NEW YORK — City taxpayers shelled out more than $77 million to settle lawsuits alleging police and prosecutorial misconduct and overturned convictions through the first six months of the year, according to a new report by the Legal Aid Society.
The payouts covered 592 cases of alleged misconduct against the NYPD and city prosecutors that were settled out of court. Two settlements had payouts of more than $10 million, with the largest payout topping $13 million, according to the Legal Aid report.
If City Hall continues along this track, taxpayers could be on the hook for paying out more than $155 million in police misconduct cases, which would be a drop from the $206 million paid out last year, the highest annual total since 2018. The number of settlements exceeded the 416 made in the first half of 2024, the agency said.
The data the Legal Aid Society pulled together for its report did not account for settlements with the New York City Comptroller’s Office before a formal lawsuit was filed.
An NYPD spokesman said 41% of the cases settled this year — about $72.5 million — were for lawsuits regarding overturned convictions that occurred decades ago in varied circumstances that were not immediately clear.
“Over a third of these payouts are for reverse conviction cases that happened more than 20 years ago,” the spokesman said. “While these cases are very important, they tell you nothing about the state of policing today.”
“The NYPD works closely and collaboratively with the District Attorney’s Offices and their conviction review units to get them the materials they need to review these cases, and ultimately secure these payouts,” the spokesman added.
Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry said that, despite the Legal Aid Society’s report, “lawsuit settlements are not a reflection on how police officers are doing their jobs.”
“The city routinely settles lawsuits for reasons that have nothing to do with police officers’ conduct, often without informing those officers,” Hendry said. “It is shameful that those settlements are being used to smear police officers’ reputations without any regard for the facts in the case.”
The payouts including a $5.7 million settlement to a Brooklyn man who was blinded in one eye when cops tasered him in the face, according to the report.
Kenneth Bacote was walking through NYCHA’s Kingsborough Houses during the pandemic lockdown on June 2, 2020, when he got into a confrontation with several officers, the lawsuit states. The officers tasered Bacote as they took him into custody, charging him with obstructing traffic, resisting arrest, harassment, and other misdemeanor charges, which were all eventually dropped, court documents show.
A taser prong pierced his left eye, which needed to be surgically removed, the lawsuit stated. Doctors told Bacote that he likely won’t recover his vision.
“No amount of money can compensate someone for losing sight in one eye, but at least he can live his life more comfortably,” Bacote’s attorney, Sanford Rubenstein, said.
Jennvine Wong, supervising attorney for the Cop Accountability Project, a special Legal Aid litigation unit, said the amount of settlements being made by the city remain “disconcerting” even though they are lower than last year’s numbers.
She said she doesn’t see these settlements slowing down anytime soon with Mayor Eric Adams continuing to promote a broken-windows philosophy to crime fighting, which is based on the theory that violent crimes could be stopped by clamping down on misdemeanor quality of life crimes.
“What that means is that the taxpayers are going to be paying for the Adams administration policies for many, many years, even after he’s out of office,” Wong said.
_____
Comments