Most Sued Cities and Counties: Federal Civil Rights Lawsuits in FY2025

Calibration: our count of 22,522 Other Civil Rights filings in FY2025 differs by 0.06% from the 22,509 cases commenced in Table C-2 of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts; for FY2024 we count 18,193 against 18,194. These totals include reopened cases, transfers and remands; counted this way, they match the official table closely.

For the ranking we kept only new suits, meaning IDB origin codes 1 (original proceeding), 2 (removed from state court) and 13 (multidistrict litigation originating in the district), and counted each docket once, keyed by circuit, district, office and docket number, with fiscal years taken from the filing date (FDATE); where a docket has more than one such record in FY2025, the records carry the same defendant name. That leaves 21,110 suits in FY2025; 1,412 records (6.3%) were reopenings, transfers, remands or repeat records of the same docket and are excluded.

The IDB records only the first-listed defendant (field DEF), shortened to at most 30 characters; names ending in ", ET AL" keep 23 characters plus that suffix. So that anyone can reproduce the count exactly, we classified the name by its words alone, where a word is any unbroken run of the letters A to Z (the field is in capitals). An apostrophe before a final S is dropped, so "Sheriff's" is the word SHERIFFS and "Prince George's" the words PRINCE GEORGES; other apostrophes, periods, hyphens, slashes, ampersands, parentheses and commas split words, so "Miami-Dade" is MIAMI DADE. A suit names a local government first if the defendant name contains at least one of the words CITY, COUNTY, TOWN, VILLAGE, BOROUGH, TOWNSHIP, PARISH, POLICE, SHERIFF, SHERIFFS, SHERRIF, SHERRIFF, SHERRIFFS, NYPD, LAPD or NYC, or one of the phrases DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT, LAS VEGAS METROPOLITAN, LAS VEGAS METRO or LVMPD, and none of the words STATE, STATES, SCHOOL, SCHOOLS, EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE, HOUSING, AUTHORITY, TRANSIT, COURT, COURTS, SUPERIOR, CIRCUIT, PROBATE, FAMILY, CLERK, ATTORNEY, PROSECUTOR, DEFENDER, PROBATION, CHILD, CHILDREN, HOSPITAL, MEDICAL, OFFICER, OFFICERS, INC, LLC, INDEPENDENT, UNIFIED, ISD, USD or DIOCESE, no word beginning with EDUC and not the word ED directly after OF ("Board of Ed"). Only whole words count otherwise: a cut-off word such as "Sher" or "Poli" matches nothing. Other offices of a city or county, such as a truncated "New York City Departmen", count with it.

For the ranking, each of these suits is assigned to one government, keyed by the state of the federal district court where it was filed (without exception, also for New York City), a type and a place name. Names containing the phrase NEW YORK CITY or CITY OF NEW YORK or the word NYC or NYPD are New York City; so are names that reach New York City through the general place rule below, i.e. the city-type place NEW YORK in a New York court, such as "New York Police Dept." or the truncated "New York Police Departm" (the place runs to the stop word POLICE; two FY2025 suits), whereas "New York County" is a county and not counted for the city; names containing DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, or METROPOLITAN POLICE in a District of Columbia court, are the District of Columbia; names containing LAPD are the City of Los Angeles; names containing LAS VEGAS METROPOLITAN, LAS VEGAS METRO or LVMPD are the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, a unit of its own; METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT in a Tennessee court is Metro Nashville. Otherwise the type is county if the name contains COUNTY or PARISH; else township, borough, village, town or city, checked in that order, if the name contains that word; else county if it contains a sheriff word; else city. The place name is read from the name without a trailing ", ET AL", before the first comma. Below, stop words are CITY, COUNTY, TOWN, VILLAGE, BOROUGH, TOWNSHIP, PARISH, the police and sheriff words above, DEPARTMENT, DEPT and OFFICE. If the name contains CITY, COUNTY, TOWN, VILLAGE, BOROUGH, TOWNSHIP or PARISH directly followed by OF, the place is the words after the first such pair up to the next stop word, where one CITY after the first place word belongs to the place ("City of Kansas City"); this reading is discarded if the place is a state name or the beginning of one ("Muncie City of Indiana"), or if it reaches the end of a shortened name and has fewer than 4 characters. Otherwise leading THE, AND, OF and stop words are dropped and the place runs to the next stop word; a CITY directly after the place belongs to it unless AND or OF follows ("Sioux City", "Oklahoma City Police Department"). A trailing postal code of the court's state, a full state name, or the first three or more letters of the court state's name are then dropped ("Roswell Geo" is Roswell). A name is shortened if it has 29 or more characters; if the place reaches its end, a last word that is the beginning of a longer stop word is dropped ("Philadelphia Po"). A place beginning with BOARD ("Board of County Commiss") gives no place. A place that reaches the end of a shortened name and does not also occur in full (not at the end of a shortened name) for the same court state and type is completed: if it is the beginning of such full places that are all beginnings of the longest of them, and it has at least 4 characters, it becomes that longest place ("San Bernardin" is San Bernardino); if such places exist otherwise, the suit counts for no single government; if none exist and dropping its last word gives a full place, it becomes that place ("Los Angeles Met"). One place with no full spelling in FY2025, Huntington Beac in California, is completed to Huntington Beach. A place with CITY after its first word becomes the words before CITY if those occur as a full place ("Chicago City Hall" is Chicago). City and county names of the consolidated governments of Denver (Colorado), Honolulu (Hawaii), San Francisco (California), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Jacksonville (Florida), Nashville (Tennessee) and Louisville (Kentucky) form one unit each when the place is that name or begins with it as a word, and in names containing CITY AND COUNTY (or CITY & COUNTY) also when the place is the beginning of that name ("City and County of San"). Names that leave no place name, such as "Sheriff's Office", or that cannot be matched (29 suits) count in the local-government total but not for any single government. The local-government share uses all 21,110 new FY2025 suits as the denominator; shares of individual governments use the 4,788 suits naming any local government first.