Among the payments this year was a roughly $415,000 settlement to resolve allegations in June from state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and former Assemblymember Diana Richardson against the city and multiple NYPD officers at a 2020 protest over the death of George Floyd.
Their descriptions echoed others offered by protesters that summer, some of whom also sued and received payouts from the city. Another payout came from a case in which officers, some of whom had been previously accused of misconduct, allegedly removed a man from his car at an intersection in Queens in 2016 and “threw him to the ground where they punched and kicked him repeatedly in the face, ribs, shoulder and back,” according to the complaint. The parties reached a settlement in principle, and city records show a $75,000 settlement that resolved the case in June.
The department said a lot of the payouts were for decades-old cases and don't reflect current department policy. The NYPD also said there's been close to a 20% reduction in complaints filed against the agency between 2020 to 2022 — and more than a 50% drop since 2013.The city spent more than $135 million on misconduct payouts last year, according to an earlier analysis from Legal Aid. That sum covered nearly a thousand lawsuits, the median cost of which landed at $22,500 for the year.