Detroit, MI

The Detroit Police Department (DPD) has paid $83.1 million in documented police misconduct settlements between 2015 and 2025, according to records compiled by Michigan Capitol Confidential, WXYZ Detroit, and the National Police Funding Database. The dataset accelerated sharply in the early 2020s: DPD paid $56 million in settlements between 2020 and mid-2023 alone, and $64 million across 111 settlements from 2022 to 2025 - a pace of roughly $22,767 per day.

The most significant individual documented settlement is the $7.5 million paid in July 2022 to Desmond Ricks, a Black man who served 25 years in prison after a false murder conviction. During the original 1992 investigation, police seized a gun belonging to Ricks' mother and claimed it was the murder weapon. A 2016 review by the University of Michigan Law School Innocence Clinic found that the bullets that killed the victim did not match the gun - and that the original police lab analysis had been completely wrong. The $7.5 million settlement, approved by a federal judge, represents one of the largest wrongful conviction payouts in Detroit history.

In November 2023, a judge approved a $5 million settlement to the daughter of Clifford Woodards II, a prominent local attorney and media personality killed in 2021 when Officer Teaira Iris Funderburg ran a red light at 1:00 a.m. while pursuing a suspect. Prior to the incident, Funderburg had lost her license twice and had previously struck another person while running a red light. The settlement was approved without admission of liability.

The most significant pending exposure in the Detroit dataset is a $25 million federal civil rights lawsuit filed in February 2026 by Brittany Towns, a mother of five who was shot six times by Officer Zachary Melvin during a traffic stop in October 2024. Towns survived and filed suit against both Melvin and the City of Detroit. The case is pending trial as of April 2026.

Detroit is not under a federal consent decree and has not been the subject of a DOJ pattern-or-practice investigation. For insurance underwriters, the Detroit dataset reflects a high-volume, accelerating settlement environment driven by a combination of use-of-force incidents, wrongful conviction cases, and officer misconduct - with a known pending pipeline of at least $25 million in active litigation.