UCLA School of Law

From 2006-2011, in forty-four large jurisdictions across the country, plaintiffs were awarded more than $735 million to resolve approximately 9225 police misconduct lawsuits. Law enforcement officers contributed to just 0.41% of settlements and judgments in these cases, and their contributions amounted to just 0.02% of the money paid. Officers did not pay even when they were disciplined, fired, or sent to prison, and did not pay a penny of the more than $9 million in punitive damages awarded against them. Officers employed by thirty-seven smaller jurisdictions paid nothing to resolve the cases brought against them, either. In a 2014 article, Police Indemnification, I reported these findings and considered their implications for civil rights doctrine, policy, and practice. For this Article, I queried the same jurisdictions about government and officer payouts in police misconduct lawsuits resolved between 2018-2023. Among responding jurisdictions, the overall picture remains very much the same: police officers virtually never pay. Yet there also appear to be intriguing, if subtle, differences between 2006-2011 and 2018-2023: higher overall payouts to plaintiffs; juries awarding more, on average, in punitive damages; more governments denying officers indemnification or requiring them to contribute to settlements; and more plaintiffs’ attorneys seeking to collect against unindemnified officers.Both the overall consistency of these findings—and the observed shifts in some governments’, plaintiffs’ attorneys’, and juries’ decisionmaking—prompt valuable insights for this understudied corner of constitutional tort law and litigation. Additionally, many local governments’ stubborn reluctance to collect information about lawsuit payouts and indemnification decisions—apparent in the earlier study and seemingly heightened in some jurisdictions in this study—is itself a notable finding that should guide policies and practices moving forward.