1. “10 NYPD Officers Accounted For $68M In Police Misconduct Payouts.”
That’s the headline from a new WNYC article by Ramsey Khalifeh covering a new report on police misconduct settlements against NYPD officers. Alarmingly, “all of the [ten officers] are still on the public payroll, according to the analysis and police records.”
The Intercept’s Akela Lacy also covered the report, noting that of “the 10 officers most named in civil suits going back to 2013 … at least seven of the officers have each been named in more than 20 suits, and another three have each been named in 19 cases.” Here’s Lacy diving deeper on one of these problem officers:
“A series of headlines in New York City buzzed with excitement about a cop with the street nickname of ‘Bullethead.’ New York Police Department Sgt. David Grieco had reached a milestone: Police misconduct lawsuits naming him as a defendant had exceeded $1 million in settlement payouts. Since the raft of news stories, Grieco has been named in at least two additional suits, according to publicly available information as of July, and payouts in complaints naming him have now reached $1,099,825. In the 13 years it took for Grieco to be named in 48 suits alleging police misconduct, he’s been promoted twice. In 2016, he was elevated from officer to detective and, a year later, to sergeant.”
Disturbingly, as Lacey reports, the nearly $70 million in settlements over the last decade is “dwarfed by payouts this year alone… In the first half of 2023, New York City paid more than $50 million in lawsuits alleging police misconduct by members of the NYPD. The figure is on track to exceed $100 million by the end of the year and does not include matters settled with the city comptroller prior to formal legal proceedings.”
It’s Not Just The NYPD. Here are three local headlines from the last week alone that illustrate how problem officers are costing cities across the country an eye-popping amount of money:
“Atlanta committee OKs nearly $4 million payment in police custody death.” As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, thirty-three-year old Ricardo Dorado Jr., “a father of four from Nebraska, became unresponsive after being beaten with batons and handcuffed face down inside a southwest Atlanta gas station…The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Dorado’s death a homicide, caused by prone restraint [read: being pinned chest down to the ground] cardiac arrest…”
“L.A. County will pay $4.75 million to Black man beaten by deputies during traffic stop.” As The Los Angeles Times reports, Christopher Bailey “was beaten so badly by sheriff’s deputies that he wound up with permanent eye damage, missing teeth and facial fractures.” Bailey said that “he was driving home from work when two deputies pulled him over in Inglewood, then dragged him from his car and beat him without any apparent provocation. Minutes later, four other deputies joined in and began kicking him as he lay on the ground…”
“New Haven alders approve $16M settlement plan.” As the Connecticut Mirror reports, this is New Haven’s share of a $45 million dollar settlement, which, when it is paid out to Randy Cox (“after city police officers’ mishandling of the then-36-year-old arrestee left him paralyzed”), will be “the largest municipal settlement in a police misconduct case in this country’s history.”
Zooming Out: $3.2 Billion Spent To Settle Police Misconduct Claims Over The Last Decade. That’s the finding of a recent Washington Post report examining data from nearly 40,000 settlements stemming from law enforcement misconduct in 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments. Disturbingly, The Washington Post found that 1,200 of these officers “had been the subject of at least five payments—more than 200 had 10 or more.” Here’s more from The Post:
“The repetition is the hidden cost of alleged misconduct: Officers whose conduct was at issue in more than one payment accounted for more than $1.5 billion, or nearly half of the money spent by the departments to resolve allegations … In some cities, officers repeatedly named in misconduct claims accounted for an even larger share. For example, in Chicago, officers who were subject to more than one paid claim accounted for more than $380 million of the nearly $528 million in payments.”
Taxpayers Are On The Hook For The Costs Of These Settlements. As CBS News recently reported in an investigation of police misconduct lawsuits around the country: “Almost no settlements are paid out by the police officers accused of misconduct, researchers and data show [and] the cost is often borne by taxpayers.” Indeed, “even when payments are covered by insurance claims, taxpayers ultimately still pay as those claims drive up the cost of the insurance.”
It’s Not Just The $$$: Police Misconduct Also Erodes Public Trust. Researchers examining data from eight major American cities found that the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin “spurred a roughly 50% drop in 911 calls per gunshot, an effect that is mirrored across multiple cities and racial groups and that persisted over time.” Worse, the researchers found that public trust does not rebound even after officers are disciplined for misconduct. For example, city-level data following the murder conviction of officer Chauvin provided “little evidence that the decision increased civilian crime reporting.”
Mitigating The Damage: How Are Cities And Police Departments Combatting Police Misconduct? A single best approach to reducing police misconduct has not emerged in any city, but here are examples of partial solutions proposed in recent years:
Private Insurance As Police Regulator. Professor John Rappaport wrote in the Harvard Law Review that “[police] liability insurers are capable of effecting meaningful change within the agencies they insure — [which is] a majority of police agencies nationwide” by “performing a traditionally governmental ‘regulatory’ role as they work to manage risk” and push “police agencies to adopt or amend written departmental policies on subjects like the use of force and strip searches, to change the way they train their officers, and even to fire problem officers from the beat up to the chief.”
Police Bodycams. The data is mixed on the effectiveness of body-worn cameras on reducing police misconduct. Some studies find that body-worn cameras show promise in reducing unnecessary stops of civilians and use of force. However, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report reviewed 70 studies of body-worn cameras and found that “the larger body of research on body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects” on effects either to “improve officer safety, increase evidence quality, reduce civilian complaints, and reduce agency liability” or reduce “use of force, assaults on officers, officer-initiated calls for service, arrests, traffic stops and tickets, and field interviews.”
Misconduct Databases. Public officer misconduct databases, such as the University of Southern California’s Police Misconduct Registry, helps to identify problem officers and hold police departments accountable. USC’s database identified “all police officers who were terminated or resigned due to misconduct, including excessive use of force, corruption, violent extremism, domestic violence, sexual assault, physical assault and harassment, perjury, falsifying a police report, and planting or destroying evidence.”
Qualified Immunity Reform. University of California law professor Joanna Schwartz, one of the country’s leading scholars around police accountability issues, argues that “qualified immunity”—a legal principle established by the U.S. Supreme Court that “shields government officials from constitutional claims for money damages so long as the officials did not violate clearly established law”—“is historically unmoored, ineffective at achieving its policy ends, and detrimental to the development of constitutional law.”
New Approaches To Public Safety. The contexts that find police at the other end of a misconduct lawsuit—from mental health crisis to minor traffic infractions—frequently are interactions for which armed officers aren’t the best response in the first place. That’s why cities around the country are turning to civilian first responder teams, such as clinicians who handle mental health related calls, which are proving effective. Cities also are passing laws to remove the burden from police officers to conduct non-safety related traffic stops so that officers can focus on more serious crimes. For example, in Philadelphia, a “law [that] bans specific traffic stops for minor violations like having a tail light out” has allowed the police to “take more guns off the streets with fewer stops.”
2. “Sheriff's Deputy Caught With Fentanyl Was Middleman For Mexican Cartel.”
For the Desert Sun, Christopher Damien reports on a Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy that was “caught with about 520,000 pills of fentanyl [more than 100 pounds].” In charging documents, county prosecutors allege that the deputy “has likely ties to a Mexican drug cartel.” Here’s more from the Sun:
“Inside the trunk of the vehicle, deputies located four trash bags all containing square shaped (packages) wrapped in clear cellophane… they all contained a bulk quantity of blue fentanyl laced M30 pills. The packages weighed 104 pounds and contained about 520,000 pills, which were tested and confirmed to be fentanyl. A loaded Glock handgun was found in a bag on the backseat [of the officer’s vehicle]... ‘Based on his employment with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, [the officer] has knowledge of the dangers of fentanyl and the mass overdose pandemic… [investigators] estimate the quantity he was in possession of at the time of his arrest is enough to kill approximately 2 million people,’ the filing reads.”
This is just the latest example of police officers who break the law and wind up with serious drug charges:
“L.A. County sheriff’s deputy is charged with selling drugs and offering to hire other cops to protect dealers.” As The Los Angeles Times reports, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy was charged with “operating a large-scale drug trafficking scheme in which he boasted that he hired other law enforcement officers to provide security to dealers and could assault people for his clients, according to court records.” The deputy was recorded by investigators “discussing ‘his extensive drug trafficking network, past criminal conduct, and willingness to accept bribes to use his law enforcement status for criminal purposes ... ‘I fix problems,’ [the deputy] was recorded saying to an undercover agent, court records show… ‘I make a lot of things go away.’”
“Ex-Nassau County deputy facing charges following FBI drug trafficking investigation.” As News4 in Jacksonville, Florida reports, a “former Nassau County Sheriff’s Office sergeant is facing federal drug charges following an FBI investigation into drug trafficking … He’s accused of having large amounts of narcotics including cocaine, MDMA and fentanyl, with the intent to sell them [and, ironically] was part of a DEA task force meant to get drugs and dealers off the streets.”
“San Jose Police Union Executive Director Charged With Attempted Illegal Importation Of Fentanyl Analogue.” As Protect and Serve previously reported, an executive at the San Jose Police Officers Association was charged for being “involved in importing dozens of packages of illegal fentanyl and more than 4,000 opioid pills into the United States—disguising the contents with labels such as ‘chocolate and sweets’, then, allegedly, sent little care packages to drug dealers across the United States.”
When police officers break the law, it doesn’t only erode public trust of law enforcement, it jeopardizes cases that they helped investigate:
300+ convictions dropped in Manhattan. The New York Times reports on prosecutors in Manhattan being forced to dismiss 316 convictions earlier this year “tied to a group of New York Police Department officers, sergeants and detectives who have been convicted of crimes related to their work… Hundreds of misdemeanors were [also] thrown out in court and eight felonies are expected to be tossed.”
Dozens of DUI cases dropped in two North Carolina cities. Also this year, WCNC in North Carolina reported that Union County prosecutors had to throw out “hundreds of cases [including “around 80 DWI cases… and around 250 other various traffic-related cases” in two different cities] involving a now-former North Carolina state trooper.”
Bay Area prosecutors drop cases involving officers who “can no longer be trusted.” The Mercury News reported that prosecutors in Contra Costa County, California, had to “drop dozens of cases” where “crimes and misconduct by officers who played key roles in the investigations” meant that the officers “can no longer be trusted …. compromising [the cases] to the point they cannot be salvaged.”
3. “Pennsylvania Cop Arrested For Improperly Committing Ex-Girlfriend To Mental Facility.”
For The New York Post, David Propper reports on a Pennsylvania State Police trooper who is now “facing false imprisonment charges after he allegedly violently detained his ex-girlfriend and committed her to a mental health treatment program under bogus claims…[leaving] his former girlfriend improperly stuck in a medical facility for multiple days.” Court records show that the Trooper allegedly told his ex—“I know you’re not crazy, I’ll paint you as crazy.”
This is an extreme example of a disturbing trend involving police officers arrested for committing domestic violence. Just this month alone:
Officer gives a family member a black eye. 13News in West Virginia reported on a Dunbar police officer “being charged with domestic battery after an alleged domestic violence incident” in which the officer allegedly “pushed the victim down onto the floor, causing their elbows to swell and bruise [and] hit them in the face, causing them to get a black eye.”
Officer caught on video choking a family member. WYFF in South Carolina reports on a “Ridgeland police officer [arrested for] second-degree domestic violence … [who allegedly] choked and pushed [the victim] into a closet shelf [causing them to] hit their head [as well as producing] injuries on their arms and neck, which were photo-documented the day after the incident… [the officer’s] body camera was on during the incident, and it captured part of the incident.”
Officer points his gun at wife and child. In Washington state, the Tri-City Herald reports that a “Kennewick police detective was arrested and jailed [on charges of second-degree domestic violence assault] after allegedly pointing a gun at his wife and teen son.”
POLL. Though most police departments don’t even have a written officer-involved domestic violence policy, a recent national survey reveals that voters overwhelmingly support zero tolerance policies for officers who commit domestic violence:
Nearly nine-in-ten voters (86%) support “the adoption of a zero tolerance policy for domestic violence committed by police officers, which means that if there is a credible finding of domestic violence, that officer will be fired from the force.”
Nearly three-in-four voters (73%) believe that an officer should “not be allowed to keep any weapons” while that officer is “under investigation for a credible allegation of domestic violence.” That majority includes 81% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans.
