- We've heard about the multimillion-dollar suits
involving George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,
but we don't often hear about the numerous lawsuits
involving an officer while he or she is still on the force.
Those are the cases that don't make the headlines.
- We really wanted to know, are any of the officers
who are involved in these settlements
involved in multiple of these settlements?
- We have police officers who are doing, allegedly,
during a 10-year period,
have been sued for excessive force or wrongful arrest
or illegal search and seizure over and over again.
- So we looked at approximately 40,000 settlements
across 25 departments.
In order to report this story,
we had to send open records requests
to many large police departments and sheriff's offices
across the country, and from there,
what we did was we tried to get names of officers.
Here is 605 pages of a printed-out database
that we got sent as part of this project.
In a few of the cities, they sent us names.
Most of these places did not.
And so what I did was I went in case by case
using either the name of the claimant or the case number
if they had it and searched in federal courts,
in local courts to find those cases,
and when I found them, I pulled all of the police officers
from those cases and added them to the database.
All in all, I did that more than 20,000 times.
- The majority of these lawsuits are just allegations.
They did not go to trial.
The city decided it would be easier and cost effective
to just settle, which is part of the reason
why police departments and police officers
are saying there's no reason to keep track of this information.
You know, there's been investigation stories
at various publications
where they look at the overall number,
but nowhere in no other institution did a story
that actually drilled down into the court records
and found the names of the officers.
We put together an incredible database
with names of these officers,
how many times they'd been sued, the total amount of settlements.
Residents in various cities around the country can look
and say, "Oh, well, I live in Detroit
and I didn't know this officer has been sued this many times."
- The police departments paid out over $3.
2 billion in civil settlements for police misconduct,
and this is just 25 of the largest departments.
In this country, there are 18,000-plus police departments.
I would say the biggest finding that we have
is across 25 cities, we found over 7,500 officers
who had been involved in multiple settlements
from 2010 to 2020,
and those settlements accounted for 49% of total payouts
in those cities over that time.
Generally speaking, police departments themselves
are very, very hidden, in large part
because there are so many police departments,
and the federal government has almost no oversight.
I think that any time that a municipality spends money,
the citizens have the right to know
whether it's part of a budget or it's part of a settlement.