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In the spring of 2016, the city of Cleveland agreed to pay $6 million to the family of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a city police officer in late 2014. ...... After the payout was announced, the Rice family said they hoped the settlement would “stimulate a movement for genuine change in our society and our nation’s policing.”.
But five years later, Cleveland has paid more money in police misconduct settlements than in the five years before Rice was killed. In 2017, according to public records obtained by FiveThirtyEight and The Marshall Project, the city paid $7.9 million (including $3 million for half of the payment to the Rice family). In 2019, it paid $6 million. That’s more than the city spent on police misconduct in the entire five-year period between 2010 and 2014. ...snip....
But police settlements are their own bramble of contradictions. Including Cleveland, we obtained public records from 31 of the 50 cities with the highest police-to-civilian ratios in the country. Our analysis shows the cities have spent more than $3 billion to settle misconduct lawsuits over the past 10 years. 3 (You can access all of the data in our Observable notebook.)But as with Cleveland, the data mostly left us with more questions than answers. Shoddy, confusing, or incomplete record-keeping combined with a host of other local factors to make it nearly impossible for us to conclude if anything was changing in any given city—much less whether those shifts were for better or worse. Those problems, in turn, mean that it’s very difficult to know which cities are more successfully reducing police misconduct than others, and how the burden on taxpayers is shifting as a result. ...snip...
