$500 million over 6 years: costs of NYPD misconduct settlements

New York City has paid more than $500 million in police misconduct settlements over the past six years, including nearly $115 million by 2023, according to an analysis by city ​​data released by the Legal Aid Society on Thursday.

Fewer lawsuits are being settled each year, the association found, but the average payout has more than doubled over that period, from an average of $10,500 in 2018 to $25,000 last year.

A growing number of such settlements in recent years have resulted from lawsuits filed by people after their criminal convictions were expunged in court. Many of those convictions date back to the 1990s, when rising crime rates prompted New York law enforcement agencies to make arrests at all costs. Those affected were predominantly black or Hispanic.

A spokesperson for the city’s Law Department said Wednesday that there had been an increase in overturned convictions and that settling the lawsuits resulting from these reversals avoided lengthy litigation and provided justice to people wrongly convicted.

The New York Times reported last year that a police detective, Louis N. Scarcella, had cost the city and state $110 million in settlements involving fourteen people whose convictions he helped secure and which were later overturned. Mr. Scarcella, who has been accused in dozens of cases of fabricating false witness statements and coercing confessions, has not been criminally charged.

Jennvine Wong, an attorney with the organization’s Cop Accountability Project, said many factors could contribute to what she called the “mind-boggling amount of money” the city has spent on police misconduct settlements in recent years. The settlements, she said, come at a time when the city is “putting money into police and violent police, instead of investing in public services and social safety nets.”

In November, the city agreed to pay $17.5 million to a man who was exonerated in 2021 after serving more than two decades in prison for two Queens murders he did not commit.

The man, George Bell, and two others were convicted of the 1996 murders of an East Elmhurst check-cashing store owner and an off-duty police officer who worked there as a security guard. Mr. Bell was sentenced to life in prison without parole, but a judge overturned his conviction and that of the other men.

In 2022, the city paid $135 million in settlements resulting from 971 lawsuits, the association said in the analysis released Thursday. That was the highest total in five years, and was driven by several payouts of more than $10 million, including one to Muhammad A. Aziz, whose conviction in assassination of Malcolm was cleared after spending twenty years in prison. (The association last year reported a figure of $121 million for 2022, based on city data at the time. The new, higher figure is based on updated data.)

One factor that has fueled the increase in payouts recently involves complaints arising from the protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Ms. Wong said.

Last year, the city agreed to pay $13.7 million to settle a federal class action lawsuit brought by protesters who said police violated their rights during demonstrations in May and June of that year.

Patrick Hendry, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, said it was “disingenuous to use lawsuit payouts from decades-old cases as a benchmark for how New York City police officers do our jobs today.”

“Even in more recent cases, the city often chooses to settle even though police officers have done nothing wrong,” Mr. Hendry said. “Often, police officers are not even informed of these settlements and have no way to clear their names.”

The number of complaints against police officers is increasing, according to an annual report from the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an oversight body. According to the report, there was a “significant increase” in these types of complaints last year to the annual report. The board said it received 5,550 complaints last year – a ten-year high and a 50 percent increase from the 3,700 cases it received in 2022.

When the police file an internal complaint, subsequent administrative processes can take years to be decided. Lawsuits against the city can also take years to resolve. The settlements paid out last year resulted from 801 lawsuits, the legal aid analysis shows; Some of those lawsuits were filed as early as 2019.