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NEW YORK — <\/span>New York City paid more than $117 million last year to settle police misconduct lawsuits in cases ranging from the violent arrests of protesters in 2020 to bad police work that led to wrongful convictions in the 1980s, according to a newly published analysis of city data. Nearly $800 million in payouts were made over the last seven years.<\/p>\n The largest settlements last year, totaling $24.1 million, went to two men who spent more than 20 years in prison after they were wrongly arrested and convicted for a fatal 1986 robbery in midtown Manhattan robbery. Another settlement, for $5.75 million, went to a man who said police blinded him in his left eye<\/a> with a stun gun.<\/p>\n The analysis, released Monday by the nonprofit public defender organization The Legal Aid Society, comes as the nation\u2019s largest city faces a $5.4 billion budget shortfall. Along with broader cuts, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed trimming $22 million from the NYPD\u2019s $6.4 billion budget as it continues to tout lower crime numbers<\/a>. Settlements are paid out of a separate part of the city\u2019s budget. Elsewhere, they’re paid directly from a police department\u2019s operating budget.<\/p>\n \u201cThis analysis is really about transparency around what the NYPD is costing us,\u201d said Jennvine Wong, the supervising attorney with the organization\u2019s Cop Accountability Project. \u201cAnd from what we can tell here, I think it means that meaningful accountability has been lacking in the police department. It\u2019s a chronic problem that needs to be addressed.”<\/p>\n In all, the city settled 1,044 police misconduct lawsuits in 2025, the most since 2019, when 1,276 were resolved. It was the fourth straight year with settlements exceeding $100 million. Last year’s total was nearly double the $62.1 million the city paid in 2020 to settle 929 lawsuits. In 2024, the city paid $206.4 million in 980 lawsuits.<\/p>\n Those amounts are just a part of the city\u2019s overall police misconduct toll. The Legal Aid Society\u2019s analysis only includes lawsuit settlements, not claims that the city comptroller, the official in charge of financial matters, resolved prior to formal litigation.<\/p>\n Of last year\u2019s settlements, about $42 million were for wrongful convictions and $28 million \u2014 nearly a quarter of the payout total \u2014 involved incidents that occurred more than two decades ago. Such cases have also accounted for a substantial portion of the $796 million the city has paid to resolve police misconduct lawsuits since 2019, the NYPD said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile these cases are very important to address, they tell you nothing about the state of policing today,” the department said in a statement.<\/p>\n Under Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the NYPD \u201chas taken significant steps to increase accountability, compliance, and change outdated policies that might create greater risk,” the statement said. The department said it also works closely with the city\u2019s district attorneys’ offices, providing material to facilitate their review of cases involving wrongful arrest and conviction claims.<\/p>\n The men wrongly convicted in the fatal 1986 robbery, Eric Smokes and David Warren, received $13 million and $11.1 million, respectively. In a lawsuit filed in 2024 in federal court, they alleged that a corrupt detective relied on the word of an emotionally handicapped and drug-addled 17-year-old who was seeking a way out of his own separate robbery rap. Three of the four witnesses who identified Smokes and Warren as the killers only did so after being threatened with criminal charges, the lawsuits said.<\/p>\n