NYPD misconduct claims at record highs

Complaints of alleged police wrongdoing in New York City have hit a record level of 5,601 — a 150 percent increase from 2006 — and when the claims were settled or went to trial, they have cost the city over $315 million from 2006 to 2012, according to latest figures released by the city.

The numbers reflect concerns spotlighted in recent days by rising public anger over incidents including the fatal police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri, and the police chokehold death of New York City resident Eric Garner in July. In both cases, grand juries recently declined to indict the police officers involved, triggering major nationwide demonstrations accusing police of excessive force and racism.   

On average, New York City pays about $45 million a year to settle or pay plaintiffs who have won in court on police-related claims, which are defined as "alleged improper police conduct, such as false arrest or imprisonment, shooting of a suspect, excessive force, assault or failure to provide police protection." Before a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict the officer who killed Garner, Garner's family said they planned to sue the city for $75 million in civil court.

In 2000, to help control rising costs from claims filed against the city's police force, the city comptroller recommended the New York Police Department incorporate payout information into its statistical crime-tracking program. Twelve years and repeated recommendations later, claims are at record levels, and the NYPD hasn’t developed any system for routinely tracking them by officer, offense or precinct.

The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Claims are not always proof of wrongdoing, said Joel Berger, a civil rights attorney who was a senior litigator with the city’s law department from 1988 to 1996. "But typically in a police misconduct case, once a lawyer decides to file it, that means the lawyer has investigated it and has come to the conclusion that it's sufficiently meritorious to spend time and resources on," he said. "The important thing is that the number of complaints skyrocketed over a five-year period. When you have that large an increase, it's got to tell you something."

"Police action" and claims against the NYPD are often cited in comptroller reports as areas "of concern" and consistently cost the city a large share of personal injury payouts along with civil rights claims, a category that includes claims of discrimination and alleged civil rights violations by law enforcement.

The comptroller is still preparing the figures for fiscal year 2013, but Berger said the overall trend isn’t likely to go away. "There’s a huge backlog of cases in the city’s law department, and I still get cases of police overstepping their bounds," he said. "In 2014 narcotics cops in Brooklyn jumped a perfectly innocent woman and claimed she was doing a narcotic transaction. They discovered no transaction had taken place, but they didn’t like the woman’s attitude and arrested her for disorderly conduct. You see this stuff all the time."

These numbers show the roots of a frustration with police even before the high-profile cases like Garner's and Brown's, Berger said, and are evidence of policing practices that put residents at odds with police.

"For those of us who work in civil rights litigation, we saw the volume of our work was going up and the majority of them were low-level cases that don’t attract media attention," he said. "They weren’t people being beaten to a pulp or railroaded into false confessions. It was people being arrested because a cop didn’t like their attitude and wanted to run them through the system even though they knew the case would get thrown out."

One proposal in the comptroller’s report is to create a task force with representatives from various civil groups to identify precincts that have seen repeated claims and seek remedies. Similarly, tracking which officers have claims repeatedly filed against them and the outcome of these claims would let the NYPD better address long-term trends.

"I've had cases of someone arrested for a controlled substance violation when he had in his pocket one pill of Motrin. I’ve had someone arrested for public urination when he was on dialysis and couldn’t urinate. You couldn’t make this stuff up," Berger said. “It's a terrible epidemic and indicative of the stuff that’s going on that is causing so much public outrage at the moment. Notwithstanding the statements of Mayor [Bill] de Blasio and Police Commissioner [William] Bratton to the contrary, the city's law department continues to fight these cases fiercely."