Leaving us the tab: $13 million NYPD settlement is the product of unaccountability

With the dust settling on the litigation around the NYPD’s response to mass racial justice demonstrations following the 2020 killing of George Floyd, it seems that the city will be forced to pay $13 million, or about $10,000 per each of 1,380 demonstrators arrested over just a week of protests, plus attorney’s fees that could themselves run into the millions.

Among the reasons were excessive force in the form of unnecessary deployment of pepper spray and the practice of kettling, or boxing demonstrators into an area without exits and then arresting them for their inability to disperse.

It’s worth asking who this settlement punishes, exactly. Certainly the New York City taxpayers, who are on the hook for millions in settlement funds. Does it meaningfully affect the police department itself, which will see no reduction in its budget or practically any other real consequences for this mass misconduct? Will it do anything to disincentivize additional excessive use of force and First Amendment-threatening crackdowns on protest activity?

There’s no real reason to think so, nor do there seem to be other effective avenues for accountability. Before she left her job as NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell had refused to impose the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s recommended discipline on officers more than 50% of the time, even after the oversight body had investigated and substantiated these complaints. In a case involving an officer cited for misconduct during the Floyd protests, Sewell went so far as to overrule a guilty plea that the CCRB’s prosecutors had already reached.

In short, despite more than 1,300 people being on track to receive compensation for mistreatment during legally protected protest activity and some 150 officers being specifically identified as having engaged in misconduct — not to mention that around five dozen complaints featured officers that could not be identified, often because they improperly covered up their badges and name tags and refused to be identifiable — the NYPD itself is facing little in the way of direct administrative or financial penalties from this whole ordeal.

We can’t really expect things to improve if we the rank and file don’t believe that there will be any repercussions for abuse of the substantial authority we place in their hands. All they see now are charges they largely don’t have to answer for even when they are substantiated and settlements they don’t have to pay, not to mention that their top uniformed leader, Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey, is busy fighting minor punishment for what could have been a fireable offense, with the full-throated support of Mayor Adams. For shame.

New Commissioner Eddie Caban should recognize that in the long run, creating the perception that the police are free to do as they wish without a care for the aftermath will only make their jobs harder and the city less safe as New Yorkers lose trust in the force itself.

Accountability is a crucial element of legitimacy, and while it’s good that those harmed by the chaotic response to the 2020 demonstrations will receive some compensation, it shouldn’t be seen by the city as the cost of doing business. It should be an alarm bell blaring that this shouldn’t be allowed to happen again, and that officers should actually fear the consequences of misconduct.

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