When lawsuits against the police are settled, like the one announced this week in which New York City agreed to pay $4 million to the family of Akai Gurley, people tend to focus on the amount of money changing hands. Sometimes overlooked are the institutional reforms embedded in the deals, and the difficult decisions made by plaintiffs and their lawyers in trading a full public airing of the facts for the recovery of damages.

In many police misconduct cases, the victims and their families are people of limited means for whom a six-figure check could be life-changing. At the same time, lawyers said, those who file, and settle, such suits belong to what might be called a community of the wronged, and often have a strong desire to tell their stories or force the system to change.

“Frequently, plaintiffs in these cases are badly damaged and want or even need compensation,” said Barry Scheck, a lawyer who helped negotiate the $9 million settlement for Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was sexually assaulted by the police with a broomstick inside a Brooklyn station house in 1997. “But you have to trade that off sometimes with their aspirations to expose what happened, and to find solutions.”

Mr. Louima’s suit, which was filed against the city and its main police union, was a rare example of litigation that produced enormous monetary damages and real alterations to policing policy. When the settlement was reached in 2001, Mr. Louima said that he had dropped his three-year battle because he was convinced that the city and the union had started to improve the ways the Police Department trained, monitored and disciplined its officers.