized.... even if they never got a conviction.

The police today are under a lot of scrutiny to not profile (though they still do it anyways), but crime rates are at record lows. What will happen if crime rates rise, and the populace becomes more willing to accept policing profiling as a preventative measure?

Profiling is common and not a bad thing. The police profile, the feds profile more. They just have fancy new words for it to avoid the silliness that the word profile has somehow gotten the same meaning as discrimination.

Your example is already done today, you just don't hear about it in those terms.

Ok... well that was my entire point and the reason why I stated that it's not fair to call all forfeiture as "stealing".

Well, until they specify line-by-line in their statistics which is which, and then address the obvious issues/corruption, I'm comfortable with calling all of it stealing.

My understanding is that what happens is that the money is civil-forfeitured immediately after arrest in a separate proceeding from, in your example, the alleged drug dealer being charged.

That said, the fact is that your example's archetype accounts for a vanishingly small amount of civil forfeitures.