UCLA School of Law

In most departments, police learn little from damage action lawsuits. Suits are defended and resolved with no effort to gather and analyze litigation data in ways that could inform personnel and policy decisions. Given what we know about our legal system, departments’ inattention to lawsuits makes some sense. As many have observed, lawsuits are highly imperfect sources of information. Suits are underrepresentative of harms generally and plaintiffs win and lose for reasons – and are compensated at amounts – often divorced from the merits of their claims. Cases drag on for years, and are often brought against individual bad actors instead of the institutional players best suited to address systemic harms.

This Article reveals that lawsuits can play an important role in performance improvement efforts, despite these imperfections, by revealing information about the incidence and causes of misconduct. This view is grounded in a study, the first of its kind, which examines the practices of a small handful of law enforcement agencies that systematically pay attention to suits. These departments gather lawsuit data at every stage of the litigation process and use that information to identify personnel and policy weaknesses. Lawsuits have proven valuable sources of information: Suits have alerted departments to incidents of misconduct, and the information developed during the course of discovery and trial has been found to be more comprehensive than that generated through internal channels. The practices in these departments additionally mitigate lawsuits’ undeniable flaws. Department practices take advantage of the strengths – while minimizing the weaknesses – of lawsuit data and therefore suggest a promising way to learn from litigation.