Settlement agreements in the US are good and bad

In the United States (and some other countries) there exists the legal concept of a "settlement": When one party sues another one for some kind of crime or wrongdoing, the two parties can negotiate a (legally supervised and enforceable) settlement before going to court. In other words, rather than going through all the legal process of going to court, they can settle the case out-of-court (although still under the court's supervision and agreement). This usually involves coming up with an agreement where eg. the injured party gets some kind of compensation (usually monetary one) and legally agrees to not pursue the case further. (There may be be all kinds of other things agreed by either or both parties, depending on what kind of case it is.)

This kind of arrangement has all kinds of benefits: It saves time and money on court proceedings, freeing up the courts for other matters, and often the two parties come to a mutual agreement among themselves rather than a third party (ie. a judge and/or jury) deciding, which rarely satisfies both parties. It may also be cheaper for the parties involved because of the saved time (after all, the hourly rates of lawyers, especially in the United States, are exorbitant.)

Settlements are the preferred form of resolving such conflicts precisely because they lessen the already time-burdened courts of law, and in fact a good majority of cases are settled out of court (quite archetypically "for an undisclosed sum".)

However, there's also somewhat of a drawback to such settlements. And that's that the guilty party never gets an actual legal verdict and punishment. In other words, the guilty party never gets actual legal consequences for their actions, and it doesn't set any kind of legal precedent for any future such cases.

This is especially egregious when it comes to lawsuits filed by individual citizens against a governmental entity (such as a police department or a city): Something like 99.9% of these lawsuits, when they aren't just dismissed, are settled out of court.

In principle (as pointed out by many lawyers) this is a good thing from one point of view: These settlements quite often compensate the victim with a sum that's significantly higher than they could expect to get if the case was brought to court and decided by a judge or jury. Even in the sue-happy United States the sums granted by courts as compensation for eg. rights violations are often surprisingly small. (There may be some favoritism and corruption involved, as judges are often buddies with the governmental entity being sued, such as the police department or city government. Even when the judge just can't outright dismiss the case because it's so egregious, the amount of money being awarded to the victim may sometimes be laughably small.)

However, there's another aspect to this: By being settled out of court, the governmental entity is never officially legally found guilty, and usually does not need to publicly accept guilt. A governmental entity settling a lawsuit out-of-court is, for all intents and purposes, paying money to the victim to have the lawsuit go away. And what's worse, it's actually taxpayer money. The people involved aren't paying it out of their own pockets (as would be the case when a citizen is sued and found guilty.)

So, in a sense, it's essentially bribery: The governmental entity is bribing, completely legally, the injured party into not suing them. And they aren't even using their own money to do so, but taxpayer money.

While the victim of the crime is getting good compensation, nevertheless the morality of this is questionable.