According to data analyses released by the Legal Aid Society last week, NYC has paid out more than half a billion dollars in NYPD settlements in the past six years, the result of hundreds of lawsuits with settlements ranging from the thousands to the millions each.
It’s not necessarily worthwhile to take the settlement numbers as directly connected to police performance; many are downstream of wrongful convictions or misconduct that happened years or even decades ago. In that sense, it’s something of a delayed metric. Nonetheless, it’s an sign of nothing good if the numbers keep rising.
What we should look at the settlements as is to some degree a sign of where attitudes and procedures are too lax. If many of the settlements were arising out of wrongful convictions, that should tell us that there should be more concrete oversight for both cops and prosecutors to ensure that they’re not rushing through cases and that, for example, cops known to lie on the stand actually face consequences.
If other settlements are coming from cops taking a heavy-handed approach to public protest, as many did from the NYPD response to the 2020 George Floyd protests, it should be a signal to NYPD brass and policymakers that the force needs to better understand the bounds and importance of First Amendment activity.
A recent settlement with Attorney General Tish James was meant to build out a more robust framework for police responses to public protest, yet there have been some indications that the NYPD has continued the trend with its response to pro-Palestinian protests in the city.
Ultimately, all accountability flows from the top, and unfortunately the NYPD and Mayor Adams’ public safety leadership have not set a tone for accountability. Deputy Mayor Phil Banks has taken it upon himself to leapfrog the police commissioner in the chain of command. So has Adams, most notably to protect his old pal Jeff Maddrey from any consequences for his role abusing his authority to spring a friend from jail after the latter was arrested for waving a gun at some kids.
It’s not Maddrey’s only misconduct rodeo; NYPD’s own internal investigators determined he lied to them about a physical altercation with another officer with whom he’d had a tumultuous years-long affair. He was also accused of reassigning an officer who dared to give a traffic ticket to a friend of his. Yet there he remains as the top uniformed officer on the force.
Meanwhile, Maddrey’s boss, Commissioner Eddie Caban, has retained his predecessors’ habit of overruling the Civilian Complaint Review Board and doling out little or no punishment to officers and particularly high-ranking pals who have already been found to have engaged in misconduct. Just last month, he declined to issue any discipline to a deputy chief who grabbed a woman by the hair and slammed her face into the ground during a 2020 arrest.
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The example of proper behavior must come from the top. The NYPD don’t have much incentive to minimize settlements that come out of the city’s coffers, but they should see them as at least some flashing warning signs for their own operational integrity and credibility. If they can’t reform themselves, policymakers should remind them who calls the shots.
