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

NEW YORK– New York City paid more than $117 million last year to settle police misconduct lawsuits in cases ranging from violent arrests of protesters in 2020 to poor police work that led to wrongful convictions in the 1980s, according to a newly released analysis of city data. Nearly $800 million in payments have been made over the past seven years.

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

The analysis, released Monday by the nonprofit public advocacy 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 slashing $22 million from the NYPD’s $6.4 billion budget as it continues to tout a drop in crime. Settlements are paid from a separate portion of the city budget. Elsewhere, they are paid directly from a police department’s operating budget.

“This analysis is really about transparency about what the New York Police Department is costing us,” said Jennvine Wong, the supervising attorney for the organization’s Cop Accountability Project. “And from what we can tell here, I think that means there’s a lack of meaningful accountability within the police department. It’s a chronic problem that needs to be addressed.”

In total, the city settled 1,044 police misconduct lawsuits in 2025, the most since 2019, when 1,276 were resolved. This was the fourth consecutive year that settlements exceeded $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.

These amounts represent only part of the city’s overall record of police misconduct. The Legal Aid Society’s analysis includes only lawsuit settlements, not claims that the city comptroller, the official in charge of financial matters, resolved before formal litigation.

Of last year’s settlements, about $42 million related to wrongful convictions and $28 million — nearly a quarter of the total awards — related to incidents that occurred more than two decades ago. Such cases also make up 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 current state of policing,” the department said in a statement.

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

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

Another settlement, worth $3.9 million, was awarded to Steven Lopez, a sixth man arrested with the so-called Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five, after their convictions for the 1989 rape of a jogger were overturned. The Five went to trial but Lopez, under intense pressure from police and the public, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of assaulting a jogger that 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 protest in Brooklyn following the killing 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 police officers who were later convicted of falsifying testimony or documents.

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

Since then, the department has significantly reduced stops and frisks but continues to have “unacceptably low compliance rates” with constitutional protections, said the monitor, Mylan L. Denerstein.

The staggering settlement costs incurred by the New York Police Department suggest that much more needs to be done to reduce misconduct, and “the lack of accountability has continued to contribute to a culture of impunity,” Wong said.

“These judgments and settlement costs are very costly to the city and cost victims of police misconduct not only monetary and financial losses, but also cause real human trauma that they carry with them,” she added.