U.S. News

NYC Taxpayers Have Paid Nearly $800 Million for Police Misconduct Since 2019

By Mike Harper · April 29, 2026

The number changes slightly each year. The pattern does not. For the fourth consecutive year, New York City paid more than $100 million to resolve lawsuits accusing NYPD officers of misconduct — and since 2019, the cumulative total has reached nearly $800 million.

The Legal Aid Society released its annual analysis of city data this week, finding that New York paid $117,251,230.82 to settle 1,044 police misconduct lawsuits in 2025 — the most lawsuits resolved in a single year since 2019. The money comes not from the NYPD’s operating budget, but from the city’s general fund — meaning every New Yorker, regardless of neighborhood or income, contributes to the bill.

That structural detail is at the heart of what reformers have been arguing for years: when police misconduct costs are absorbed by the general budget rather than the department that generated them, there is no direct financial pressure on the NYPD to reduce the behavior that produces the lawsuits.

The human stories behind the aggregate number are striking. The largest single payout of 2025 — $13 million — went to Eric Smokes, who was 16 years old when NYPD officers arrested him for a 1986 Times Square robbery he did not commit. He served more than 20 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. The second-largest, $11.1 million, went to his co-defendant in the same wrongful conviction.

A $5.2 million settlement went to Taron Parkinson, who was 18 when two NYPD officers planted a gun in his car in Queens and arrested him for possessing it. He spent seven years in prison before his conviction was overturned in 2021.

Among the more striking findings in the Legal Aid analysis: at least one NYPD officer — Pedro Rodriguez of Brooklyn’s 72nd Precinct — has been named in four separate lawsuits resulting in $12 million in total payouts, has 19 allegations against him, 10 of which have been substantiated for abuse of authority. He is still on the force.

“New Yorkers are once again paying the price for alleged police misconduct, and the numbers from the full 2025 calendar year make clear that this pattern continues,” said Jennvine Wong, supervising attorney with Legal Aid’s Cop Accountability Project. “The officers named in these cases continue to cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements and legal fees. In most professions, conduct that repeatedly exposes an employer to that level of financial liability would trigger serious scrutiny and consequences.”

The NYPD pushed back on the framing. In a statement, the department noted that the most expensive payouts were for wrongful convictions from decades ago — cases the department said it is now more actively helping to resolve — and argued that the settlements “tell you nothing about the state of policing today.” Commissioner Jessica Tisch cited steps the department has taken to increase accountability and reduce future liability.

The city is simultaneously dealing with a roughly $5 billion budget gap. Mayor Mamdani has proposed trimming $22 million from the NYPD’s $6.4 billion budget as part of broader cuts — a reduction that, in context, represents roughly a fifth of what the city paid last year to settle misconduct claims alone.

The Legal Aid Society’s recommendation: deduct settlement costs directly from the NYPD’s operating budget, creating a direct financial consequence for the department when its officers generate misconduct liability. That proposal has been made by multiple oversight bodies over multiple years. It has not been implemented.