The George Floyd Trial Starts This March

Yes.

[bold]Police Misconduct Costs Cities Millions Every Year. But That’s Where The Accountability Ends.[/bold]

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. It was one of the only forms of justice the grieving family was likely to receive.1 A grand jury had already opted not to charge the officers involved, so the city’s decision to settle the family’s wrongful death lawsuit for such a large amount of money was all the more significant. 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.

What to make of that trend? Is it a sign that the city’s policing problems have gotten worse? Or evidence that more victims of police violence were moved to come forward? Or that the city has started to compensate people more generously for the harms they experienced? Depending on your perspective, the data could be seen as a warning that Cleveland has even more work to do — or a sign that the city had started to take police misconduct more seriously. (The city and its public records office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

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This is a long article; however, the authors seem to have dug fairly deep for data.