The City of New York settled a lawsuit Wednesday of about $13.7 million after allegations of mistreating over 1,000 protestors in the wake of the George Floyd’s killing in summer 2020.
The New York Times cites an example of one the plaintiffs represented in the class-action lawsuit, where one officer lunged at a protestor as she was recording a confrontation with police, “knocked the phone from her hands and began striking her with a baton as he tackled her.”
Other police tactics were said to have violated the rights of protestors over several days of protests in May and early June of 2020.
The city will now pay about $9,950 each to “up to about 1,380 people who ‘were arrested and/or subjected to force by N.Y.P.D. officers’ at 18 specific locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn,” the Times reports.
The protests against the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a worldwide movement against police brutality, many protests themselves marred by police aggression.
The City of Philadelphia settled a lawsuit of over $9 million for “physical and emotional injuries” to protestors in 2020, and protestors sued the City of Denver after police misconduct.
As of May 2023, Denver had paid over $2 million in claims. A civil rights attorney representing some of the plaintiffs remarked that “Denver was worse than negligent, just so reckless, in the way that they policed these protests.”