Police don't pay damages in civil rights cases — taxpayers do


When police officers are found guilty of civil rights violations in civil suits, victims and/or their families frequently receive large monetary settlements that can total in the millions. But the guilty officers almost never pay those fines, instead shifting the costs to taxpayers through city government.
According to the research of UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, from 2006 to 2011 guilty officers paid just $171,300 out of $735 million in settlement costs in 9,225 cases from big cities. Schwartz says that New York City, where the family of Eric Garner will soon sue for $75 million, "has required officers to contribute small amounts when officers have been found to be acting outside of policy," but it is still typically a "minuscule fraction" of the total settlement.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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