ABSTRACT
From 2006-2011, in forty-four large jurisdictions across the country, plaintiffs were awarded more than $735 million to resolve approximately 9225 police misconduct lawsuits. Law enforcement officers contributed to just 0.41% of settlements and judgments in these cases, and their contributions amounted to just 0.02% of the money paid. Officers did not pay even when they were disciplined, fired, or sent to prison, and did not pay a penny of the more than $9 million in punitive damages awarded against them. Officers employed by thirty-seven smaller jurisdictions paid nothing to resolve the cases brought against them, either. In a 2014 article, ‘Police Indemnification’, I reported these findings and considered their implications for civil rights doctrine, policy, and practice.
For this Article, I queried the same jurisdictions about government and officer payouts in police misconduct lawsuits resolved between 2018-2023. Among responding jurisdictions, the overall picture remains very much the same: police officers virtually never pay. Yet there also appear to be intriguing, if subtle, differences between 2006-2011 and 2018-2023: higher overall payouts to plaintiffs; juries awarding more, on average, in punitive damages; more governments denying officers indemnification or requiring them to contribute to settlements; and more plaintiffs’ attorneys seeking to collect against unindemnified officers.
Both the overall consistency of these findings—and the observed shifts in some governments’, plaintiffs’ attorneys’, and juries’ decision-making-prompt valuable insights for this understudied corner of constitutional tort law and litigation. Additionally, many local governments’ stubborn reluctance to collect information about lawsuit payouts and indemnification decisions – apparent in the earlier study and seemingly heightened in some jurisdictions in this study – is itself a notable finding that should guide policies and practices moving forward.
Schwartz, Joanna C, Police Indemnification Reexamined, 74 UCLA Law Review (2027) (12 August 2026).
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