Freddie Gray
The
Wall Street Journal's Zusha Elinson and Dan Frosch investigated the 10 cities with the largest police departments. They went through public records to see what claims had been paid out by these cities for beatings, shootings, misconduct, wrongful imprisonment—all of the bad,
unconstitutional things that these lawsuits are about.
Claims paid for all alleged beatings, shootings, and wrongful imprisonments by the departments in those same cities totaled $1.02 billion—in just five years. With property damage, vehicle crashes, and various other police incidents added to that five-year sum, the figure astonishingly surpasses $1.4 billion.
This isn't a surprise when you consider major cities like Chicago have forked over about
half a billion dollars over the past 10 years—in settlements. Of course, let us not get ahead of ourselves. Some of the WSJ findings are the result of cases
not just from the past five years.
These astronomical figures aren’t entirely indicative of a corresponding upsurge in police misconduct since totals include compensatory “efforts to resolve decades-old police scandals. In 2013 and 2014, for example, Chicago paid more than $60 million in cases where people were wrongfully imprisoned decades ago because of alleged police misconduct.” Compensation per resolution is substantially more expensive than in the past. Philadelphia settled eight such cases in 2010 for an average of $156,937—but just four years later, ten cases averaged $536,500.
You know, stuff like the
Central Park Jogger case from 1989:
A $41 million settlement for five men whose convictions in the 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park were later overturned was made final on Friday, with the deal including unusual language that sought to absolve New York City from blame.
The agreement, which awards the five black and Hispanic plaintiffs about $1 million for each year of their imprisonment, includes no admission of wrongdoing from the city; in fact, the city explicitly asserts that prosecutors and police detectives did nothing wrong at the time.
No
wrongdoing though. Also, see the police department has always been racist, without competent oversight, and brutal to its citizens. So, that's that. nothing to see here. No wonder the New York Police department keeps trying to
literally rewrite the history of their organization's misconduct. There are a few other reasons for these growing numbers that don't have to do with older cases being settled in the last few years. The
settlements themselves are getting larger...and cameras:
Civil rights violations and other forms of misconduct were the costliest resolutions for most police departments. According to the WSJ, “Dallas civil-rights lawyer Don Tittle says the increased availability of camera footage and shifting attitudes toward police are affecting cases.” As Tittle explained, “[W]ith the advent of video, and the changing perception of society, I don’t think police are held in the same regard” in terms of steadfast integrity that had proven difficult to contradict in court in the past.
This has lead to juries being able to actually see how full of shit some of these police reports are and some of the officers fabricating them. The good news and the bad news is that it is costing tax payers tons of money. We foot the bill for our bad police departments. The good news is that we should foot the bill. Maybe we can figure out ways to make our police departments better so that the bill we are footing is loaded down with police misconduct, brutality and homicide settlements.