For most people, one of the highest-funded police departments in the country suing its own city for $67.6 million would sound absurd. In St. Louis, it is reality. This spring, the state-controlled St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners filed a lawsuit claiming that tens of millions of dollars from the city’s settlement with the National Football League over the departure of the Rams should be diverted to the police department. The board argued that the settlement funds, along with city reserves, should count as “general revenue” under Missouri law, which would require the city to divert 25 percent of the settlement to policing under a 2025 law.
Earlier this month, a judge rejected that argument, ruling that money received and accounted for in prior years does not suddenly become current-year revenue simply because the police department wants access to it. But the board, joined by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, intends to appeal the ruling.
After the unexpected windfall from the Rams lawsuit, city officials and residents spent years debating how to use the money. Under Board Bill 22, which is advancing through the city’s Board of Aldermen, the funds would go to repairing homes damaged by last year’s tornado, helping displaced residents find housing, demolishing unsafe buildings, rebuilding North St. Louis neighborhoods, repairing sidewalks and streets, upgrading aging water infrastructure, redeveloping vacant properties, and supporting small businesses. The settlement is a rare opportunity to make investments that cities often struggle to afford through ordinary annual budgets, but the police board’s position is that tens of millions of those dollars should be diverted to policing instead. The consequence of a board win in the lawsuit would be less money for rebuilding neighborhoods and more money for an institution that already consumes nearly a third of the city’s general revenue—and generates millions more in legal liabilities, settlements, judgments, and overtime costs.
The details are specific to St. Louis, but the underlying dynamic is far more widespread. The lawsuit offers a revealing look at the extraordinary fiscal and political power police departments enjoy in U.S. cities. At a time when local governments are struggling to fund schools, parks, housing programs, public health initiatives, transit systems, and basic infrastructure, a police department that already consumes a substantial portion of municipal resources is attempting to use the courts to suck even more funding away from other city services.
The board is pursuing this funding shift even as taxpayers already bear an enormous range of police-related costs that rarely appear in discussions about police budgets. When politicians and police advocates talk about police spending, they usually mean appropriations. They point to the department’s annual budget and argue that officers need more personnel, more equipment, or higher salaries. But policing’s true price tag extends far beyond the amount formally allocated to a department each year.
Cities also pay for police misconduct settlements. From judgments entered against officers and departments for excessive force to outside counsel hired to defend misconduct suits, to litigation arising from unconstitutional arrests, wrongful imprisonment, and protest crackdowns, the public bears the consequences of police misconduct long after the underlying incident has faded from public attention.
In St. Louis, those costs have been substantial. The city has paid millions of dollars in police misconduct settlements and judgments over the last decade. For example, it paid approximately $5 million to undercover officer Luther Hall after he was beaten by fellow officers during protests following the acquittal of former officer Jason Stockley. Hall was a St. Louis police officer working undercover when members of the department’s notorious “Civil Disobedience Team” attacked him, leaving him with serious injuries. A jury later awarded Hall nearly $24 million in damages against one of the officers involved. The city also paid millions more to settle claims arising from an infamous “kettling” operation in which officers indiscriminately arrested protesters, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders. Publicly documented misconduct settlements and judgments alone amount to tens of millions of dollars.
The department has other significant expenses outside of its annual budget. Recent city budget records show policing already consumes close to 30 percent of St. Louis’s general revenue. Meanwhile, police overtime spending has repeatedly blown past budgeted amounts, costing taxpayers millions more than anticipated.
Yet none of those costs seem to matter when police officials describe the department’s financial situation. The board’s position is effectively that no matter how much policing already costs the public, the police department is entitled to more. That attitude has become even more striking since Missouri restored state control over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in 2024.
Supporters of state control argued that local officials could not be trusted to prioritize public safety, and claimed the solution was to exclude key decisions from the oversight of the majority-Democrat city government and place them in the hands of a board appointed by the majority-Republican state government. Under this arrangement, local taxpayers fund the police department but have little control over how that money is spent. When disputes with the city government arise, the board can turn to state officials and the courts to extract additional resources. This current litigation is an example of that dynamic in action.
Taxpayers are effectively paying both sides of the dispute, funding the police board’s effort to obtain more money while simultaneously financing the city’s effort to defend itself. At the same time the board has been pursuing $67.6 million from the Rams settlement, it has also proposed double-digit raises for command staff. The proposal includes raises of 16 percent for lieutenants, 18 percent for captains, 20 percent for majors, and 22 percent for lieutenant colonels. City officials have warned that because of pay-parity requirements, the proposal could trigger nearly $6 million in additional spending when corresponding raises for firefighters are included.
Every dollar directed toward one function of government is a dollar unavailable for another. That reality applies to housing departments, health departments, libraries, schools, sanitation services, and parks; but in cities across the country, police institutions are often treated as exempt from the tradeoffs that govern every other part of municipal government.
Across the country, police unions and departments operate as political actors whose primary objective is securing ever-greater fiscal protection from democratic accountability. When cities attempt to reallocate funds or increase oversight, police organizations mobilize and aim the familiar “weak on crime” rhetoric unrelentingly at any politician who threatens their dominance. Nearly every other public institution is expected to justify its spending, but police budgets are often treated as presumptively legitimate and perpetually insufficient.
Public school teachers pay for basic classroom supplies out of their pockets, libraries have to scrape and beg for every scrap of funding, and public infrastructure wastes away, while any attempt to rightsize the police budget is treated like a five-alarm fire. This political asymmetry helps explain why police budgets have often remained resilient even in periods of fiscal stress. It also helps explain why a police board could look at a major municipal settlement and conclude that the money should belong to them.
The fight over this $67.6 million is about much more than a budget formula. The lawsuit is a test of whether city residents can decide how to spend their own money or whether the police’s trump card will continue to drain communities of vital services. And the implications are nationwide. For years, debates about policing have focused on questions of crime, accountability, and public safety. The St. Louis lawsuit highlights a different question that deserves equal attention: How much public money is enough?
The answer from the police board is pretty simple. Whatever the city has, the police should get more of it. Everyone else can go without.
