Queens Lawsuits Against NYPD Cost Taxpayers $3.4M in 2019

QUEENS, NY — Lawsuits filed in Queens against the NYPD cost taxpayers nearly $3.4 million last year, according to a Patch analysis of city data.

The city's Law Department paid out $3,375,500 in settlements last year for lawsuits filed in Queens Supreme Court and Civil Court against the police department and individual police officers, the data shows.

Patch's analysis excluded cases filed in the Eastern District of New York, the federal court that covers Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island.

In last year's priciest settlement in Queens, the city agreed to give $1,495,500 to FedEx driver Karim Baker, who claimed that police officers had harassed him for almost a year after he unwittingly gave directions to a man who then murdered two cops in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

"He took a serious beating and continues to suffer," Baker's lawyer, Eric Subin, told the New York Daily News in October, following reports that the Civilian Complaint Review Board had substantiated misconduct allegations against two detectives accused of beating up Baker.

Across all five boroughs, the city paid about $68 million last year to settle lawsuits against police, an increase of about $30 million in payouts compared to 2018, according to The Legal Aid Society.

"An epidemic of misconduct within the New York City Police Department continues to cost New York City taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year," Corey Stoughton, who heads the Special Litigation Unit of the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society, said in a statement.

The data, released Friday by the city's Law Department, includes lawsuits dating back to 2015.

The Law Department is required to publish information on police misconduct lawsuits twice a year, in accordance with a 2017 city law.

But the data does not include cases settled out of court, which the Legal Aid Society says could amount to hundreds of individual cases.

This story previously stated that $3,422,500 had been paid out last year in settlements in Queens but erroneously included two settlements paid so far in 2020, totaling $47,500. The numbers have been updated.