New York City’s tab for police misconduct settlements: Nearly $800 million since 2019

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City paid more than $117 million last year to settle police misconduct lawsuits in cases ranging from the violent arrests of protesters in 2020 to bad police work that led to wrongful convictions in the 1980s, according to a newly published analysis of city data. Nearly $800 million in payouts were made over the last seven years.

The largest settlements last year, totaling $24.1 million, went to two men who spent more than 20 years in prison after they were wrongly arrested and convicted for a fatal 1986 robbery in midtown Manhattan robbery. Another settlement, for $5.75 million, went to a man who said police blinded him in his left eye with a stun gun.

The analysis, released Monday by the nonprofit public defender organization The Legal Aid Society, comes as the nation’s largest city faces a $5.4 billion budget shortfall. Along with broader cuts, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed trimming $22 million from the NYPD’s $6.4 billion budget as it continues to tout lower crime numbers. Settlements are paid out of a separate part of the city’s budget. Elsewhere, they’re paid directly from a police department’s operating budget.

“This analysis is really about transparency around what the NYPD is costing us,” said Jennvine Wong, the supervising attorney with the organization’s Cop Accountability Project. “And from what we can tell here, I think it means that meaningful accountability has been lacking in the police department. It’s a chronic problem that needs to be addressed.”

NYPD says it’s increasing accountability, helping right wrongs

In all, the city settled 1,044 police misconduct lawsuits in 2025, the most since 2019, when 1,276 were resolved. It was the fourth straight year with settlements exceeding $100 million. Last year’s total was nearly double the $62.1 million the city paid in 2020 to settle 929 lawsuits. In 2024, the city paid $206.4 million in 980 lawsuits.

Those amounts are just a part of the city’s overall police misconduct toll. The Legal Aid Society’s analysis only includes lawsuit settlements, not claims that the city comptroller, the official in charge of financial matters, resolved prior to formal litigation.

Of last year’s settlements, about $42 million were for wrongful convictions and $28 million — nearly a quarter of the payout total — involved incidents that occurred more than two decades ago. Such cases have also accounted for a substantial portion of the $796 million the city has paid to resolve police misconduct lawsuits since 2019, the NYPD said.

“While these cases are very important to address, they tell you nothing about the state of policing today,” the department said in a statement.

Under Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the NYPD “has taken significant steps to increase accountability, compliance, and change outdated policies that might create greater risk,” the statement said. The department said it also works closely with the city’s district attorneys’ offices, providing material to facilitate their review of cases involving wrongful arrest and conviction claims.

Multimillion-dollar payouts for wrongful convictions and brutality

The men wrongly convicted in the fatal 1986 robbery, Eric Smokes and David Warren, received $13 million and $11.1 million, respectively. In a lawsuit filed in 2024 in federal court, they alleged that a corrupt detective relied on the word of an emotionally handicapped and drug-addled 17-year-old who was seeking a way out of his own separate robbery rap. Three of the four witnesses who identified Smokes and Warren as the killers only did so after being threatened with criminal charges, the lawsuits said.

Another settlement, for $3.9 million, went to Steven Lopez, a sixth man arrested with the so-called Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five, after their convictions in the 1989 rape of a female jogger were overturned. The Five went to trial but Lopez, under intense police and public pressure, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge that he mugged a male jogger the same night.

Other settlements included $1.7 million for four protesters who said officers beat them with batons or threw them to the ground during a June 2020 demonstration in Brooklyn over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

The city paid $5.2 million to nine people who said they were framed in cases from 2014 to 2016 by two officers who were later convicted of falsifying testimony or paperwork.

Stop-and-frisk continues to be a concern, police monitor says

Last week, a court-appointed monitor criticized the NYPD for poorly supervising and underreporting officers’ use of the tactic known as stop-and-frisk. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD’s frequent use of the tactic to search for guns and drugs violated the civil rights of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

Since then, the department has sharply cut down on stop-and-frisks, but continues to have “unacceptably low compliance rates” with constitutional protections, said the monitor, Mylan L. Denerstein.

The NYPD’s staggering settlement costs suggest more needs to be done to drive down misconduct, and a “lack of accountability has continued to contribute to a culture of impunity,” Wong said.

“These judgments and settlement costs are costing the city so much money and are costing the victims of police misconduct not just monetary losses and financial losses, but also causing real human trauma that they carry with them,” she added.