$800 Million and Counting: How NYPD Misconduct Is Robbing New York's Communities Twice

New York City taxpayers footed a $117 million bill last year to settle police misconduct lawsuits, part of a staggering $796 million paid out over the last seven years. That's nearly $800 million that didn't build a school, fund a shelter, or repair a road. Instead, it quietly vanished into a legal fund, shielding officers from direct consequences while ordinary New Yorkers absorbed the cost.

The payouts in 2025 alone covered everything from wrongful convictions dating back to the 1980s to protesters beaten with batons during 2020's George Floyd demonstrations. Two men, Eric Smokes and David Warren, received a combined $24.1 million after spending over two decades in prison for a crime they didn't commit. Another man received $5.75 million after police blinded him with a stun gun. These are not minor clerical errors,  they are catastrophic failures, and taxpayers are the ones writing the checks.

What makes this especially painful is the timing. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is currently navigating a $5.4 billion budget shortfall, proposing cuts across city services. Yet settlements are paid from a separate budget line, insulated from scrutiny. As Jennvine Wong of The Legal Aid Society put it, "meaningful accountability has been lacking in the police department. It's a chronic problem that needs to be addressed." That chronic problem has a chronic price tag.

The NYPD argues that many costly cases, like wrongful convictions from decades ago,  "tell you nothing about the state of policing today." But stop-and-frisk violations continue, with a court-appointed monitor citing "unacceptably low compliance rates" just last week. The pattern hasn't broken.

Wong captured the full weight of the cost plainly: these settlements 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."

That trauma, and that bill, belong to the whole city. The question New Yorkers deserve answered is: what could $800 million have built instead?

Link: ABC7NY