The city paid out $114.5 million in police misconduct lawsuits last year — nearly double what it paid in 2020, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society. Such lawsuits have cost taxpayers more than half a billion dollars since 2018, the analysis showed.
Payouts for police misconduct cases have steadily increased in recent years, though the number of settlements has gone down, according to Legal Aid’s analysis.
Just 10 NYPD officers accounted for $68 million in misconduct payouts from 2013 to 2023.
Jennvine Wong, an attorney with Legal Aid said in a statement that the payouts “are indicative of a system that both refuses and fails to hold offending officers accountable.”
The NYPD referred Gothamist to the city’s law department for this story. Department spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci said in a statement that many of the recent payouts are connected to cases from the 1980s and 1990s. He said in cases where past wrongdoing is discovered, the city aims to settle the cases quickly.
“Expeditious settlement of these cases avoids the risk of protracted and costlier litigation and provides some justice to people wrongfully convicted,” he said in a statement.
In one lawsuit settled last year, the city paid nearly $3.7 million after NYPD narcotics officers were accused of fabricating a robbery charge, court records show. A man spent two years wrongfully imprisoned as a result, court records show.
Both officers in that case were defendants in past lawsuits that resulted in payouts of over $100,000, according to Legal Aid’s analysis. Neither officer was disciplined by the police department, according to NYPD records.
In a 2013 case, which the city settled for almost $1.7 million last year, a plainclothes officer was accused of pointing his gun at a man without identifying himself as a police officer, according to court records. The lawsuit also claimed that the man did not match the description of the person the officers were chasing. Two officers beat the man and pistol whipped him on the head, and he received staples on his skull, the lawsuit claimed. The officers then filed an unwarranted felony charge against the man, claiming a gun they found nearby belonged to him without collecting fingerprints or DNA evidence, according to the lawsuit.
Both officers in that case were defendants in past lawsuits that resulted in over half a million dollars in payouts. Neither was disciplined by the police department.
These payout totals don’t include cases settled with the city’s comptroller prior to formal litigation — setting the actual totals even higher, according to Legal Aid.
Misconduct payments slightly decreased in 2023 compared to 2022, when the city paid out $121 million.
“It is blatantly misleading and unfair to use lawsuit payouts from decades-old cases as a measure of how New York City police officers are doing our job today,” Patrick Hendry, president of the city’s largest police union, said in a statement.
“Even in more recent cases, the city frequently chooses to settle even though police officers have done nothing wrong. Often, police officers aren’t even notified of those settlements and have no opportunity to clear their names,” he said.
Bahar Ostadan
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