Cops who misbehave on the job cost the city half a billion dollars -- not to mention the headaches -- in the last decade as taxpayers see their share of the pain rise.
The amount New York City is paying to settle claims or cover judgments related to improper police conduct is soaring.
The city paid $66.4 million last year to 1,265 claimants who accused the NYPD of bad behavior, according to The New York Post. That compares with $31.8 million paid to 571 claimants in 1998.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, says those figures reveal an increasing problem of police wrongdoing during Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration. She says the rise in payouts parallels an increase in police-abuse complaints made to the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board.
"The trend is in the wrong direction," Lieberman told the Post.
But NYPD spokesman Paul Browne says it's not fair to assume the lawsuits, which charge the officers with false arrest, malicious prosecutions, excessive force or other bad behavior, are always indicative of police wrongdoing. The city often has to settle cases with plaintiffs, but that doesn't mean the implicated cop did anything wrong.
"Actions in which the police are innocent of wrongdoing, and in which the city admits none, nonetheless frequently result in settlements which enrich plaintiffs and their lawyers at monetary expense to the public and at the expense of the NYPD's good name," Browne told the Post.
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Nonetheless, there have been some fairly high-profile cases over the years that have smudged the NYPD's reputation, especially on issues of civil rights. Hector Gonzalez, for example, won $3.4 million from the city after he sued for wrongful conviction. Gonzalez had been jailed after he was convicted of killing a Brooklyn bar customer when he was 17; he spent six years behind bars before a DNA test proved his innocence, according to the Post. Gonzalez's lawyer, Nick Brustin said an NYPD detective mishandled evidence in the case that would have proved his client innocent in court.
"We see no suggestion that the Police Department is looking at what is happening in some very serious civil-rights cases in terms of addressing problem officers, policing procedures and police training," Brustin told the Post.
In February, the family of an emotionally disturbed man who fell to his death from a rooftop after he was Tasered by an NYPD stun gun sued the city for $10 million in damages. One of the officers, Lt. Michael Pigott, committed suicide after becoming increasingly distraught over ordering an another officer to use the Taser. Morales was teetering naked on a building ledge in Brooklyn jabbing at police with a long fluorescent light when they fired the stun gun. The 50,000-volt shock immobilized him and he fell 10 feet. Commissioner Raymond Kelly ordered refresher training on how to deal with emotionally disturbed people after the incident.
