The Hidden Costs of Use of Force: Civil Settlements, 2020 to 2024

What public settlement data from major cities shows about the fiscal weight of use-of-force litigation, and how to think honestly about the return on de-escalation training.

Most discussions of use of force focus on the human cost, and rightly so. But there is a second cost that is easier to measure and almost as instructive: the money. Civil settlements and judgments arising from police conduct move real dollars out of municipal budgets every year, and because settlement figures are increasingly published, they offer one of the few use-of-force datasets that is denominated in a unit, the dollar, that every chief and every city council already understands. This article reviews what the public settlement record from 2020 through 2024 shows, and then works carefully through the question every training budget eventually faces: does de-escalation training pay for itself?

The data, and why it is uneven

A reader should know the central limitation before the first number: there is no national database of police-related civil settlements. Cities are not required to publish this information in any standard form, and most do not publish it well.¹ What exists is a patchwork: a handful of cities with genuine transparency, journalistic investigations that assembled multi-city datasets through records requests, and advocacy databases. Comparisons across cities are therefore approximate, and the absence of a city from the data usually means the city does not publish, not that it pays nothing.

With that caveat firmly stated, the available record is still substantial.

What major cities paid

The most thoroughly documented city is New York. The annual cost of NYPD misconduct settlements over the recent period runs as follows: roughly $62 million in 2020, about $87 million in 2021, over $135 million in 2022, about $115 million in 2023, and approximately $205.6 million in 2024, the highest annual total in years.² Across 2018 onward, NYPD misconduct settlements have totaled well over $750 million.² The five-year arc from 2020 to 2024 shows the figure more than tripling.

Chicago is the second-best-documented city. It spends on the order of $85 million per year on average to resolve police misconduct claims, and in 2024 it paid at least $107.5 million.³ A 2025 analysis found that repeated misconduct by just 272 Chicago officers had cost the city roughly $295 million since 2019.³

Stepping back to the national picture, a 2022 Washington Post investigation assembled settlement data from the country's largest police departments and found that police misconduct had cost taxpayers more than $3 billion across roughly the prior decade.⁴ New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles alone accounted for the bulk of that total, more than $2.5 billion.⁴

The single most important pattern: concentration

If there is one finding in the settlement data that should change how an agency thinks, it is this: the cost is heavily concentrated among a minority of officers.

The Washington Post investigation found that officers whose conduct was at issue in more than one paid claim accounted for more than $1.5 billion, nearly half of all the money the studied departments spent resolving allegations.⁴ In Chicago, officers subject to more than one paid claim accounted for more than $380 million of the payments analyzed.³

This concentration matters for two reasons. First, it is a caution against reading aggregate settlement totals as a measure of the typical officer's conduct. They are not. They are heavily weighted by a comparatively small group. Second, and more constructively, concentration implies that the cost is, in principle, addressable. A cost that were spread evenly across every officer and every encounter would be nearly impossible to manage. A cost concentrated among identifiable patterns, repeat involvement, particular incident types, is a cost that early intervention systems, supervision, and targeted training can plausibly reach.

What settlements do and do not measure

Before turning to the return-on-investment question, two more honest qualifications.

A settlement is not a finding of fact. Cities settle for many reasons, including the cost of litigation and the unpredictability of juries, and a settlement does not establish that an officer violated policy or law. Settlement totals are best read as a measure of municipal financial exposure, not as a scorecard of misconduct.

And settlement data is lagged. A payment in 2024 typically resolves an incident from an earlier year, sometimes several years earlier. The 2020 to 2024 settlement figures therefore describe incidents that substantially predate the payment year. Any attempt to connect a training change to a settlement change has to account for that lag, which can be two to five years or more.

The return-on-investment question, handled honestly

Here is the argument an agency naturally wants to make: settlements are enormously expensive, de-escalation training is comparatively cheap, therefore training pays for itself. The argument has real force, but it has to be built carefully or it collapses under scrutiny.

The strongest available evidence comes from a peer-reviewed evaluation of de-escalation training at the Louisville Metro Police Department. Researchers used a stepped-wedge randomized controlled trial design, training 1,049 sworn officers across 2019, and measured outcomes before and after.⁵ The results were statistically significant: a 28.1 percent reduction in use-of-force incidents, a 26.3 percent reduction in citizen injuries, and a 36.0 percent reduction in officer injuries in the post-training period.⁵

The study, an evaluation of the Police Executive Research Forum's ICAT curriculum, was the first of its kind to demonstrate significant reductions in use of force tied to a de-escalation training program.⁵

Note carefully what that study did and did not measure. It measured force incidents and injuries. It did not measure settlement dollars. The chain from "fewer injuries" to "lower settlement costs" is plausible, because injuries and serious force are what most use-of-force litigation arises from, but it is an inference, not a measured result.

So the honest ROI framing is conditional, and it goes like this. De-escalation training has been shown in a rigorous study to reduce use-of-force incidents and injuries by roughly a quarter to a third. Use-of-force incidents and injuries are the principal driver of civil settlements. A city such as New York paid over $200 million in misconduct settlements in a single year, and a city such as Chicago averages around $85 million per year. Against numbers of that magnitude, a department-wide de-escalation training program is a small line item. If such a program produced even a fraction of the force and injury reductions seen in the Louisville study, and if those reductions translated proportionally into reduced litigation exposure, the avoided settlement cost would exceed the training cost by a wide margin.

Every clause in that paragraph carries a condition: "if it produced," "if those reductions translated." That is the intellectually honest version. It is not a guarantee. It is a favorable expected-value case, and it is favorable precisely because the downside, the training cost, is small and certain, while the upside, avoided settlements, is large and probable but not certain. A chief presenting this to a council should present it exactly that way. A guaranteed-savings pitch invites a skeptic to demand proof that does not yet exist; a sound expected-value pitch does not.

There is also a non-financial element that belongs in the same conversation. The Louisville study's 36 percent reduction in officer injuries is, by itself, a reason to train, independent of any dollar figure.⁵ Officer safety and reduced litigation exposure are, in this evidence, the same intervention pointing in the same direction.

What this means for your agency's training

The settlement data supports several practical conclusions for an agency planning its training investment.

Settlement costs are large, rising in the cities that publish data, and concentrated rather than diffuse. The concentration is the opening: a concentrated cost can be targeted, and targeting it is partly a training and supervision problem.

The case for de-escalation training as a fiscal measure should be made as an expected-value argument, not a guarantee. The honest claim, that rigorous evaluation shows de-escalation training reducing force and injuries by roughly a quarter to a third, and that those are the drivers of settlement cost, is strong enough on its own. It does not need to be oversold, and overselling it invites a credibility loss the agency cannot afford in a budget hearing.

Agencies should also recognize the data gap as a self-improvement opportunity. A department that tracks its own claims, settlements, and the incident types behind them, and connects that record to its training and early-intervention systems, can build the local evidence base that the national record lacks. Over a multi-year horizon, that internal data is what will let an agency actually test, rather than merely assert, the return on its training spend.

CodeBlu's scenario-based de-escalation training operates on the same mechanisms the Louisville evaluation tested: rehearsing the encounter phases where force and injury arise. This article does not claim CodeBlu training will reduce any specific city's settlement costs, because no training program's effect on settlements has been directly measured. It claims something more defensible: the category of training has rigorous evidence behind it for reducing force and injuries, those outcomes drive settlement exposure, and the cost asymmetry strongly favors investment.

Recommended CodeBlu scenarios this article supports

1. High-litigation-risk encounter rehearsal: scenarios built around the incident types that most often generate civil claims, so officers practice the decision points before they face them.
2. Injury-reduction tactics: rehearsing force options and positioning that lower injury risk to both subject and officer, the outcomes the Louisville study measured.
3. Repeat-involvement early intervention scenarios: targeted refresher scenarios for officers or units flagged by an early intervention system.
4. Documentation and report-writing under scrutiny: practicing the accurate, complete use-of-force documentation that shapes later litigation exposure.
5. Supervisor decision-making on scene: scenarios for first-line supervisors, whose on-scene choices influence both outcomes and later liability.

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Footnotes

1. On the absence of standardized national settlement reporting, see CBS News, "Settlements for police misconduct lawsuits cost taxpayers from coast to coast." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-misconduct-lawsuits-settlements-taxpayers/ ↩

2. Legal Aid Society, "NYPD Misconduct Lawsuits Cost Taxpayers Over $205 Million in 2024." https://legalaidnyc.org/news/nypd-misconduct-lawsuits-over-205-million-2024/ ; year-by-year totals also reported by Gothamist, "NYC paid $200 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits in 2024." https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-paid-more-than-200-million-to-settle-police-misconduct-lawsuits-in-2024-report ↩ ↩²

3. WTTW News, "Repeated Police Misconduct by 272 Officers Has Cost Chicago Taxpayers $295M Since 2019," 2025. https://news.wttw.com/2025/09/23/repeated-police-misconduct-272-officers-has-cost-chicago-taxpayers-295m-2019-analysis ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Washington Post, "Repeated police misconduct cost taxpayers $1.5 billion in settlements," 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/police-misconduct-repeated-settlements/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. R. Engel et al., "Assessing the impact of de-escalation training on police behavior: Reducing police use of force in the Louisville, KY Metro Police Department," Criminology & Public Policy, 2022. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9133.12574 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴