In an attempt to help reduce the exponentially rising costs of lawsuits against the NYPD, Scott M. String, the City Comptroller, has launched ClaimStat, a real-time online app that maps claims made against the NYPD and allows for transparency that gives an unsettling view of just how costly some of the NYPD’s worst offending departments are to the city. In a statement to MSNBC, Stringer points out that ClaimStat will hopefully provide an “early warning system” that will help identify police behavior that is costing the city money through lawsuits and settlements. Stringer specifically states, “We do not need to accept the premise that claims and settlements have to go up year after year. We don’t have to accept that violent confrontations between police and the community are an inevitable part of policing.”
NYC data blog I Quant NY organized the available data by location and found some interesting information about the neighborhood of Eric Garner, the unarmed man who was choked to death by an NYPD officer on Staten Island this past summer. There were 109 lawsuits that came out of Staten Island, and there were three within a two block radius of where Garner lived. Some of Garner’s family has said that he was targeted because he was preparing to a lawsuit against NYPD officers.
I Quant NY also found that the residents of the Bronx were more than two times as likely than Brooklyn residents and six times more likely than residents of Staten Island to file lawsuits against the NYPD. Behind the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn residents were the most likely to file a lawsuit against the NYPD.
Article Appeared @http://keepittrill.com/online/2014/12/nypd-sued-average-10-times-day-2013/