New Yorkers arrested in 2020 BLM protests to get $13M in historic settlement

New York City has agreed to pay out $13 million to more than a thousand New Yorkers arrested in the summer 2020 George Floyd demonstrations, marking the largest settlement agreement with protesters in a class-action suit in U.S. history, according to court records filed late Wednesday.

About 1,380 people arrested during protests between May 28 and June 4, 2020 in 18 Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods are slated to each receive at least $9,950 plus lawyers’ fees, under the terms of the proposed Manhattan federal court settlement with New York City, which U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon must approve. Attorneys’ fees are expected to be in the millions.

New Yorkers joined millions nationwide following the Black Minnesota man’s killing by white former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, now serving time for murder, taking to the streets for weeks in record numbers to protest police brutality and systemic racism.

The case filed in early 2021 by attorneys in the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild accused the NYPD of violating protesters’ civil and constitutional rights in multiple ways, including excessive use of force, improper use of pepper spray and employing violent crowd control measures like “kettling,” in which they barricaded protesters without letting them disperse. Footage of one incident in Brooklyn showed officers throwing bicycles at protesters.

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs said they combed through thousands of videos in the case, including cell phone videos, police body camera footage and scenes captured by helicopters. They said no case has ever featured such an enormous trove of police surveillance footage.

Civil rights lawyer Wylie Stecklow said the settlement needs to be a wake-up call.

“Any reasonable municipal actor paying over $13 [million] of taxpayer funds to more than 1,300 people whose rights were violated while participating in expressive speech activity would recognize the payment as a red flag and a need to correct NYPD’s decades old problem with constitutional compliant protest policing,” Stecklow said.

“NYPD’s suppression of dissent has continued through numerous mayoral administrations,” he added. “While the arc of the moral universe is indeed long, sometimes it needs reform to bend towards justice.”

The city Law Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the proposed settlement, which was filed to Judge McMahon less than 30 minutes before the midnight deadline to submit a motion for settlement and class certification.

The historic agreement is part of a complex set of consolidated class-action cases involving thousands of people in at least seven lawsuits arising from the summer 2020 protests. The city has been sanctioned in the ongoing litigation for what a magistrate judge previously described as “completely inexcusable” idleness in responding to deadlines.

The city settled two of the cases in March for $6 million, agreeing to pay $21,500 each to more than 300 people arrested at a protest in Mott Haven in the Bronx, where footage captured police hitting protesters with batons while their hands were in zip ties and pepper spraying their bloodied faces.

That settlement came weeks after the NYPD issued a damning internal report acknowledging the botched response to the widescale protests, finding that no single police commander was in charge and cops lacked “timely intelligence” as the demos intensified.

Remy Green, another of the attorneys involved in the years-long litigation, said the settlement marked an immense victory, but that the city’s taxpayers “will need to keep shelling out millions until City Hall stops bowing to the worst violent whims of the NYPD.”

Several protest cases are yet to be settled, including a suit brought against the NYPD by the New York attorney general, another by an independent news photographer and lawsuits filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society.

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“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. It is also a testament to the importance of collective action to redress violations of important constitutional rights,” one of the protesters involved in Wednesday’s settlement, Adama Sow, said in a statement.

Savitri Durkee, another demonstrator set to be compensated, said she would make sure everyone owed money knows about it.

“The harmful realities we were protesting in 2020 persist. Black and brown people are disproportionately harassed, prosecuted, jailed and killed by police,” Durkee said. “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.”

The suit named former Mayor Bill de Blasio and former top NYPD officials as defendants. They would not be held liable or have to admit wrongdoing, under the terms of the settlement.

Civil rights lawyer Gideon Orion Oliver said along with the $13 million, his clients want to see transparency, investigations, discipline and reform.

“This massive settlement is more proof of what protesters already know: that the NYPD has been, and is, wildly out of control. Such settlements are supposed to motivate the government to change policies and training, and to increase oversight — but none of that has happened here,” Oliver said.

“New Yorkers can’t trust our city government to guarantee those things.”