LAPD Settlement Bill Reaches Nearly $480 Million Since 2019 — a $178.6 Million Peak in 2024, Only $20.3 Million in the First Half of 2026, and the Big 2026 Verdicts Not Yet Counted

An LAPD settlement is a payment by the City of Los Angeles to the specific people who sued or filed a claim — a family after a police shooting, a driver hit by a patrol car, an officer who alleged retaliation. It is not a class action. As of October 13, 2026, there is no LAPD settlement fund, no claim form and no deadline that lets the public collect money. Any email or text saying you are owed money from an “LAPD settlement” and asking for a fee or your bank details is not from the city.

What is new is the size of the bill. On October 9, 2026, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis of City Attorney data obtained through a public records request: “The city of Los Angeles has shelled out nearly $480 million over the last seven and a half years to end legal disputes involving the Police Department.” The data cover “nearly 2,000 payouts dating to January 2019.” According to the analysis, annual costs more than doubled from 2019 to 2025, peaked in 2024 at $178.6 million for more than 300 police-related lawsuits and civil claims, and dropped to just over $100 million in 2025.

The 2026 number looks small and is not. “Through the first six months of this year, the city has paid out $20.3 million in legal settlements and court judgments involving LAPD officers. Several recent big-dollar verdicts aren't included in that tally because they hadn't yet been approved by the City Council.” The totals also “may not always include lawyer fees that are negotiated after a settlement is reached — or if a case is appealed.”

In Los Angeles, the city pays — which means taxpayers. Larger settlements need a City Council vote before money moves; the Times notes that big 2026 verdicts were missing from the half-year total because the Council had not yet approved them. The officers involved generally do not pay. A labor attorney quoted by the Times put it this way: “the costs of lawsuits are passed on to taxpayers — not the officers involved in misconduct and their bosses. ‘The person responsible for the error never feels the pinch.’”

City Controller Kenneth Mejia told the Times the payouts take money from streetlights, sidewalks and animal shelters; his office is auditing the city’s risk-management strategies, with results due this year. The city faced a $1 billion budget shortfall in 2025 and still funded the hiring of more than 500 new officers. City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto blames earlier litigation practices and so-called nuclear verdicts and has lobbied to cap “non-economic” damages under state law. Her office said it cannot “control the number, timing or claimed damages of lawsuits filed against the City,” and that lawsuits against the city have risen by roughly 20% in each of the last four budget years. The department has also brought back a former senior official at $20,000 a month, paid by a private donation, to study how to reduce costly lawsuits.

The Times broke the payouts into categories. What follows reflects the cost of resolved cases, not proof of how often misconduct happens — a settlement is not an admission, and many cases end with the city denying the allegations.

• Police shootings: $104.6 million since 2019; more than three-fourths involved people reported to be under the influence of a substance or in a mental health crisis. About $38.4 million followed shootings of people holding an edged weapon such as a knife; shootings involving gang officers cost nearly $4 million.
• Traffic incidents: $125 million, nearly a quarter of all payouts; just under a third came from cases in which officers failed to stop or yield before a crash.
• Crowd control: at least $22 million for foam projectiles, mounted officers and other tactics, just over half from the 2020 protests. Lawsuits over the handling of immigration protests since last year are still pending.
• The 2021 fireworks detonation: nearly $40 million to people whose homes were damaged.
• Old cases: the city still pays $7,410 a month to a man wrongly imprisoned for 17 years over a murder he did not commit.

That answers the “most common police misconduct” question only in money terms: in Los Angeles, the most expensive categories are shootings and crashes. The Times did not publish a ranking of how often each kind of complaint occurs, and we have not seen one.

No one publishes an average, and we will not invent one. What the record shows is that retaliation and discrimination suits by LAPD employees are a large slice of the bill. According to the October 9 analysis, “since 2019, at least 27 LAPD employees have won million-dollar-plus jury verdicts or settlements from the city; many more have seen five- or six-figure paydays.” A May 14, 2025 KTLA report on earlier Times reporting said the city had paid “at least $68.5 million over the last five years” to resolve lawsuits by officers alleging sexual harassment, racial discrimination or whistleblower retaliation.

Recent examples, each an individual case with named plaintiffs:

• $2.2 million — a sergeant’s Los Angeles Superior Court suit filed in March 2021 alleging discrimination, retaliation and harassment after an on-duty injury; the City Council approved the settlement 13–0 in August 2026 (City News Service, August 19, 2026). The City Attorney’s Office had denied the allegations.
• $13.1 million — a verdict for two officers who alleged discrimination and retaliation during an internal affairs investigation, reinstated by the 2nd District Court of Appeal in a published opinion reported by the Daily Journal on July 31, 2026, after the trial judge had cut it.
• $11.5 million — a March 2024 jury award to a former K-9 handler who alleged retaliation and discrimination; the Times reported at the time that the city could still challenge the size of the award, and we have not seen a later outcome.

Outside police cases these figures say little about a typical private-employer retaliation claim. If you have one, the California Civil Rights Department or an employment lawyer is the place to start; this page cannot estimate it.

There is nothing to sign up for in the cases above; each payment goes only to the people who sued. If you believe LAPD officers injured you, damaged your property or killed a family member, California requires a government claim against the city before most lawsuits for money damages. The City of Los Angeles takes claims through the Office of the City Clerk; the city’s claim form states that claims for death, injury to a person or damage to personal property must be filed no later than six months after the incident, and other claims within one year. We could not load the Clerk’s or City Attorney’s pages directly on October 13, 2026, so check the current form at clerk.lacity.gov before relying on it. Federal civil rights suits have their own deadlines; a lawyer can tell you which apply.

Be wary of anyone who contacts you first. The city does not cold-call people about “LAPD settlement” money, and no legitimate claim requires an upfront payment.

Our October 7 article covered the $5.8 million settlement with the family of a man killed by an LAPD officer who mistook a plastic fork for a weapon, and an $11 million jury verdict for the family of a man killed during a mental health crisis. The Times analysis now places those cases in a seven-and-a-half-year series. Two more points on the record since then: on August 26, 2026, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong left a $6.6 million verdict over the 2019 detention of a disabled veteran during a welfare check largely intact and awarded $1,704,139 in fees and costs (Daily Journal, September 4, 2026); and the Times notes that dozens of lawsuits remain pending, including claims over the handling of mass pro-immigration protests since last year.

The next numbers to watch are the City Council votes on the 2026 verdicts that are not yet in the $20.3 million half-year figure, and the Controller’s risk-management audit. Los Angeles is not alone: the Times cites more than $796 million paid by New York City since 2019, including $117 million in 2025, and $252 million spent by Chicago last year.