Opinion

The price ain’t right

Scott Stringer has an idea he hopes will help contain the rising costs New York is paying for settlements and claims.

Borrowing from the NYPD’s CompStat program developed in the ’90s to track crime patterns so cops could be deployed more efficiently, the comptroller calls his new tracking program ClaimStat.

He hopes ClaimStat will help save money by flagging “troubling patterns” of agencies and city workers needlessly costing the city money.

We wish Stringer well. But we don’t need ClaimStat to highlight what may prove one of the biggest contributors to rising costs: bad judgment calls.

A perfect example is the $40.7 million payout to the Central Park 5, the men whose convictions for the brutal 1989 rape of Trisha Meili were later overturned. This settlement — for malicious prosecution and racial bias — has inspired others to ask for more for their claims.

Take Jabbar Collins, imprisoned for 16 years due to the apparent malfeasance of Brooklyn Assistant DA Michael Vecchione.

Certainly, he deserves compensation. But his lawyer is now pointing to the Central Park 5’s million-dollar-per-year-served settlement as the bar by which Collins’ payout should be set.

Previously, a settlement for wrongful conviction would average about $305,000 per year served. Under the Central Park 5 standard, that now triples.

Collins is not alone. Others claiming wrongful conviction see the Central Park 5 settlement as setting a new floor.

In short, while we’re all for Scott Stringer’s ClaimStat program, it’s too bad he didn’t wave his own flag about the pricing precedent the mayor set when he agreed to such an outlandish amount of taxpayer money for the Central Park 5.