LAPD Settlement: Los Angeles Pays $5.8 Million to the Family of a Man Shot While Holding a Plastic Fork — as 2026 Juries Add $11.8 Million and $11 Million More Against the Department

The $5.8 million LAPD settlement goes to the people who sued: Jason Maccani’s wife and parents. It resolves a federal civil rights lawsuit they filed against the City of Los Angeles in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, accusing the police department of “excessive force, battery, negligence and civil rights violations,” as the Ventura County Star summarized it. Nobody else is entitled to any part of it. There is no class, no settlement administrator, no claim form and no deadline for the public — which also means that any email, text or website asking you to “register” or “verify” for an “LAPD settlement payment” is not connected to this case.

The timeline in public reporting: the Los Angeles Times, in a story republished by Police1 on August 28, 2026, reported that “the city of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $5.8 million” and that the settlement “brings to a close a two-year legal tussle,” adding that “most larger civil payouts require final approval from the City Council.” On September 10, 2026, the Star reported that “the city of Los Angeles recently paid the family $5.8 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit ahead of trial, according to the Maccani’s attorney.” As of October 7, 2026, we have not located the City Council vote or council file, and the City Attorney’s Office did not answer either paper’s questions. The city also “did not disclose how much it spent on its legal defense prior to the settlement.” The family’s mother told the Times: “the settlement we received is not life-changing, but what they’ve done to us is definitely life-changing.”

According to an August 21 news release from the family’s attorney, Dale Galipo, cited by the Star, seven LAPD officers responded that day to a reported trespassing near the corner of 7th Street and Towne Avenue. The Times describes the call as an “assault with a deadly weapon” call at a Skid Row warehouse. The city’s position, as the Star reported it, was that officers “believed Jason Maccani was armed with a knife, assaulted a female officer and grabbed the less-than-lethal shotgun she was holding.” The family’s release says body-worn camera and surveillance footage show he was holding a plastic fork and never got close to taking the weapon.

The Times account: after officers hit Maccani, 36, with a 40-millimeter less-lethal projectile, footage showed him move toward the six officers and one supervisor with the utensil in his hand; a struggle followed, one officer pinned him against a wall, and another fired one round at point-blank range. The bullet also grazed the supervisor’s hand. The officer who fired had less than a year on the job — “roughly six months,” still on probation, according to the family’s release — and said afterward he mistook the fork for a weapon. An internal review board split, and LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell ruled the decision to shoot was against department policy. The officer is no longer with the department. His family says Maccani had bipolar disorder and was in an apparent bipolar episode; an autopsy found no drugs in his system. All of the above are allegations and findings reported in the press; the case settled without a trial verdict.

Because this is an individual lawsuit, the only way to get money from the City of Los Angeles over police conduct is your own claim. In California that starts before any lawsuit: the Government Claims Act requires a written claim to the public entity first, on a short statutory deadline measured in months, not years. Federal civil rights suits like the Maccani family’s run on their own clocks. Both are easy to miss, which is why families in these cases generally work with a civil rights attorney from the start.

Two practical points from these cases. First, amounts are negotiated or decided case by case — there is no schedule, and the settlements and verdicts below are not a guide to what any other claim is worth. Second, payment is not instant: most larger civil payouts in Los Angeles require final approval from the City Council, the Times notes, and money for minors can be held for years — in the Blanco verdict below, the children cannot touch the award until they turn 18. Anyone contacting you about an LAPD payout you did not personally sue for is not a settlement administrator; there is none.

Castellanos v. City of Los Angeles (C.D. Cal., Case No. 2:22-cv-01165). In April 2026 a federal jury unanimously found two LAPD officers liable for excessive force, negligence and violating the constitutional rights of Isaac Castellanos, a Dodgers fan permanently blinded in his right eye on October 28, 2020, when the officers fired 37mm less-lethal launchers toward a crowd celebrating the World Series win. He was 22. His lawyers’ firm puts the award at $11.8 million — $7 million for future pain and suffering, $1 million for past noneconomic damages, nearly $3.7 million for lost earning capacity and $135,749 for future medical care; LAist reported “more than $11.7 million.” Evidence at trial put the shots at about 145 feet. The firm says it has moved to triple the damages under California’s Bane Act, “which could bring the total judgment to approximately $35 million”; as of October 7, 2026, we have not seen a ruling on that motion. LAist counted more than $19 million the city had already paid over LAPD crowd-control actions since the beginning of 2020.

The Blanco verdict. Hoodline reported on September 24, 2026, citing CBS Los Angeles, that a Los Angeles jury ordered the city to pay $11 million to the two children, 9 and 13, of a South LA man shot by LAPD officers on May 19, 2024, finding the officers liable for battery and negligence. Police said he ran at an officer holding a knife; the family’s attorney argued the officers had less-lethal options. Earlier, in January 2026, a jury awarded $6.8 million to an Army veteran over an improper mental health detention in 2019, according to the Los Angeles Times as cited by Hoodline. Verdicts can still be challenged after trial or on appeal; a jury award is not yet money paid.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia put the city’s liability payouts for fiscal year 2025, which ended June 30, 2025, at approximately $286,345,711 — about $286 million, a record — and said the money comes out of the general fund, “leading to less funds for other city departments and contributing to city layoffs,” as ABC7 reported. LAist, citing the controller, put the LAPD’s share at $152 million, the largest of any department, followed by $44 million from the Bureau of Street Services, and reported that liability payments have grown by an average of 35% a year since 2022. In April 2026, City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo told the Budget and Finance Committee the city was on track to spend $207 million on liabilities in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2026. The options the council asked staff to study include buying liability insurance and making departments carry their own liability costs.

Against that backdrop, the $5.8 million Maccani settlement is mid-sized. What it buys the city is certainty: no jury, no Bane Act multiplier, no appeal. For the family it buys an end to the case but not what the mother says she wanted — criminal accountability. She told the Star she hopes to push an amendment to the penal code so that officers found to have acted outside policy in a shooting are criminally charged. That is a proposal, not a bill; we have found no legislation filed as of October 7, 2026.