NYPD, LAPD and Chicago PD pay the most in police misconduct/use-of-force settlements — and payouts are rising sharply in all three

Summary

New York (NYPD), Los Angeles (LAPD) and Chicago (CPD) are the large-city police departments that pay out the most in misconduct/use-of-force settlements, and in all three the trend is clearly up. NYC paid a record $206 million in 2024 (up 190% from $71M in 2019), settling around $117M in 2025 — its fourth straight year above $100M. LAPD's share of Los Angeles's liability payouts jumped from about $15M in FY2020 to $100M in FY2024 and $152M in FY2025 (+52% in one year, now 53% of the city's total liability bill of $287M). Chicago paid a record $107.5M in 2024, up 43% from an implied ~$75M in 2023, part of a $491.7M six-year (2019-2024) total. No single national database cleanly tracks 'use-of-force settlements' as a uniform category across cities; most public reporting tracks broader 'police misconduct' settlements (excessive force, wrongful convictions, false arrest, illegal search). Where a narrower use-of-force-only figure is available it is called out below.

Data availability caveat

The AskAmerica/askengine government-data connector was checked first (crime schema — FBI CDE use-of-force incident data, police employment, offenses) and confirmed to carry no lawsuit-settlement or payout data (search terms 'lawsuit', 'settlements', 'payouts' matched nothing anywhere in the catalog). Settlement payouts are municipal legal-liability figures, not FBI/BJS data, and are not centrally reported at the federal level — each city discloses (or is compelled by state law/FOIA/reporters to disclose) its own totals, on its own schedule and its own definitions. This answer is therefore built entirely from primary city sources (NYC Comptroller, LA Controller checkbook data, Chicago Department of Law data) and investigative tallies built from court and city litigation records (Legal Aid Society for NYC; WTTW/Injustice Watch and Straight Arrow News for Chicago; LAist for LA), not from the AskAmerica warehouse.

New York City (NYPD) — the largest payer in dollar terms

The Legal Aid Society's annual tally of disposed NYPD misconduct lawsuits shows: 2019 ~$71M; 2022 ~$135M; 2023 ~$115M; 2024 ~$206M (record); 2025 ~$117M — the fourth consecutive year over $100M, and 2025 was the most cases settled (1,044) since 2019. About a third of the 2024-2025 dollar totals came from decades-old wrongful-conviction cases, not use-of-force incidents specifically, and the NYPD disputes that the misconduct-payout total reflects current-day policing. A narrower, use-of-force-focused figure comes directly from NYC Comptroller Brad Lander's September 2025 report, 'A Blueprint for Department-Wide Restraint': in FY2025, 'Police Action' claims (predominantly alleging excessive force) were the City's single largest tort-claim category — 6,082 claims filed and over $113 million in settlements — making NYPD the City's largest source of claims. The same report found CCRB-investigated excessive/unnecessary-force complaints rose 49% between 2022 and 2023, the highest level since 2013, and NYPD tort-claim filings rose 31.8% between FY2023 and FY2024 (7,017 to 9,249). Citywide, NYC paid out $1.94 billion across all claim types in FY2024, the most ever for one fiscal year. By either the broad misconduct measure or the narrower use-of-force-specific measure, NYC's costs are rising.

Los Angeles (LAPD) — fastest recent growth

Per LA's own controller checkbook data (analyzed by LAist), citywide liability payouts grew from a budgeted-vs-actual baseline of $87M/year (largely unchanged for 8 years) to an actual $320M+ expected in FY2025 — more than 3.6x the budgeted amount, and enough to push the city's reserve fund toward its legally mandated emergency floor. LAPD is consistently the single largest driver: it accounted for $100 million in liability claims in FY2024 alone (the next-highest department, Public Works, totaled $45M), and $152M (53% of the citywide total) in FY2025 — a 52% one-year jump. A narrower police-misconduct-specific subset (excessive force, shootings, illegal searches) rose from about $15M in 2020 to $50M in 2024, more than tripling in four years. Individual recent excessive-force cases have run into the tens of millions: a $25.1 million jury verdict for the fatal shooting of Navy veteran Jesse Murillo, and a $17.7 million verdict for the fatal shooting of a mentally disabled man outside a Costco.

Chicago (CPD) — record 2024, steep single-year jump

Per data released by Chicago's Department of Law, the city paid a record $107.5 million in 2024 to resolve 122 police-misconduct lawsuits — the highest since 2011 and a 43% increase over 2023 (implied ~$75.2M), well above the city's $82M budgeted for such settlements that year. The main causes cited by the city are racial discrimination, excessive force (both minor and serious), illegal searches, and false arrests; the single costliest 2024 case was a $45 million wrongful-conviction settlement (Eddie Bolden, 22 years wrongfully imprisoned), and a separate settlement went to a 15-year-old permanently injured in an unauthorized 2021 police pursuit. Over 2019-2024, Chicago paid a cumulative $491.7 million resolving misconduct lawsuits, and a 2025 analysis found that lawsuits naming officers with repeat-misconduct histories alone cost $295 million of that. As in NYC, a meaningful share of Chicago's total is wrongful convictions rather than use-of-force specifically (they cost $237.5M of the 2019-2024 total); a narrower 2024 use-of-force-case tally (28 resolved cases with payouts) totaled about $9.2 million — showing 'use-of-force' proper is a much smaller slice of Chicago's overall misconduct bill than the topline figure suggests.

Other large cities, for context

Minneapolis — much smaller in dollar terms but instructive because it is one of the few cities publishing consistent historical data: per Minneapolis City Attorney's Office data (via a MinnPost fact-check), the city paid just over $70 million in police-conduct settlements from 2019-2023, dominated by the 2021 $27 million George Floyd family settlement, the highest wrongful-death payout in city history. Louisville paid $12M to Breonna Taylor's family (2020) plus $2M to her boyfriend (2022). Baltimore paid nearly $16M in settlements in a recent 12-month period, with its Gun Trace Task Force scandal alone costing $22.2M since 2007. None of these approach NYC, LA or Chicago in absolute dollar terms — payout size scales heavily with city/department size and litigation volume, not just misconduct rate.

Is the amount going up? Yes, in every large city with a multi-year record

Every department with a usable multi-year series shows a rising trend, though not a smooth one — payouts are lumpy because a single multimillion-dollar wrongful-conviction or fatality settlement can swing a year's total sharply:

• NYC: $71M (2019) to $206M (2024), +190%, before settling back to $117M in 2025 — still the fourth straight year above $100M; the narrower use-of-force-specific 'Police Action' claim category alone hit $113M in FY2025.
• LAPD: ~$15M (FY2020, misconduct-only) to $50M (FY2024, misconduct-only); LAPD's full liability share went $100M (FY2024) to $152M (FY2025), +52% in one year.
• Chicago: implied ~$75M (2023) to $107.5M (2024), +43% in one year, a new decade-plus record.

City officials in both LA and Chicago have explicitly said settlement costs are now running well ahead of the budgeted amounts set aside for them (LA's FY2025 liability spending was on pace to exceed its $87M budget by more than 3.5x; Chicago exceeded its $82M annual settlement budget in 2024 and was on track to exhaust the following year's budget within about four months). That repeated, independently reported budget-outrun pattern is itself corroborating evidence that payouts are rising faster than cities are planning for, not just that a few outlier years look big in isolation.