New York City has agreed to pay more than $13 million to settle a federal lawsuit brought on behalf of hundreds of people who were arrested or subjected to the use of force by police during racial justice protests in 2020 in what attorneys for the plaintiffs believe is one of the largest payouts ever awarded to protesters in a class-action lawsuit in the United States.
About 1,380 people who were at 18 protests in the city over the course of a week after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis will be eligible to receive a $9,950 payment, according to court documents. Those who were arrested on certain charges, including assaulting a police officer, will not be eligible to receive a payment, according to Elena Cohen, a lead attorney in the case and former president of the National Lawyers’ Guild, which is representing the plaintiffs.
Cohen said the settlement, outlined in documents filed Wednesday in Manhattan, could be preliminarily approved by a judge soon, but it will likely take months before the agreement is finalized and the plaintiffs are paid. Though the defendants, which include the city, former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the New York City Police Department and others, do not have to admit any wrongdoing, Cohen called the settlement “a first step toward towards justice.”
“Having the settlement in this record amount of money, even if it doesn’t come with an explicit ‘we did something wrong,’ gives a message that the city of New York understands that what they did was wrong and really legitimizes that what happened to them and other people with them isn’t okay,” she told USA TODAY.
What does the lawsuit allege?
The plaintiffs claim the city “systematically attacked, trapped, and arrested people who were joining in protests condemning police violence in response to the gruesome murder of George Floyd,” court documents state.
Officers corralled protesters using a tactic known as kettling, assaulted them with batons and pepper spray and then unlawfully arrested them en masse, according to court documents, which cite videos produced during discovery that show the practices were “widespread and pervasive.”
Cohen said video footage showed one of the lead plaintiffs, Adama Sow, was blindfolded by police with his face mask and forced to kneel on a street in a pool of someone else’s blood.
“When you hear the stories and see the videos, it was extremely traumatic and extremely scary,” Cohen said.
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What does the city say?
Attorneys for the city maintained that police were responding to a chaotic and unprecedented situation, pointing to some unruly protests in which police vehicles were set on fire and officers pelted with rocks and plastic bottles.
The city invoked qualified immunity, which protects police officers from lawsuits stemming from lawful work performed in the line of duty, and defended the decision to arrest medics and legal observers as within the rights of the department.
Attorneys listed for the defendants did not immediately respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY. The NYPD referred questions to the city’s law department, which in a statement said the settlement “was in the best interests of all parties.”
“The City and NYPD remain committed to ensuring the public is safe and people’s right to peaceful expression is protected,” the statement said. “The NYPD has improved numerous practices to address the challenges it faced at protests during the pandemic.”
‘A drop in the bucket’ or a ‘terrific settlement?’
Without a policy component or admission of wrongdoing, Howard University School of Law Professor Justin Hansford questioned the impact settlement will have on the police department.
“This could easily just get to be a drop in the bucket of the huge New York City budget overall,” he said. “So that’s the big concern.”
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, acknowledged there are differences between strictly monetary settlements and those with institutional changes attached. But she called the New York case a “terrific settlement” and said it “certainly sends a message.”
“…I think for the people who are harmed, it’s really important to try and get any measure of relief that you can for them and so I applaud this even though it’s, you know, monetary,” said Verheyden-Hilliard, who also said she doesn’t think the New York case is definitively the largest class-action payout related to protests.
Plaintiff Savitri Durkee said in a statement that while the settlement does not address the injustice that sparked the protests, it “(affirms) our constitutional right to protest that injustice.”
“I’m going to spend the next few months making sure this settlement reaches every single activist in the class and I’m going right back in the street – and the First Amendment is my permit,” she said.
Settlement is one of many
The settlement comes months after the city agreed to pay several hundred other people $21,500 apiece to settle a class-action lawsuit related to a similar incident involving kettling in the Bronx. That proposed settlement was believed to be among the highest-ever per-person settlements in a class-action case involving mass arrests.
More than 600 protest claims and lawsuits have been brought against New York City, and roughly half have resulted in settlements and resolutions that cost the city nearly $12 million, according to the office of the city’s comptroller.
At least 19 U.S. cities will pay more than $80 million to people who filed lawsuits after being injured by police during the 2020 protests, The Guardian reported in May.
Contributing: Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
