Introduction
Every year over the past decade, police in the US have killed over 1,000 people, with this epidemic of police murder reaching its highest numbers ever recorded in just the last couple of years. In 2024, out of the 1,365 people killed by police, only 9 officers were charged with any crime, less than 1%. An even smaller number were found guilty of that crime. For every year the police butcher or beat people in the streets, thousands of victims and their families are thrust into a fight against the system, seeking some semblance of justice from an unjust system. Absent mass outrage and resistance to these instances of police murder and brutality, killer cops facing prison time is almost unheard of. With the odds stacked against families and victims of police brutality getting real justice, people will often pursue lawsuits as a way to get some satisfaction.
Families and victims of police brutality have every right to get some form of financial compensation from the system that’s ruined their lives, for the excruciating pain and chaos they have suffered at the hands of police. People brutalized by police can become permanently disabled and unable to work or provide for their loved ones as they once had, and families can be thrown into financial turmoil when police murder their loved ones, who were their primary breadwinners. People’s lives are turned upside down in an instant at the hands of the police, and if isolated from any sort of movement in the streets demanding justice, lawsuits and settlements become the only way to fight. While lawsuits have become almost second nature to those affected by police brutality, they have increasingly become more of a tool for the system against the people than the other way around; turned into settlements by parasitic lawyers and quickly becoming a way for the status quo to continue unabated, with killer cops remaining on the payrolls, grifter lawyers cashing checks, and local governments facing no accountability. Unable to actually stop police brutality, and controlled by a class of lawyers who quickly pursue a settlement over fighting in the courts, lawsuits become a way to maintain the status quo rather than deter it or challenge it.
Settling for Less
While the cops continue to get away with murder and other crimes against the people, cities, counties, and local governments across the US are paying out more and more in settlements to the families and victims of police brutality. An estimated $4 billion was paid out in police misconduct settlements from 2010 to 2020 across the US, increasing every year. Cities like Chicago set aside millions in their annual budget to settle police misconduct lawsuits. In fact, this year, Chicago surpassed the allotted amount by more than double in just the first five months of 2025 ($82 million was budgeted for the year, $162 million was reached in settlements by May).
Police brutality is baked into this system and cannot be reformed away. So rather than attempt to put an end to it by prosecuting and punishing cops who kill and brutalize (maybe they would think twice before killing someone if there were consequences for their actions), the system will simply allocate more money to settle lawsuits in court, boiling down police brutality as just another expense in the cost of doing business, another cog in the machine.
If a family or victim of police brutality decide to sue for wrongful death or police misconduct, the government often prefers a settlement over duking it out in court (or you know, jailing the killer cops). The truth is, when local governments don’t believe they can win in civil court due to the egregious nature of the crime their police committed, settling allows them to escape any legal responsibility for the actions of the police. They can simply pay out and wipe their hands clean, with no record of being held liable. Just like the Department of Transportation or Streets & Sanitation, these settlements have become an essential feature in the maintenance of the overall system, regardless of who holds political office.
Settlements have also become a way to quite literally silence victims and their families and to protect the killer cops. Non-disclosure Agreements (NDAs) have been a practice in many settlement agreements with impacted families, turning families into legal targets if they speak out about the details of the case. Up until 2019, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, used mandatory “non-disparagement” clauses to silence survivors and their families of police brutality who settled with the city in court and prevent them from speaking out publicly to the media about what happened. In California, when Fullerton Police killed Alejando Campos Rios in 2024, an intense struggle was launched, demanding justice and to jail the killer cops responsible. In the summer of 2025, the city decided to settle with the next of kin, including an NDA, in an attempt to fracture the movement and silence the demands for justice. Because some cities often pile up tax dollars for such instances (or have insurance that will pay these sums of money), they can dangle it in front of families who often find themselves in desperate situations, giving them the impossible choice of whether or not to take this money. On top of this, when a city reaches such a settlement, the public usually understands this as meaning that the instance of police brutality is more or less “settled” and no longer an issue people are fighting around, all while the abusive or killer cops continue to roam free on the streets.
This is all assuming victims and their families will even have the “right” to take the city to court. Yvonne Del Torre, the long-time partner of Alejandro Campos Rios and the most visible fighter for his campaign for justice, was never even able to pursue a lawsuit due to them not being legally married, and was offered no kind of civil lawsuit for recompense. Charoltta Pritchett, the long-time partner of Timothy Glaze, who was killed by Chicago Police in January 2025, was also never offered this option, even though she was financially tied to and dependent on Timothy to make ends meet. Both women are tirelessly fighting for justice in the streets, demanding that the killer cops be jailed, while settlements continue without them and are portrayed in the media as issues being dealt with “in mediation” with the families. Fundamentally, lawsuits cannot stop police brutality, and most often are flipped into settlements, used as a way to derail any demands for accountability or justice. This flip, from lawsuit to settlement, becomes commonplace since many of these kinds of suits must go through a seemingly never-ending pipeline of parasitic lawyers looking for an easy cash grab. Lawsuits are often pushed on families and victims by grifter lawyers as the only practical solution to pursue. To push families toward lawsuits, lawyers minimize the effectiveness of movement in the streets, while silently hoping to flip the civil suit into a settlement.
Parasitic Lawyers
The reason that many feel the lawsuit route is the only or next “rational” step after police murder someone’s loved one or brutally beat someone half to death, is in no small part due to lawyers getting in people’s ear and telling them “this is the way things go.” Families and victims, filled with rage against the system and police, are often ready to do anything to get justice, but are quickly approached by lawyers who usher them into fighting the “right way” through the proper channels. For decades, civil rights lawyers have carved out an entire hustle by representing families whose loved ones have been killed by police, pushing for a civil suit, then switching to a settlement at the earliest convience, racking in hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves from people’s pain and suffering, with no accountability for the city or local governments (let alone the actual cops who beat and murder people). These types will often bolster the narrative that families of victims are “only in it for the money,” a common narrative pushed by right-wing media after a police killing or assault is headed to court. While there is a dire need for sincere people’s lawyers who are ready to fight and expose police brutality for what it is and to stand with families who demand justice, grifter lawyers are just another wing of the same rotten system that keeps the machine going. From a business standpoint, these lawyers would rather families take settlements so they can avoid putting in work to litigate and fight to hold the city, state, or local government accountable; rather, they’re running off with an easy check and 15 minutes of fame, leaving families in the dust when they want to go further and fight for real change.
This increasing trend in settlements and payouts has created a new class of parasitic, celebrity “civil rights” lawyers, such as Ben Crump, who literally travel across the US, seeking out the next big paycheck from the families or victims of police brutality. Often working on contingency to take upwards of 40% of the settlement money, these lawyers will typically take cases they know they can push to settle, and string families along for years, telling them they will fight for their loved ones in civil court, all while pushing for a settlement behind closed doors. For people like Ben Crump, this is the best outcome because not only does he get paid, but he doesn’t have to prove any wrongdoing on the part of the local government, let alone pursue any real action against the police (this is why an overwhelming amount of Crump’s police brutality cases are settled and never taken to trial to be decided by a jury verdict). These kinds of lawyers are quick to jump ship if the going gets tough, known by some impacted families as the “Crump Dump”: they take off when the families or victims are too outspoken, demand things like criminal charges, or refuse to settle in court in favor of pushing for a trial to prove the city responsible. These lawyers try to be quick on the scene when instances of police brutality are widely publicized (see “ambulance chasers”), and will try their best to get in the ears of families and victims, using their credentials to insist lawsuits are the only course of action to get any semblance of justice, then turning them into settlements when they’re able. But for many of these grifter lawyers, when the case is not neatly packaged, like if someone has a gun on them when they are killed by police, for example, they will quickly drop the family’s case, leaving people devastated and believing they have no hope for getting justice.
While most of these settlements are financially life-changing for families and victims who deserve some kind of compensation for their pain, they have become big business for the attorneys only interested in lining their pockets, and remain merely a drop in the bucket for the government that budgets for such settlements. Grifter lawyers need the system to stay intact to keep the money flowing in, and thus have a financial stake in having killer cops on the street. This reality pushes lawyers to insert themselves as the de facto leaders in the struggle, silence families in the process of representation by telling them not to speak about the case publicly, and get in front of the media to set the terms of the struggle ahead. When a family is in the streets, demanding the killer cops be jailed, a grifter lawyer will step in, shut them up by saying that speaking will “hurt their case”, then start to demand things like better training for police or other reforms in front of the news camera. Some lawyers also want the political clout from the families and victims they represent, seeking to carve out a name for themselves as civil rights icons. In those instances, instead of or after they pursue their civil case, they push for sweet-sounding legislative reforms through the courts, all of which rarely hold cops accountable and provide just another smoke screen for the system, in which police brutality is a key function.
When Lawsuits lead to reform
Much of the time, police brutality-related civil suits are filed against cities and local governments for police misconduct or wrongful death. But sometimes, civil suits are pursued for reform, to change laws and practices of local police departments. Historically, these suits have led to progressive reforms such as mandatory body-cams for many police departments, helping to expose the severity of police brutality at a nationwide level. Federal and state civil rights lawsuits have forced consent decrees upon local police departments, essentially meaning local police departments are monitored by the feds or another oversight board to institute certain practices and policies. After the Los Angeles Police Department was exposed for widespread corruption and brutality in the Ramparts Scandal, the department was placed under a consent decree by the Department of Justice from 2001 to 2006 to monitor reforms in the department. In Chicago, in the wake of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, civil suits resulted in a 2019 consent decree requiring reforms to training, use of force, accountability systems, and community engagement that is still in place.
While these might be examples of reforms that lead to tangible changes, the reality is that these often change nothing in terms of police brutality and only serve as illusions to make people feel the system can be reformed. Since the consent decree had ended, LAPD killed more than 1000 people in the city, and in Chicago, since 2019, CPD has been involved in at least 40 fatal shootings while continuing to rack up hundreds of millions in police misconduct lawsuits for things like assault and torture. Police body cams have exposed the epidemic of brutality, but how many of these murders caught on camera have actually led to justice? Reforms rarely ever change the reality on the ground for people under the gun of police brutality, but often serve as a wider purpose of the illusion of change. While often led by opportunist activists or non-profits, and sometimes by sincere people and impacted families seeking change to change the system, these reforms serve as a distraction for people to pursue, leading people to rely on the proper channels, who would otherwise be in the streets demanding justice or bringing forward masses of people to demand something different.
Absent a movement that seriously seeks to confront and end police brutality, it’s no surprise people often turn to lawsuits and reformism as the only course of action to be taken. But aside from the insistence that lawsuits be settled by grifter lawyers, lawsuits and pursuing reforms will strategically have a demobilizing effect on building the kind of movement we need today: a nationwide movement in the streets that demands nothing less than killer cops being jailed. Pursuing a civil lawsuit can take years to get started, finding a lawyer to really take on the fight in a serious way, and dragging families and victims to court for years, all the while the calls for justice fade from the public’s and people’s collective memory (and more importantly, the killer cops remain free). The worry for many families of high-profile police killings is wondering if civil suits will detract from getting criminal charges against killer cops, and the reality is, it often does.
The story of Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old Black man killed by Memphis police on January 7th, 2023, is very instructive for all of us. In the wake of the 2020 uprisings against police brutality, the cops who killed Tyre were properly charged with murder, in hopes of starving off more riots and rebellions that could ignite after the gruesome body cam footage was released. The family of Tyre Nichols has been pursuing a civil lawsuit against the city of Memphis since April 2023, which has since been dragged out and stalled by the courts. Later that year, MPD was placed under a federal consent decree to change policing policies, and Tyre’s family was even invited to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, where he made promises of sweeping police reform. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the video of MPD killing Tyre being released, the city announced massive reforms to policing and how they were changing local policy for police traffic stops (Tyre was pulled over in a pretextual traffic stop by MPD before being killed). All this was done to project the illusion of a changing tide in policing. The short story is this: in 2024, the traffic stop reform law itself was rolled back by the right-wing state government in Tennessee, which later was revealed to have never even been enforced by MPD. The Department of Justice “retracted” its Division’s reports of widespread constitutional violations in MPD from the previous consent decree, and the officers who beat Tyre were acquitted of his murder. What’s even more concerning is that during this period, MPD killed at least 11 more people. The effect was the movement in the streets that emerged when the video footage of Tyre being brutally beaten to death was released to the public, one which should have released it’s outrage into the streets in fury (especially after the aquittal of the killer cops), was not properly escalated and sustained, mired by reforms and pending lawsuits to take people into false directions and away from the direct responses required.
Conclusion
There is nothing wrong with families and victims pursuing lawsuits or even taking settlements, but we have to be clear: lawsuits do not fundamentally change the system or put an end to police brutality. The question we have to ask is, “Are lawsuits and settlements the best we can do?” While people are being beaten by police and killed in record numbers, while families lose loved ones every day across this country, is the best we can hope for that some people get a little money out of it, and the system goes unscathed? In the US, people are trained in a “get mine” attitude, a mindset of only focusing on their abuse, their grief, and their families, that clouds the fact that they belong to an entire class of people who all suffer under the boot of the same system. Settlements are ultimately used to divide people even further by giving out a little money here and there, stoking jealousy and envy among the people, and holding them back from uniting against the system itself. What’s needed today is people standing together and fighting for the better world we all deserve. We can’t rely on the proper channels or the courts to change the system: they never have worked for us and have only created distractions. We can’t rely on the parasitic lawyers who profit from our grief or those who speak for us and set the terms of the fight. We must go outside of them and into the streets, go to the people who suffer like us under this system, and build a mass movement, with the people in the driver’s seat; not grifter lawyers, NGO’s, or opportunist activists. We can’t afford to keep settling for less.
Families Demanding Justice 
Leave a comment