NYC has paid $50 million so far this year in police misconduct payouts, Legal Aid says

The city will have to pay for misconduct claims from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

New York City paid out more than $50 million to settle claims of police misconduct in the first seven months of this year, with the median amount already higher than the last five years, according to an analysis from the Legal Aid Society.

The price tag covered the resolution of more than 400 lawsuits between January and late July, based on the organization’s analysis of city data. Data on payouts related to law enforcement misconduct is disclosed biannually under local law.

Among the payments this year was a roughly $415,000 settlement to resolve allegations in June from state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and former Assemblymember Diana Richardson against the city and multiple NYPD officers at a 2020 protest over the death of George Floyd.

In their lawsuit over police behavior during the New York protests, Myrie and Richardson accused officers of using pepper spray and controversial crowd control tactics like kettling at a Brooklyn demonstration they both attended. Officers arrested Myrie at the protest “even though he had done nothing wrong,” the complaint reads.

Their descriptions echoed others offered by protesters that summer, some of whom also sued and received payouts from the city.

“This culture of impunity cannot continue, and we implore recently appointed Commissioner Edward Caban to prove to New Yorkers that NYPD will finally take the steps needed to truly hold officers accountable who infringe on the rights of our clients,” Jennvine Wong, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society who focuses on police accountability, said in a statement on Friday.

Another payout came from a case in which officers, some of whom had been previously accused of misconduct, allegedly removed a man from his car at an intersection in Queens in 2016 and “threw him to the ground where they punched and kicked him repeatedly in the face, ribs, shoulder and back,” according to the complaint. The parties reached a settlement in principle, and city records show a $75,000 settlement that resolved the case in June.

In a statement, the police department said it “carefully analyzes allegations in civil lawsuits as well as trends in litigation against the Department.”

The department said a lot of the payouts were for decades-old cases and don't reflect current department policy. The NYPD also said there's been close to a 20% reduction in complaints filed against the agency between 2020 to 2022 — and more than a 50% drop since 2013.

A spokesperson for the city's Law Department did not immediately return a request for comment.

The city spent more than $135 million on misconduct payouts last year, according to an earlier analysis from Legal Aid. That sum covered nearly a thousand lawsuits, the median cost of which landed at $22,500 for the year.

The median payout has steadily increased over the last several years, with the figure for the first seven months of this year — $25,000 — already being higher than the median for last year. So far, this year’s median payout is the city’s highest since 2018.

Anything short of full accountability for police misconduct “will only perpetuate this suffering with taxpayers footing the bill,” Wong added.

The organization predicted that the city’s rate of payouts so far this year related to officer misconduct allegations could drive the final amount to roughly $100 million by the end of this year.