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NYPD Misconduct Payouts Still Soar Under Mamdani — And May Keep Growing

So far, settlement payouts under Mamdani are holdover cases. Without policy changes, however, they might keep growing toward a $1 billion total since 2018.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani never quite promised to reform the police.

Any such undertaking would always have been fraught with potential traps. For the city’s first democratic socialist mayor, changes to criminal policy would have made Mamdani a prime target for conservative backlash. It’s a well-worn playbook: He would be blamed for any level of crime in the city. The mayor and his allies, even among them advocates hoping he’d go further to curb police abuse, understood the threat well.

Still, Mamdani had little trouble during his bombshell campaign convincing leftists that his sweeping vision for a socialist-governed metropolis included criminal policy reforms that would satiate them.

He promised to eliminate some of the most notorious of the New York Police Department’s institutions — a widely criticized gang database and infamous Strategic Response Group, which responds to protests and whose officers have histories of higher complaint rates. Mamdani outlined an ambitious vision to divert police away from responding to mental health crises, proposing an Office of Community Safety.

New data on how much the New York City is spending to pay for police misconduct, however, has heightened concerns among advocates that paltry rate of changes to policing under Mamdani could lead to even higher payouts in coming years. The first six months of the Mamdani administration saw $53 million in police misconduct settlements, according to an analysis of NYPD data by the public defense group Legal Aid Society.

If the figures continue to grow at that rate under Mamdani, it will make 2026 the fourth year in a row that police misconduct settlements top $100 million.

“We’re going to see these numbers continue to balloon absent a new course from the administration.”

“We’re going to see these numbers continue to balloon absent a new course from the administration.”

The payouts under Mamdani so far cover conduct that took place under his predecessor Eric Adams’s administration, but criminal policy experts worry that, without major changes to policing, the new mayor will put the city on the hook for similar payouts in the future. That’s especially true if he maintains an approach to policing that they say is not all that different from the policies he campaigned against.

“What is concerning is that if we don’t see the kind of shift in tactics away from the kind of NYPD activity that has been driving these misconduct complaints and settlements, we’re going to see these numbers continue to balloon absent a new course from the administration,” said Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The settlements represent the kinds of abuses of aggressive enforcement of “quality of life” policing and the deployment of specialized units like the Strategic Response Group that characterized the Adams administration, Sisitzky added.

“Those have yet to really be reined in under the Mamdani administration,” he said. “So, while he can’t be held directly responsible for all of the numbers reflected in this first tranche of data in terms of settlements payouts, we’re going to continue to see large volumes of complaints being filed, of settlements being reached, unless we see a change in tactics and a shift away from the kind of policing policies that drove these settlements in the first place.”

Even as Mamdani made campaign promises on policing, he went out of his way not to bash the NYPD or offer too much specificity about addressing the department’s biggest issues. During the election, that didn’t worry too many of his supporters. There was too much at stake for purity tests. Let him win first, many criminal justice advocates thought — and then they’d see what he could do.

The steps Mamdani has taken on criminal policy seem tailored to avoiding political pitfalls.

The steps Mamdani has taken on criminal policy seem tailored to avoiding political pitfalls.

While, as mayor, Mamdani takes his biggest swings at the city’s billionaire class, the steps he has taken on criminal policy seem tailored to avoiding political pitfalls.

At Rikers Island, Inmates Locked in Showers Without Food and Defecating in Bags

Along the way, he has notched small victories. He made progress on police body cameras and cutting down on low-level........

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