New York — New York City paid more than $117 million last year to settle police misconduct claims 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 published analysis of city data. Nearly $800 million has been paid out over the past seven years.
The largest settlements last year, totaling $24.1 million, went to two men who spent more than 20 years in prison after they were wrongly arrested and convicted of a fatal 1986 robbery in midtown Manhattan. Another $5.75 million settlement went to a man who was reported to police Blind in his left eye With a stun gun.
The analysis, released Monday by the public defense nonprofit The Legal Aid Society, comes as the nation’s largest city faces a $5.4 billion budget shortfall. Along with broader cuts, New York Mayor Zahran Mamdani proposed cutting $22 million from the NYPD’s $6.4 billion budget. He continues to tout low crime numbers. Settlements are paid from a separate part of the city budget. In other places, they are paid directly from the police department’s operating budget.
“This analysis is about transparency about what the NYPD costs us,” said Genevaine Wong, a senior staff attorney at the organization’s Police Accountability Project. “From what we can tell here, I think this means the police department lacks meaningful accountability. It’s a chronic problem that needs to be addressed.”
In all, the city settled 1,044 police misconduct lawsuits in 2025, the most since 2019, when 1,276 cases were settled. This was the fourth year in a row 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 out $206.4 million in 980 lawsuits.
These amounts are only a portion of the city’s total tally of police misconduct. The Legal Aid Society’s analysis includes only lawsuit settlements, not allegations that the city comptroller, the official in charge of financial matters, were resolved before a formal lawsuit was filed.
Of last year’s settlements, about $42 million was for wrongful convictions and $28 million — nearly a quarter of the total payouts — were for incidents that occurred more than two decades ago. Such cases also account for a significant portion of the $796 million the city has paid to resolve police misconduct claims since 2019, the NYPD said.
“While it is important to address these cases, they tell you nothing about the state of policing today,” the ministry said in a statement.
The New York Police Department, under the leadership of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, “has taken important steps to increase accountability and compliance and change outdated policies that may create greater risks,” the statement said. The department said it also works closely with city prosecutors’ offices, providing materials to facilitate their review of cases involving claims of wrongful arrest and conviction.
The two men wrongly convicted in the fatal 1986 robbery, Eric Smokes and David Warren, received $13 million and $11.1 million, respectively. In a lawsuit filed in 2024 in federal court, they claimed a corrupt detective relied on the word of an emotionally disabled, drug-addicted 17-year-old who was looking for a way out of his own separate robbery rap. Three of the four witnesses who identified Smokes and Warren as the killers did so only after they were threatened with criminal charges, the lawsuits said.
Another $3.9 million settlement went to Steven Lopez, A sixth man was arrested along with the so-called Central Park Fivenow known as the “Exonerated Five”, after their conviction for raping a jogger was overturned in 1989. The Five were put on trial, but Lopez, under intense pressure from police and the public, pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of robbing 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 demonstration in Brooklyn over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
The city paid $5.2 million to nine people who said they were implicated in cases from 2014 to 2016 by two officers who were later convicted of falsifying certificates or papers.
Last week, a court-appointed monitor criticized the NYPD for poor supervision and under-reporting of officers’ use of a tactic known as stop-and-frisk. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD’s frequent use of this tactic to search for weapons and drugs violated the civil rights of black and Latino New Yorkers.
Since then, the department has sharply reduced stops and searches, but still has “unacceptably low compliance rates” with constitutional protections, Comptroller Milan L. Dinerstein said.
The NYPD’s high settlement costs indicate more needs to be done to reduce misconduct, Wong said, and “a lack of accountability continues to contribute to a culture of impunity.”
“These judgments and settlement costs cost the city a lot of money and cost the victims of police misconduct not only financial and financial losses, but they also cause real human trauma that they carry with them,” she added.