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New York City to pay $13 million to settle claims by Black Lives Matter protesters
By
Samantha Max
Published Jul 20, 2023
Modified Jul 20, 2023
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Maria Sbytova / Shutterstock
By
Samantha Max
Published Jul 20, 2023
Modified Jul 20, 2023
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New York City has agreed to pay nearly $10,000 apiece to more than a thousand people arrested during Black Lives Matter protests in Manhattan and Brooklyn in 2020, according to a $13 million settlement finalized on Wednesday.
The payout agreement follows a record-setting settlement earlier this year for hundreds of people who attended another 2020 protest in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. In that case, the city agreed to pay $21,500 to each eligible protester, for a total of about $6 million.
The agreement includes no admission of wrongdoing, but plaintiffs and attorneys in the new settlement described it as proof that the NYPD’s training and culture fostered a response to the 2020 protests that violated New Yorkers’ constitutional rights.
“Although the city does not admit liability in this settlement, the size of this monetary settlement, coupled with the earlier settlement about Mott Haven, strongly suggests otherwise,” lead plaintiff Adama Sow said in a statement. “It is also a testament to the importance of collective action to redress violations of important constitutional rights.”
Last year, the city spent $121 million on payouts for lawsuits against police.
In an email, the city law department said the settlement is "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 NYPD has improved numerous practices to address the challenges it faced at protests during the pandemic," the email said.
In an 85-page lawsuit filed in 2021, attorneys representing people who attended protests between May 28 and June 4, 2020 argued that NYPD officers who responded to demonstrations against systemic racism and police use of force in the days after George Floyd’s killing took steps to “instill fear and chill the speech of protesters.”
The suit claimed police harmed protesters with batons and pepper spray, illegally arrested them, restrained them with flex cuffs so tight that they caused nerve damage and detained them in close quarters as COVID-19 was still spreading rampantly through the city.
Attorneys argued that members of the NYPD weren’t properly trained on First Amendment rights or proper use-of-force procedures. They also said police used a crowd-control strategy known as kettling, in which officers encircle protesters just before they’re about to make mass arrests, leaving them with no path to escape.
Advocates for police reform have urged the department to disband its Strategic Response Group, a specialized unit that patrols at protests and demonstrations. At a City Council hearing earlier this year, some activists and elected officials said the unit isn’t properly trained — a claim the department has disputed.
Several reports have criticized police for their handling of the 2020 protests. The Department of Investigation found the NYPD “lacked a clearly defined strategy” and used tactics that “contributed to heightened tensions.” Attorney General Letitia James has also sued the department, urging police and city leaders “to end the pervasive use of excessive force and false arrests” during protests.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board, which looks into allegations of officer misconduct, received hundreds of complaints related to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. But the agency struggled to investigate many of those cases due to a combination of procedural issues within the CCRB, lack of cooperation from police and challenges identifying the swaths of officers deployed at demonstrations across the city, a Gothamist investigation found.
In an almost 600-page report published nearly three years after the protests, the watchdog agency said it had determined that at least 146 NYPD members broke department policy, or in about 40% of the cases it was able to fully investigate. That’s out of thousands of officers who worked at the demonstrations.
The massive settlement comes just days after the appointment of the NYPD’s new commissioner, Edward Caban, who will be tasked with juggling the aggressive crime-fighting strategies of the mayor and calls from advocates for police reform. Caban is the department’s first Latino commissioner, following the first Black woman to lead the NYPD, Keechant Sewell.
This story has been updated to reflect that the NYPD declined to comment.
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public safety
Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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