There's one thing that the preceding cases, from accidents to willful misconduct, have in common: Almost all the victims survived. What if they had died, wrongfully, at the hands of police? Those multimillion-dollar settlements would have been pared down to the hundreds of thousands or the tens of thousands. Or to nothing. Financially speaking, in cold accounting terms, the city of San Diego would have been better off had Frances Maday perished in that accident.
