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NYC spent $121M on lawsuit payouts for claims of police misconduct in 2022
By
Samantha Max
Published Feb 2, 2023
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By
Samantha Max
Published Feb 2, 2023
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Payouts for lawsuits against the NYPD topped $121 million in 2022, nearly doubling the amount spent to settle claims of officer misconduct just two years earlier, according to a Legal Aid Society analysis of newly released city data.
Police were named in multiple wrongful conviction lawsuits that settled last year for millions of dollars. One involved two men who have since been exonerated for the killing of Malcolm X. Another was for a man who was freed after spending 25 years in prison for the 1990 murder of a tourist on a subway platform in Midtown. Claims of officer misconduct during the 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd also contributed to the increase.
“The city continues to pay out astronomical amounts for NYPD misconduct,” said Jennvine Wong, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project. “What that means is that the city is not taking NYPD misconduct and accountability for that misconduct seriously enough.”
While the number of settled lawsuits has decreased in the past five years, the price tag has jumped substantially. In 2018, the city resolved 1,579 lawsuits for $76,492,742, according to the Legal Aid Society. Last year, it settled 939 lawsuits for $121,376,712.
That doesn’t include payouts settled through the city comptroller’s office before someone files a formal lawsuit, which exceeded $183 million in 2022. Both the number of settlements and the dollar amount for payouts from the comptroller’s office have declined in recent years, from a high of more than $356 million spent on 4,072 settlements in 2017.
The city’s Law Department, which is legally required to publish police settlement data every six months, noted that some of the payouts stem from prosecutorial reviews of potentially wrongful convictions in recent years. Progressive district attorneys have created units to reinvestigate old cases in recent years, prompting them to drop convictions against some people after decades of incarceration.
“In recent years, district attorneys have moved to vacate many more criminal cases going back dozens of years which have led to an increase in the number of reverse conviction suits and related payouts,” law department spokesperson Nick Paolucci said in a statement. “We are committed to promptly reviewing matters to keep litigation costs down and to provide some measure of justice to plaintiffs who were wrongfully convicted.”
Settling a lawsuit allows the city and the police department to close a case without admitting wrongdoing. While settlements sometimes require the NYPD to implement policy changes, such as the landmark Floyd v. City of New York case that upended the department’s stop-and-frisk practices, they are separate from the police department’s disciplinary process. Being named in a lawsuit only results in punishment if the NYPD believes that an officer violated policy.
The Police Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, said lawsuit payouts “are not a fair or accurate measure” of officers’ job performance.
“The city routinely settles cases in which police officers have done nothing wrong,” PBA President Patrick J. Lynch said in a statement. “Some of the largest payouts arise from decades-old cases that don’t involve a single cop who is still on the job today.”
The NYPD said in a statement that it “actively seeks out information learned from these lawsuits in order to improve officer performance and enhance training or policy, where necessary.” A spokesperson also noted that about 60% of the payouts went to just seven settlements for actions that occurred under previous administrations..
Here are a couple of the highest payouts last year (you can also read more of Gothamist’s reporting on the NYPD’s biggest settlements and officers with the most payouts here):
Muhammad A. Aziz v. City of New York, et al: $26 million
Last fall, the city agreed to pay $26 million to two men who were exonerated in 2021 after spending decades in prison for the assassination of Malcolm X. Half the money went to Muhammad Aziz and half went to the estate of Khalil Islam, who died in 2009.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office moved to vacate Aziz’s and Islam’s convictions after a joint investigation with the Innocence Project and the Shanies Law Office uncovered multiple pieces of evidence that cast doubt on the guilty verdict at their 1966 trial.
Another defendant, Mujahid Abdul Halim, has long maintained that he fired at the civil rights leader during a speech in the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. Investigators have since learned that two other men also shot at Malcolm X. Multiple people said Aziz and Islam were at home at the time of the killing. The Manhattan DA’s office has since admitted that it failed to turn over pieces of exculpatory evidence to defense lawyers.
“As the reinvestigation showed, Mr. Aziz’s wrongful conviction was the product of flagrant official misconduct,” his attorneys wrote in a lawsuit.
In court, then-District Attorney Cy Vance apologized for “serious, unacceptable violations of law and the public trust.”
“Your honor, we can’t restore what was taken away from these men and their families,” he said on the day he asked a judge to throw out the convictions. “But by correcting the record, perhaps we can begin to restore that faith.”
Johnny Hincapie v. City of New York, et al: $12,875,000
In December, the city signed a nearly $13 million settlement with Johnny Hincapie, a man who served more than a quarter of a century behind bars for the 1990 killing of Brian Watkins, also known as the “Utah Tourist.”
A group of teens stabbed the 22-year-old to death after mugging him and his family in a midtown subway station. Hincapie said that he was upstairs by the turnstiles, unaware of what was happening on the platform below.
The case made national news at a time when murders were spiking in the city. Heightened fears about groups of young people committing crimes became prevalent. Hincapie’s attorneys said those fears contributed to the wrongful convictions of five teens accused of raping a female runner in Central Park the same year.
Police took multiple teenagers into custody after the subway attack and pressured them to confess. Hincapie, then 18, was the last one arrested. His attorneys claimed in a lawsuit that detectives were already convinced he was guilty by the time he got to the police precinct. He was convicted of felony murder.
Prosecutors have since vacated Hincapie’s conviction. His attorneys argue that his wrongful arrest and imprisonment were the result of systemic failures in the city’s approach to policing and prosecution at the time.
"The detectives were not interested in the truth," they wrote. "Their goal was to round up and implicate as many of the young suspects as possible, close the case, and obtain the professional accolades that were sure to follow," they wrote.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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