After Bodycam Footage Undoes Its Narrative, NYPD Agrees To Pay $13 Million To Anti-Police Violence Protesters
Cops really hate policing protests that target police. But that has been the reality since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ripped the bandage off an unhealed wound by placing his knee on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd, choking the life out of him during an act that played out like an anthropomorphized version of systemic racism.
Following this murder (and it was a murder, as a jury decided), protests against police violence erupted across the nation. Most protests did not generate anything more newsworthy than the inevitable fact that the governed were unhappy with the armed enforcers employed by their governments. Others were far more spectacular.
The NYPD responded as it almost always does when its authority is even mildly challenged. It fought back, proving the point of demonstrators while NYPD officers violated rights repeatedly. When rights are violated, lawsuits follow. And the NYPD is now (disgracefully) exiting a lawsuit brought by wrongfully arrested protesters by (1) not admitting it has done anything wrong, and (2) graciously allowing New York City taxpayers to cover the costs of its misdeeds. Elizabeth Nolan Brown has the latest on this litigation for Reason:
New York City has reached another record-setting settlement with people arrested in summer 2020 racial justice protests. The city has agreed to pay $13 million collectively to people arrested during 18 protests in Brooklyn and Manhattan—an agreement that amounts to nearly $10,000 per person arrested.
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Neither the city nor the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has admitted to wrongdoing in conjunction with the settlement, which comes as part of a federal class action lawsuit (Sow, et al. v. City of New York, et al.).
That’s the way it works for the general public. The government refuses to admit it’s done anything wrong and it casually walks out of courtrooms, tossing the bill over its shoulder to be added to the public’s tab.
That’s been the standard m.o. for plenty of law enforcement agencies. But the highly paid NYPD has been worse than most, racking up as much as a $250 million/year in civil rights lawsuits settlements for years in a row. And that doesn’t even count the sunk costs of defending NYPD officers against these lawsuits until it becomes apparent they aren’t winnable. That’s millions more city residents are expected to pay on behalf of people who violate rights and the lawyers the city hires to argue directly against its constituents’ best interests.
There’s a good chance the NYPD might have walked away from these lawsuits too. But, thanks to data and recordings generated by officers’ body cameras, the NYPD could no longer credibly pretend officers didn’t routinely violate rights while policing anti-police violence protests. Wired worked with legal reps for plaintiffs to pinpoint and analyze body cam footage, generating plenty of evidence that undercut any assertions the NYPD did nothing wrong.
Lawyers secured the settlement with the aid of a little-known tool that helped them quickly categorize and analyze terabytes of video footage from police body cams, helicopter surveillance, and social media. “We had multiple weeks of protests. We had protests spanning the city of New York. We had thousands of arrests,” says David Rankin, a partner at the law firm Beldock, Levine & Hoffman who was part of the protesters’ legal team. “We had tens of thousands of hours of body cam footage, we had text messages, we had emails, we had just an absolute truckload of data to get through.”
The path through all this data was carved by Codec, a video categorization tool developed by the civil liberties-focused design agency SITU Research.
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Among the videos we reviewed, an NYPD officer can be seen running down the sidewalk while pepper-spraying a person who’s standing against a building, entirely out of the officer’s way. In another video, an officer hits a protester with a car door while driving down the street. Another video shows a group of officers interlocking arms as one of them says, “Just like we fucking practiced.” The officers then charge a group of protesters before singling out a person on the sidewalk and beating them with batons. Taken together, the footage demonstrates widespread, systematic police misconduct during protests that spanned from May 28 to June 4, 2020, across multiple neighborhoods in New York City, according to the legal team.
The NYPD captured the actions that undercut its own assertions of (relative) innocence. But that own-goal isn’t going to result in any officers — or the NYPD itself — being held accountable for the violations caught on camera. All it has done is pushed the city to take money from the wallets of residents to paper over the weeks of rights violations the city will never willingly admit were rights violations.
The settlement agreement [PDF] includes the usual statements swearing that a massive payout does not equal an admission of wrongdoing. And the terms of the agreement force those whose rights were wronged to agree with this non-admission of guilt if they want to partake in the begrudging spending of their own money by the same government that wronged them. The city buys its way out of more serious trouble and apparently believes handing out $13 million in cash (that it has taken from others) means it won’t have to actually address the causes and behaviors that have put it in this position dozens of times a year and cost the people its supposed to be serving billions of dollars over the last decade.