New York Police Department (NYPD) Sgt. David Grieco has been named as a defendant in 48 filed civil lawsuits totalling more than a million dollars in payouts since 2013. Yet there’s no record of department disciplinary action against the police veteran on the NYPD’s website. Recently released findings by the Legal Aid Society point to Grieco, who currently works in chief crime control strategies, as by far the most-named member of the department in civil lawsuits currently active in the NYPD.
Five other service members employed by the NYPD—all currently detectives—were also named in more than 20 lawsuits each, according to the findings. Another list delineated the highest named lawsuit total payout per active officer, totalling $68,757,251 between the 10 names listed.
All the findings stem from data between 2013 and this past July 28.
Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, said such lawsuits and payouts are meant to deter police misconduct and encourage accountability. At least, that’s the idea.
“The vast majority of them are settled, so there’s no finding of wrongdoing or liability against the officers themselves,” said Wong. “In New York, these funds don’t come out of the NYPD budget, and the individual officers are usually indemnified—that means that the city taxpayers are the ones who are actually paying the judgments against them. It doesn’t come out of the NYPD budget, it doesn’t come out of the individual officer’s pocket.”
She added that many of these cases are what attorneys call “straight damages claims”—while they’re largely about wrongdoing, they don’t necessarily mandate departmental action. But settlement agreements can spring from such litigation, including the city’s recent overhaul of protest responses after recent settlements over police misconduct in the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
The Legal Aid Society said the sums are a conservative total for the payouts because the data used only accounts for formal litigation and not settlements made before legal proceedings. The NYC Comptroller’s Office, which handles such payments, told the AmNews an accurate assessment was not readily available on hand by press time. But there’s reason to believe the total payouts are significantly higher than the known amount.
Such a report is bookended by the Legal Aid Society’s previous report of around $50 million in police misconduct payouts made in this year’s first half and the public defense organization’s “Your Rights, Your Power” campaign pushing back against the growing number of police stops.
The NYPD responded by pointing to settlements for age-old wrongful conviction cases as a “substantial portion of the payouts in 2023.” It also argued the lawsuits do not reflect current practices and policies.
“The NYPD carefully analyzes allegations in civil lawsuits against individual officers as well as trends in litigation against the Department,” added the police spokesperson by email.
While there are no data points directly examining the impact for Black and brown communities, Wong pointed to officers like Grieco, who formerly served in East New York’s 75th Precinct and continues to remain with the department, as a concern.
“A principle [of] ‘broken windows policing’ [is] that low-level offenses are indicators of a person’s criminality down the line, but they’re not applying it to their own bad actors themselves who keep racking up civilian complaints again and again,” said Wong. “What we have to think about here is when we talk about impacted communities—if you are someone who comes from one of these precincts that a lot of these officers are in and have bad [or] troublesome interactions with them [and] you…see they’re not only staying on the force but they’re getting promoted, what kind of confidence does that instill about the disciplinary system and how it’s working?
“The idea [of settlements] is supposed to deter police misconduct, but unless the city is actually doing something about disciplining these officers, the message that they’re sending is that it’s the cost of doing business.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.