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…