Wichita, KS

The Wichita Police Department has paid $6.7 million in documented civil settlements between 2019 and 2026, with the dataset dominated by a single case that became nationally significant. The $5 million settlement in the Andrew Finch wrongful death case (2023) is the largest wrongful death settlement arising from a swatting incident in United States history - a distinction that makes Wichita's dataset uniquely relevant to discussions of police liability in the context of third-party-initiated incidents.

On December 28, 2017, Wichita police responded to a false 911 call reporting a hostage situation at the home of Andrew Finch. The call was made by a gamer in California as an act of retaliation in an online dispute - a practice known as swatting. Officer Justin Rapp shot Finch when he appeared at his front door, unaware of the false call. Rapp was not charged criminally. The MacArthur Justice Center, which represented the Finch family, described the settlement as a landmark recognition of police liability in swatting scenarios. No officer is named in the PoliceRiskIndex Wichita dataset because the shooter was not held civilly liable as an individual - the settlement was paid by the city.

The second-largest settlement in the Wichita dataset is a $625,000 class-action settlement in 2024 resolving a lawsuit over the Wichita Police Department's use of a discriminatory gang list. The ACLU of Kansas challenged the list, which disproportionately designated Black and Latino residents as gang members based on criteria that included association with family members. The settlement included policy reforms requiring the department to purge the existing list and establish new designation criteria.

Additional settlements documented in Wichita City Council resolutions include a $500,000 motor vehicle accident settlement (Resolution 23-461), a $262,500 incident settlement (Resolution 23-379), and a $200,000 motor vehicle accident settlement (Resolution 26-072). These smaller cases reflect the routine civil liability exposure that exists alongside high-profile incidents in every department's settlement record.

Wichita is classified as a Non–Consent Decree Dataset in the PoliceRiskIndex system. Kansas's Open Records Act is one of the most accessible in the country, and Wichita publishes city council resolutions approving settlements as public documents. For insurance underwriters, the Wichita dataset illustrates a different risk profile than the named-officer concentration cases: a single catastrophic incident generating 74.7% of total exposure, with no individual officer attribution - a scenario that requires different modeling assumptions than the repeat-offender pattern documented in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis.