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. In the final data set, “docket_number” comes from “Case No.,” “summary_allegations” comes from “Subject,” “filed_date” comes from “opened data,” “closed_date” comes from “date paid” and “amount_awarded” is equal to the sum of the judgment amount and the settlement amount. The data includes no perfect duplicates. We did not filter out any cases. Two cases were somewhat ambiguous (the first labeled "Police - Other Failure to provide police protection; Failure to Properly train, supervise and discipline" and the second labeled "Wrongful Death - Police Police - Hit by Fleeing Suspect"), but we kept them in. There were many instances in which the City of Milwaukee was listed as the defendant. Six of the cases were erroneously marked as “open” in the initial data we received, but we confirmed they were indeed closed and corrected the label in the final data.