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 for cases closed between 2010-20. The “closed date” in this case comes from “date closed.” We filtered out one employment-related case, leaving a few ambiguous cases included in our final data set, including ones labeled “litigation,” "declaratory judgement," "negligence," "personal injury" and "presuit." The data includes cases in which the city is the sole defendant, so we believe this is the whole universe of settlements related to police misconduct for the given time period.