New York City paid more than $117 million last year to resolve police misconduct lawsuits, spanning allegations from violent arrests of protesters in 2020 to wrongful-conviction claims reaching back decades, according to an analysis of city data released this week by The Legal Aid Society.
The analysis said the settlements reflected a long-running pattern of legal losses for the New York Police Department, with nearly $800 million in payouts made over the last seven years, even as the city faces budget pressure and the NYPD argues it is improving accountability.
The largest settlements in 2025 totaled $24.1 million and were awarded to Eric Smokes and David Warren, who spent more than 20 years in prison after they were wrongly arrested and convicted for a fatal 1986 robbery in midtown Manhattan, the analysis said. It also said a separate settlement of $5.75 million went to a man who alleged police blinded him in his left eye with a stun gun.
The Legal Aid Society’s report came as New York confronted a projected $5.4 billion budget shortfall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed trimming $22 million from the NYPD’s $6.4 billion budget, while the analysis said settlement costs are paid out of a separate part of the city’s budget, unlike other police expenditures that come from the department’s operating funds.
Jennvine Wong, the supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, said the analysis was meant to improve transparency about what the department costs. “This analysis is really about transparency around what the NYPD is costing us,” Wong said, adding that “meaningful accountability has been lacking in the police department” and that the issue is “a chronic problem that needs to be addressed.”
The analysis said the city settled 1,044 police misconduct lawsuits in 2025, the highest number since 2019, when 1,276 were resolved. It said 2025 marked the fourth consecutive year with settlements exceeding $100 million, and it provided a comparison showing a smaller total in earlier years, including figures cited for 2020 and 2024.
Wong and the Legal Aid Society said the case mix included both older and newer allegations. The analysis said about $42 million of last year’s settlements were for wrongful convictions, and it said nearly a quarter of the overall payout involved incidents that occurred more than two decades ago; the NYPD separately pointed to the share of settlement dollars tied to older cases.
In response to the report, the NYPD said it is increasing accountability and working to correct errors through policy changes and cooperation with prosecutors. The department said it has taken “significant steps to increase accountability, compliance, and change outdated policies that might create greater risk,” and it said it works with district attorneys’ offices and provides material to facilitate review of claims involving wrongful arrest and conviction.
The analysis described several specific settlement categories. It said Eric Smokes received $13 million and David Warren received $11.1 million, and it reported that in a lawsuit filed in 2024 in federal court, the men alleged a detective relied on testimony from a teenager who the lawsuits said was emotionally handicapped and drug-addled, and that three of the witnesses who identified them did so after being threatened with criminal charges. It also said a settlement of $3.9 million went to Steven Lopez, who the report said was arrested in connection with the Central Park Five and later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge after police and public pressure.
The report also cited settlements involving protests and later allegations of misconduct. It said $1.7 million went to four protesters who alleged 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. It also said the city paid $5.2 million to nine people who said they were framed in cases from 2014 to 2016 by two officers later convicted of falsifying testimony or paperwork.
Beyond the settlement data, the analysis linked the city’s costs to continuing concerns about compliance with policing restrictions. It noted that a court-appointed monitor recently criticized the NYPD’s supervision of stop-and-frisk and its reporting, saying the department had “unacceptably low compliance rates” with constitutional protections, and it referenced a 2013 federal judge ruling that said the tactic violated the civil rights of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.