HOLY HANDCUFFS BATMAN!

NYPD "COURTESY, PROFESSIONALISM, RESPECT"? 

NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT LAW SUIT SETTLEMENTS REACH 100 MILLION FOR SIX CONSECUTIVE YEARS.

Mudruck filed a FOI request to the NYPD for information concerning cases they had closed since 2009. It's a big PDF containing more than 10,000 settlements, ranging from $1–$11,500,000. Gawker explains:

Those numbers are in line with the findings of a 2010 AP investigation, which discovered nearly $1 billion in NYPD payouts over the previous decade. In 2012, Bloomberg News found the City of New York planned to spend $735 million on settling lawsuits, police and otherwise, almost six times what Los Angeles pays per capita.

Those Bloomberg numbers can be found here.

The cost of claims is forecast to rise to $815 million by 2016, more than the city pays to run the Parks and Recreation Department, according to budget documents. Among the incidents triggering payments are malpractice in public hospitals, police beatings, improper arrests, collisions with fire trucks and potholes causing accidents. [...}
New York spent $664 million on claims in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the Law Department. Claims alleging personal injury accounted for $565 million, including $119 million for police misconduct and civil-rights violations.

Recent examples of Police enforcement around the United States. Without listing them all you can read about some of The Big Apple's recent highlights of law and order here and here and here.

There's video and imagery for all of those cases and many others. It makes it hard not to settle for millions and millions of dollars. What's extraordinary about racism and the privileged class' dislike of the lower strata of society is that, even using the most cynical logic, it just doesn't make good economic sense. It's bad business for everyone.

Is this the cost for doing "police business"? Why is this story not front page news across the country? And police wonder why they have a bad reputation and are considered not better than the deviants they arrest? SMH!

portions of this blog are Cross posted from daily kos

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Roger West