New York City has paid more than $500 million in police misconduct settlements over the past six years, including nearly $115 million in 2023, according to an analysis of city data released by the Legal Aid Society on Thursday.
Fewer lawsuits are being settled each year, the society found, but the median payout has more than doubled over that period, rising from $10,500 on average 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 vacated by the courts. Many of those convictions dated to the 1990s, when soaring crime rates led New York City law enforcement agencies to pursue arrests at all costs. Those affected were overwhelmingly Black or Hispanic.
A city Law Department spokesman said on Wednesday that there had been an increase in convictions being reversed and that settling the suits arising from those reversals avoided protracted litigation and provided justice to people who had been wrongfully convicted.
The New York Times reported last year that one police detective, Louis N. Scarcella, had cost the city and state $110 million in settlements involving 14 people whose convictions he had helped secure and that were later overturned. Mr. Scarcella, who has been accused of concocting false witness testimony and coercing confessions in dozens of cases, has not been criminally charged.
Jennvine Wong, a Legal Aid staff attorney with the organization’s Cop Accountability Project, said that many factors could be contributing to what she called the “staggering amount of money” the city has spent on police misconduct settlements in recent years. The settlements, she said, come as the city is “pouring money into policing, and violent policing, rather than investing into public services and social safety nets.”
