On the evening of June 2, 2020, Sabrina Zurkuhlen participated in a protest march on the West Side Highway inspired by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis eight days earlier.
When the marchers were confronted by a line of police officers crossing the highway near Vesey Street, Ms. Zurkuhlen, 33, began walking backwards while recording with his phone, according to a class-action lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff. An officer pointed at him, the lawsuit says, punched him, knocked the phone out of his hands and began hitting him with a baton while holding him down.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, alleges that other officers beat and kicked Ms. Zurkuhlen and that he was handcuffed and detained for about eight and a half hours before a summons was issued for curfew violation. That call was later dropped, the suit said, adding that he never got his phone back.
On Wednesday, New York City agreed to pay about $13.7 million to settle a class-action suit, which said unlawful police tactics violated the rights of protesters over the last several days. part of May and early June 2020.
A settlement stipulation entered into an electronic docket just before midnight says the city will pay $9,950 each to about 1,380 people. who were “arrested and/or subjected to force by NYPD officers” at 18 specific locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs – who are affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild, a non-profit group – said the $13.7 million sum was the most the protesters had ever been paid.
In 2013 the city agreed to settle hundreds of claims by people who said they were wrongfully arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan, paying $10.3 million to those taken into custody and $7.6 million to lawyers. in payment.
“The NYPD’s crackdown on dissent has continued through multiple mayoral administrations,” Wylie Stecklow, one of the class action attorneys, said in a statement.
The Police Department referred a request for comment to the city’s Law Department, which did not immediately respond. The settlement agreement states that the defendants deny liability and deny that there is any pattern or practice that deprives anyone of their rights.
The settlement, pending a judge’s approval, resolves one of the most important cases of some to emerge from the protests in New York City, which saw mass arrests, the use of pepper spray and property damage and theft.
The killing of Mr. Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer has sparked a nationwide outcry over police brutality and a broader reckoning of race, power and accountability. People across the country chanted “Black Lives Matter” as they joined marches that filled streets, highways and bridges.
Most of the marches in New York City were peaceful, but police said more than a dozen of their vehicles were set on fire. And looting occurred in various neighborhoods, especially in SoHo, where on consecutive nights people who often seemed to have little to do with the protests broke into and looted luxury stores.
Mayor Bill de Blasio initiated the curfew, the city’s first in 75 years. As the looting subsided, the police dispersed or arrested people who marched outside the designated time. According to the New York State attorney general’s office, police made just over 2,000 protest-related arrests between May 28 and June 7, 2020.
New York Times journalists covering the protests saw officers repeatedly charging past curfew protesters with little apparent provocation, pushing people onto sidewalks and beating them with stick
Some of the people who stood to receive compensation under the class-action settlement were arrested. Others were not taken into custody but, the lawsuit alleges, were subjected to police conduct intended to interfere with and inhibit their ability to exercise First Amendment rights.
Lawyers for the protesters said the behavior included indiscriminate use of pepper spray or batons and crowd control tactics such as “kettling,” which kept protesters between lines of police and prevented them from leaving.
In March, the city settled a lawsuit over that approach, agreeing to pay at least $21,500 to each of the 320 protesters who said they were surrounded on June 4, 2020, in the Mott Haven area of the Bronx. police officers running at them while wielding batons and using pepper spray.
Lawyers for the protesters say that kind of response is largely in response to what they describe as decades of flawed police training, which they say treats many forms of protest as civil unrest, fueling the use of force to disperse and demoralize protesters for the protection of civil liberties. .
“Since at least the 1990s,” the class-action suit says, “the NYPD has failed to properly train its officers to properly conduct First Amendment assemblies.”
City attorneys have denied in court papers that police have a history of unconstitutionally handling protests. While acknowledging that many of the 2020 protests were peaceful, they described the police as battling a violent storm of anger interspersed with serious criminal activity, all taking place against the backdrop of a pandemic.
“Some protests have devolved into looting and rioting,” the lawyers wrote. “Protesters set police cars on fire; demolished houses in the precinct; threw rocks, bricks, bottles at officers; officers were stabbed, punched, bitten; and threw molotov cocktails at the officers.”
Both sides used visual evidence to bolster their arguments. In a court filing, city attorneys included photos of four bloodied police officers who they said were injured by protesters.
Lawyers for the protesters, for their part, have drawn from what they say are thousands of police body-camera and helicopter videos to collect records of officers wielding batons, using pepper spray or pushing the demonstrators.
A video from outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on May 29, 2020, shows several police officers, including a commander, directing baton blows at a figure on the ground. Another video shows a group of officers following protesters down a sidewalk in East Flatbush on May 30 and knocking some to the pavement.
Before the city produced that material, video from the protests circulated almost simultaneously on social media.
A video clip, recorded in Brooklyn, shows two police SUVs crashing into a crowd of people standing on a street. Another showed a Lower Manhattan officer crossing Broadway brandishing a pistol as people screamed and fled.
