The New York Law Journal: “The New York City Legal Aid Society has released a searchable database of federal lawsuits brought against New York City police, which it said could arm plaintiffs attorneys with crucial information for their own civil rights suits. The database, called CAPstat, contains more than 2,350 lawsuits filed from January 2015 to June 2018 against more than 3,900 officers, which are searchable by the names of plaintiffs and defendants, as well as the commands and precincts that officer-defendants have worked for. Additionally, the database can show the various co-defendants involved in lawsuits, which could help identify issues caused by teams of officers rather than laying blame at the feet of “one bad apple cop,” said Julie Ciccolini, who served as project manager for the database…The database also contains New York City Police Department payroll data and disciplinary summaries that BuzzFeed News published last year. Disclaimers on the site note that the information comes from federal—not state—lawsuits filed during a limited timeline and that Legal Aid did not interview plaintiffs to the lawsuits entered into the database to determine their credibility as part of the project…”