According to a Legal Aid Society review of recently disclosed municipal data, payouts for lawsuits against the NYPD surpassed $121 million in 2022, nearly tripling the amount spent to resolve allegations of officer misconduct just two years earlier.
Numerous wrongful conviction lawsuits that were resolved last year for millions of dollars included police as defendants. One case featured two individuals who were later found not guilty of murdering Malcolm X. Another was for a guy who was released from jail after serving 25 years for the 1990 murder of a tourist on a Midtown subway station. The rise was also influenced by allegations of cop brutality during the 2020 demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder.
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A lawyer with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, Jennvine Wong, claimed that “The city continues to pay out astronomical amounts for NYPD misconduct.” The city is not treating NYPD misbehavior and responsibility for it seriously, according to what that implies.
In the last five years, there have been fewer resolved claims, but the cost has increased significantly. According to the Legal Aid Society, the city settled 1,579 claims in 2018 for a total of $76,492,742. It paid $121,376,712 to resolve 939 cases last year.
This excludes settlements reached without a formal lawsuit being filed, which in 2022 totaled more than $183 million and were paid out by the city comptroller’s office. From a peak of more than $356 million spent on 4,072 settlements in 2017, the comptroller’s office’s payouts have decreased in both quantity and cash value in subsequent years.
The city’s Law Department said that some of the reimbursements result from prosecution evaluations of perhaps incorrect convictions in recent years. The department is legally mandated to post police settlement statistics every six months. In recent years, progressive district attorneys have established teams to reexamine old cases, leading them to overturn some convictions against people who had spent decades in prison.
According to a statement from the law department’s Nick Paolucci, district attorneys have moved to vacate many more criminal cases going back dozens of years which have led to an increase in the number of reverse conviction suits and related payouts.” He added, “we are committed to promptly reviewing matters to keep litigation costs down and to provide some measure of justice to plaintiffs who were wrongfully convicted.”
The city and the police force can terminate a case without making an admission of guilt by reaching a settlement. Settlements are distinct from the NYPD’s disciplinary procedure, even if they occasionally call on the NYPD to make policy changes, as in the famous Floyd v. City of New York case, which challenged the department’s stop-and-frisk procedures. The only way an officer may be penalized for being identified in a lawsuit is if the NYPD thinks that the cop broke the rules.
Lawsuit settlements “are not a fair or accurate measure” according to the Police Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, of officers’ effectiveness on the job.
According to PBA President Patrick J. Lynch, “The city routinely settles cases in which police officers have done nothing wrong.” He noted, “some of the largest payouts arise from decades-old cases that don’t involve a single cop who is still on the job today.”
Requests for comments from the NYPD were not immediately fulfilled.
