Mayor Mamdani campaigned as a police reformer, yet his administration has kept many of his predecessors’ most notorious policing strategies in place. Now, the payout of taxpayer money to settle the resulting lawsuits for police misconduct is poised to grow on his watch.
Taxpayers forked over $53 million in the first six months of this year to settle lawsuits alleging New York Police Department (NYPD) misconduct, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society. While those cases are holdovers from prior administrations, if the payouts continue at pace under Mamdani, 2026 will be the fourth consecutive year in which settlements of lawsuits alleging police misbehavior topped $100 million.
Mamdani must take action to end the NYPD’s status quo: a long-standing, well-documented tradition of human rights violations and widespread unconstitutional stop-and-frisks. At the very least, the mayor has an obligation to send the message that abuse of the city’s citizens will no longer be treated simply as the byproduct of police work. Good policing does not have to come at the expense of New Yorkers’ civil rights.
The mayor earlier this year took a step in the right direction by appointing Jennifer Jones Austin chairwoman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), which is essential to good law enforcement. Now the New York City Council must immediately make appointments to the three unfilled CCRB seats for representatives from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island.
Jones Austin, a respected pillar of the city’s social justice community, is the type of credible voice an independent CCRB needs after former Mayor Eric Adams’s administration killed CCRB cases and tinkered with the NYPD’s discipline matrix in ways that lowered penalties for police officers found to have committed serious offenses.
The CCRB plays an important role as a check on the NYPD as well as a catalyst for public discourse. Filling all 15 seats strengthens the CCRB’s legitimacy, which is necessary to maintain public trust in civilian oversight of the NYPD. For some tragic reason, elected city and state officials, and community activists, no longer speak out publicly against police excesses.
The NYPD settlements cited by the Legal Aid Society represent only a portion of the amount the city spends each year on allegations of police misconduct. The New York City Comptroller also settles cases before formal lawsuits are filed. According to the most up-to-date figures, the comptroller paid $427 million between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 to settle personal injury police action claims, which include allegations of improper police conduct, such as false arrest or imprisonment, or excessive force.
The settlements so far this year are a stain on the legacy of Adams, a supporter of gung-ho policing tactics he condemned as an activist police captain before he ran for public office. He emphasized “quality of life” policing and the deployment of specialized units that targeted mostly innocent Blacks and Latinos for legally dubious police pat-downs and arrests in the subways.
Police stop-and-frisks deemed “unconstitutional” by a U.S. District Court and, most recently, by a federal court-ordered monitor, ballooned under Adams. Police reported an average of 25,500 stops annually over the past two years, compared with merely 8,947 in 2021, the year before Adams took the oath of office.
Mamdani can begin to cut back on illegal searches and overaggressive police tactics by rethinking how to use officers who flooded the subways in recent years. A $77 million cash infusion from the state in 2025 has run out, leaving New York City on the hook for police overtime that resulted in a tsunami of fare evasion arrests and desk appearance tickets for other minor violations.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch pledged to the City Council that she would implement stricter measures against officers who ignore stop-and-frisk reporting requirements. But she also suggested the NYPD has taken significant steps to increase accountability and update policies that could create a greater risk of litigation, including regular meetings to review compliance issues like use of force and new restrictions on vehicle pursuits. Tisch’s doublespeak seems to signal the NYPD would continue to double down on targeting people of color in the misguided belief that abusive tactics are the best way, or maybe the only way, to deter crime.
Since Mamdani took office, his approach to policing has not been all that different from the policies he railed against during the 2025 campaign. Let’s hope the mayor has not fallen into the trap of all of his predecessors since the late 1980s – Edward Koch, David Dinkins, Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams. All of them tolerated or gave a wink-and-nod approval to the ugly police tactics.
I’ve said this before, and it needs to be repeated: No one is saying the NYPD should stop enforcing the laws. Just stop singling out Black and Hispanic young men.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.
