News How Much Do SPD Settlements Really Cost?
posted by on February 14 at 17:00 PM
The PI’s got an interesting story today about the real cost of each lawsuit against the SPD.
As I’ve said, people are going to keep suing the department if they don’t feel our accountability system is working, and one law firm is going to be making big bucks off of those lawsuits.
The city of Seattle has paid more than $6.3 million since 2002 to Stafford Frey Cooper and millions more before that, while still paying out settlements in many cases with the highest legal bills. The city has never put the contract for legal services out to bid and may not be able to because of a long-standing arrangement with the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild.
It just so happens that Yesterday, I posted that SPD just settled yet another lawsuit, this time for $20,000. I’m trying to get exact figures on how many lawyer-hours were put into the case—it was filed last April—and I’ll report back on how much SPD’s relatively small settlement really cost.
You'd also want to add in the cost of all the time of the cops and managers spent in talking to the lawyers and all the time of the review panels and cop supervisors dealing with discipline.
If you can get the actual time sheets of the law firm, that would make for interesting reading.
FYI, anything involving legal representation of individual officers will be attorney/client privileged, so you're SOL there.
You really ought to give me a call on this one, Jonah.
@2 but couldn't we get the legal costs to the department as a whole considering it is a public agency. we don't need case by case break-downs, just an aggregate total divided by the number of complaints acted on.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).