WE LOVE NEW YORK BUT DOES NEW YORK LOVE YOU? New York City to Pay Up to $75 Million Over Dismissed S

According to BENJAMIN WEISER at nytimes.com

New York City has agreed to pay up to $75 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit that accused its Police Department of issuing hundreds of thousands of criminal summonses that were later found to be without legal justification, according to a signed copy of the proposed deal filed on Monday.

The summonses had been issued for typically minor offenses, like disorderly conduct, trespassing and drinking in public — quality-of-life concerns that had been a major theme of policing in New York for two decades or so.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs had asserted that the summonses were part of a policy that was “selectively and disproportionately enforced in minority communities.” That claim was also a focus of earlier lawsuits that had challenged the department’s policing philosophy that relied on stop, question and frisk encounters.

The city’s use of stop-and-frisk as a crime-prevention strategy ended in 2013 after a class-action suit resulted in a sweeping decision that found that the city had engaged in a “policy of indirect racial profiling” in minority communities. In announcing three years ago that the city had agreed to reforms, Mayor Bill de Blasio said stop-and-frisk had “unfairly targeted young African-American and Latino men.”

The proposed settlement filed on Monday was seen by lawyers for the plaintiffs as another repudiation of a city policing policy. It covers at least 900,000 summonses, issued from 2007 to 2015, that were dismissed on grounds of legal insufficiency, which a federal judge later found was “tantamount to a decision that probable cause was presumptively lacking.”

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The lawsuit, filed in 2010, alleged that under an unlawful “pattern and practice” enforced by city officials, police officers were told to issue summonses “regardless of whether any crime or violation” had occurred in order to meet a minimum quota requirement — an allegation the city explicitly denied in the proposed deal.

But under the settlement, the city agreed to send out departmentwide notifications to reiterate its policy that quotas and numerical performance goals were banned, that supervisors who put them in place could be subject to disciplinary action and that officers who believed they had been threatened or retaliated against for failing to comply with a quota should notify the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

“Quotas for arrests, summonses or stops have never been used by the N.Y.P.D.,” J. Peter Donald, a police spokesman, said in a statement on Monday. “The department measures success based on the prevention and reduction of crime.”

The settlement could be nearly double the $41 million that the city paid to five men in 2014 to resolve the so-called Central Park jogger lawsuit, concerning their overturned convictions in the 1989 beating and rape of a woman. But the amount is less than the $98 million settlement (not including legal fees) reached that same year in a discrimination case against the Fire Department.

Because of the large number of potential claims — the 900,000 summonses represent about one-quarter of all such summonses issued during the period — the deal lays out a process of notifying people who are eligible for compensation, which has been set at a maximum of $150 per person per incident.

The city would set aside $56.5 million for those people, and individual payments could be lowered, depending on how many claims were made. (The number of potential claimants is expected to grow because the settlement will also cover such summonses issued after 2015.) Any settlement funds not paid out would revert to the city, which would also pay $18.5 million in attorneys’ fees.

Zachary W. Carter, the city’s corporation counsel, said in a statement that the agreement was “a fair resolution” for members of the class-action lawsuit and was also “in the best interests of the city.”