This data is a part of a FiveThirtyEight/The Marshall Project effort to collect comprehensive data on police misconduct settlements from 2010-19. See the data dictionary here and the story here.
We received settlement data from 2010 through 2019. We did not receive any cases in which the city was listed as the defendant, meaning there may have been more settlements related to police misconduct paid out during this time frame that were not included in the data set. We filtered out motor vehicle claims but kept everything else, including one case with a missing value for type. Our incident variable comes from a column originally named “DOL” (which we interpret to mean “date of loss”).