Police Misconduct Settlement News: Chicago, NYC, LA, and Reform

Police misconduct settlements cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars over the past decade, and the annual bill is still climbing. Chicago spent more than $225 million resolving over 200 lawsuits in just the first six months of 2026, nearly tripling the $82.5 million it had budgeted for the entire year.¹ New York City paid $117 million in 2025 to resolve more than a thousand NYPD cases, its fourth straight year above $100 million.² Decades-old wrongful convictions, excessive force claims, and a small set of repeat-offender officers are driving most of the spending, and almost none of it comes out of officers’ own pockets.

What the National Totals Actually Look Like

There is no comprehensive federal tracking of these payouts, so the real total is unknowable. A 2022 Washington Post investigation examined nearly 40,000 payments by 25 of the country’s largest police and sheriff’s departments between 2010 and 2020 and documented more than $3.2 billion in misconduct costs. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles alone accounted for roughly $2.5 billion of that figure.³ A separate database maintained by the Thurgood Marshall Institute identified more than $3.96 billion in publicly reported settlements through December 2025.⁴

Many smaller settlements never make the news, and no federal law requires cities or counties to report what they spend.⁵ The published numbers are a floor.

Chicago: The Extreme Case

No city shows the pattern more starkly than Chicago. From 2019 to 2024, taxpayers spent at least $472.4 million resolving misconduct lawsuits.⁶ Wrongful conviction cases alone cost $204.6 million in 2025.⁷ Then came the first half of 2026, with $225 million already spent and almost 60 percent of that tied to wrongful convictions.¹

To cover the gap between the $82.5 million annual budget and actual costs, officials were authorized to borrow another $283.3 million, with a $200 million line of credit available and a secondary $400 million line behind it for future judgments.¹ Alderman Gilbert Villegas called it a “settlement tsunami” and said the city had no comprehensive strategy to address the spiral.⁸

The Scandals Behind the Numbers

Three clusters of systemic misconduct drive most of Chicago’s liability. Former Sgt. Ronald Watts, convicted of bribery in 2013, led a crew that fabricated evidence against dozens of people. In September 2025, the city reached a $90 million global settlement covering 176 Watts-related lawsuits, with another $45 million in Watts cases expected before the end of 2026.⁷

Fourteen resolved lawsuits against former Det. Reynaldo Guevara, who allegedly coerced witnesses to frame suspects, have cost $142 million, with more cases pending. Thomas Sierra, who spent over 21 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, received a $17.5 million settlement in 2025 after witnesses testified that Guevara had pointed to Sierra’s photograph and told them to identify him.⁹

The torture cases tied to former Cmdr. Jon Burge, who oversaw beatings and electrical shocks used to coerce confessions from the 1970s into the early 1990s, had cost taxpayers more than $210 million as of 2022 — a figure that includes settlements, defense fees, pensions, and special prosecutor investigations.¹⁰ New Burge-era cases keep landing. In December 2025, the city paid $15.4 million to Robert Smith Jr., who spent 33 years in prison after a conviction allegedly obtained through torture by officers trained under Burge.⁷

Police vehicle pursuits have become another expensive category. Since January 2026, Chicago has paid $45.9 million to resolve eight lawsuits involving injuries or deaths from police chases.¹

Looming over all of it is the Fulton and Mitchell case. John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell, two men wrongfully convicted of a 2003 murder who served a combined 32 years, won a federal jury verdict of $60 million each in March 2025. The $120 million total was reduced to $105 million on appeal, and Cook County reached a separate $15 million settlement with both men.¹

New York City: Nearly $800 Million in Seven Years

New York City paid nearly $796 million to resolve NYPD misconduct lawsuits between 2019 and 2025, according to a Legal Aid Society report.¹¹ Annual totals swung from $62.1 million in 2020 to $206.4 million in 2024, then $117 million in 2025.¹²

Wrongful conviction cases drove the biggest 2025 payouts. Eric Smokes and David Warren received a combined $24.1 million after spending over 20 years in prison for a 1987 fatal robbery they did not commit. Steven Lopez, whose conviction was linked to the Central Park jogger case, received $3.9 million.² Wrongful conviction cases accounted for roughly $42 million of the year’s total, and the NYPD estimated about a third of all payouts came from such cases, many tied to incidents more than two decades old.¹²

Excessive and unnecessary use-of-force complaints to the Civilian Complaint Review Board rose 49 percent between 2022 and 2023, becoming the most common category of complaint.¹² A court-appointed monitor reported in early 2026 that the NYPD still had “unacceptably low compliance rates” with constitutional protections on stop-and-frisk.²

Los Angeles and Other Cities

Los Angeles has paid $384 million in misconduct claims against the LAPD since September 2019, with civil rights violations, police shootings, excessive force, and illegal searches accounting for nearly $183 million of that figure. Eight of the city’s ten largest settlement payouts involve the LAPD.¹³ In August 2025, LA Controller Kenneth Mejia announced an audit of the city’s risk management after total liability payouts hit nearly $600 million over two fiscal years, well above the $87 million annual budget.¹⁴

Smaller cities face their own outsized bills. Minneapolis paid $27 million to the family of George Floyd in 2021, dwarfing the $45 million it had paid in all misconduct cases combined between 2003 and 2019.¹⁵ Philadelphia paid $136 million between 2010 and 2020, 59 percent of it involving officers named in multiple claims.³ Baltimore settled a wrongful conviction case for $14 million in January 2026 after Gary Washington spent 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.¹⁶

Why the Costs Keep Climbing: Repeat Offenders

Settlement spending concentrates heavily on a small share of officers. The Washington Post found that roughly $1.5 billion of the $3.2 billion documented went to resolve claims against officers who had been the subject of more than one payment. More than 1,200 officers across the 25 departments studied had at least five paid claims, and over 200 had ten or more.³

In Chicago, officers with more than one paid claim accounted for over $380 million of the $528 million in total misconduct payments from 2010 to 2020. In New York, more than 5,000 officers were named in two or more claims, representing 45 percent of the city’s payout total. Only four of the 25 departments the Post surveyed tracked settlements in a way that linked them to individual officers. And because settlements typically include no admission of wrongdoing, police unions often argue there is no basis for internal discipline against the officers involved.³

Who Actually Pays

Taxpayers do, almost entirely. Most large cities pay settlements from the general fund. Officers themselves are typically shielded from personal liability by qualified immunity, which protects government officials from civil suits unless they violate a “clearly established” constitutional right.¹⁷

When settlements exceed what a city budgeted, the shortfall gets covered somehow. Chicago has historically issued municipal bonds to finance payouts. Between 2010 and 2017, the city borrowed $709.3 million in bond proceeds to pay for legal settlements, and interest on those bonds is projected to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion over the life of the debt, effectively doubling the original settlement amounts.¹⁸ Other jurisdictions have raised property taxes. San Bernardino, California, filed for bankruptcy in part due to such liabilities.

Smaller jurisdictions often rely on insurance pools, and those pools have become an unexpected lever for reform. Departments with large payout histories have seen insurance rates climb 200 to 400 percent over three-year periods, and insurers sometimes pull coverage entirely when required changes are not made.¹⁹ In 2010, the 60-officer Maywood, California, police department was disbanded after its insurer canceled coverage over excessive claims and the department’s failure to follow a mandated reform plan.²⁰

How These Lawsuits Work

Most police misconduct claims are filed in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the civil rights statute that lets individuals sue state and local officials for violating constitutional rights. A plaintiff must show that an officer, acting under the authority of their government position, deprived them of a right protected by the Constitution or federal law. Successful plaintiffs can recover compensatory damages, punitive damages, injunctive relief, and attorney’s fees.¹⁷

Getting there is hard. Defendants routinely invoke qualified immunity early, arguing that the constitutional right at issue was not “clearly established” at the time of the conduct. Courts often grant the defense if no prior case with closely matching facts has found a violation.²¹ Typical timelines from filing to trial run 18 to 24 months, though cases involving older incidents take far longer. The vast majority settle before trial, as cities often prefer the certainty of a negotiated payout to the risk of a jury verdict.

Municipalities themselves can be held liable for systemic failures, not just individual acts. Under Monell v. Department of Social Services, local governments can be sued when misconduct results from formal policies, de facto customs, or a failure to adequately train and supervise officers.²¹

What Reform Looks Like

Qualified Immunity Changes at the State Level

Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico have barred police officers from invoking qualified immunity in state court.²² Colorado’s 2020 law allows personal liability for officers up to $25,000 for bad-faith constitutional violations. New Mexico caps damages at $2 million per claim under its 2021 Civil Rights Act. Connecticut adopted a narrower “objectively good faith” standard, and the District of Columbia permanently eliminated qualified immunity for its Metro Police in 2022.²³

Movement has gone the other way too. Alabama passed its 2025 “Back the Blue Protection Act” narrowing liability, and Louisiana expanded protections for officers in 2024 by requiring plaintiffs to prove conduct was criminal, fraudulent, or intentional.²³ At the federal level, qualified immunity remains intact.

Transparency and the Push for a Federal Database

In January 2026, Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Don Beyer reintroduced the Cost of Police Misconduct Act, which would require law enforcement agencies receiving federal funds to report settlement and judgment data to the Department of Justice and direct the Attorney General to maintain a public, searchable database.²⁴ No such federal database exists today.

State-level progress is patchy. Maryland requires law enforcement agencies to report any use-of-force incident resulting in a settlement or judgment, with data compiled into an annual public report. Illinois requires a database of officers disciplined for misconduct. California laws passed in 2021 allow public release of sustained findings involving excessive force and require agencies to report use-of-force data monthly to the state Department of Justice.²⁵ Independent projects like Chicago’s Civic Police Data Project and the Legal Aid Society’s Law Enforcement Look Up database try to fill gaps, but coverage stays fragmented.²⁶

Consent Decrees Under Pressure

Federal consent decrees have long been used to force reform on troubled departments. Minneapolis approved one with the federal government in January 2025 to overhaul training and use-of-force policies following the George Floyd murder. In May 2025, the Department of Justice moved to cancel the agreement, stating it “no longer believes that the proposed consent decree would be in the public interest.” A separate state-level agreement with the Minnesota Human Rights Department, requiring the city to address race-based policing, remains in effect.²⁷

The Wrongful Conviction Long Tail

Wrongful conviction payouts are the single largest and fastest-growing category of police misconduct settlements. They involve people who spent years or decades in prison based on fabricated evidence, coerced confessions, or manipulated witnesses, and the dollar figures reflect both the severity of the harm and the length of the wrongful imprisonment.

John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell (Chicago): $120 million jury verdict in March 2025, reduced to $105 million on appeal, for wrongful conviction of a 2003 murder; combined 32 years served.⁷
Ronald Watts cases (Chicago): $90 million global settlement for 176 lawsuits involving fabricated evidence.¹⁶
Marcel Brown (Chicago): $50 million jury verdict in September 2024, described as the largest wrongful conviction damages award in U.S. history.¹⁶
Marquette Park Four (Chicago): $50 million settlement approved in June 2024 for four people wrongfully imprisoned for a combined 73 years.¹⁶
John Galvan and two others (Chicago): $48 million for wrongful conviction in a 1986 arson.¹⁶

What makes these cases so expensive for cities is that many involve conduct from decades past, creating a long tail of liability. Nearly 25 percent of New York City’s 2025 payouts involved incidents from more than 20 years earlier.² Earlier-era misconduct will keep generating payouts for years as convictions are overturned and exonerees file civil suits. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called the costs a “significant problem” that places an “enormous burden on everyday people” but cited an “obligation to compensate those who had suffered.”¹ Beyond Colorado’s capped personal liability requirement, proposals to shift any meaningful share of the financial burden to officers themselves remain mostly theoretical.

1
WTTW News. Chicago Has Spent at Least $225M To Resolve Police Misconduct Lawsuits in Just 6 Months
2
ABC 7 New York. NYC Paid $117 Million in 2025 To Settle NYPD Police Misconduct Lawsuits
3
The Washington Post. Police Misconduct Repeated Settlements
4
Police Funding Database. Explore the Database: Settlements
5
Policing Project. Its Time To Follow the Money on Police Misconduct
6
WTTW News. Final Tally: Chicago Taxpayers Spent at Least $107.5M To Resolve Police Misconduct Lawsuits in 2024
7
WTTW News. Wrongful Convictions Cost Chicago Taxpayers $204.6M in 2025
8
Chicago Reporter. Settlement Tsunami: Chicago Spending More Than Double City Budget on Police Misconduct Settlements
9
WTTW News. City To Pay $17.5M to Man Who Spent More Than 21 Years in Prison After Being Framed by Disgraced Ex-Detective
10
Injustice Watch. Burge Torture Taxpayer Tab $210 Million
11
The New York Times. Misconduct Lawsuit Settlements 2025
12
Queens Eagle. Police Misconduct Payouts Top $100 Million for Fourth Straight Year
13
LA Public Press. LAPD Settlements
14
LAist. Los Angeles Liability Payments Costliest Cases
15
Police Funding Database. Explore the Database: Settlements
16
Loevy and Loevy. Big Wins
17
Peoples Law Library. Section 1983 Civil Rights Lawsuits
18
ACRE. Police Brutality Bonds – Chicago
19
The Washington Post. Police Misconduct Insurance Settlements Reform
20
Los Angeles Times. Maywood PD Disbanded
21
MacArthur Justice Center. Litigation Resources
22
Institute for Justice. Qualified Immunity State Reforms
23
Police1. Qualified Immunity: A State-by-State Review
24
Representative Don Beyer. Cost of Police Misconduct Act
25
NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Police Accountability Index
26
Prison Policy Initiative. Police Misconduct Databases
27
PBS NewsHour. Justice Department Moves To Cancel Minneapolis and Louisville Police Reform Settlements