The May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers inspired millions of people nationwide to come together, at the height of the COVID pandemic, to protest police brutality. Unfortunately, Mr. Floyd’s murder also inspired further police brutality around the country, as municipalities employed excessive force and unreasonably violent crowd control measures against the very people calling for an end to police violence.
Today, the City of Denver settled the latest in a series of lawsuits arising from the protests, with the city council voting to award $2.5 million in compensation to 13 individual plaintiffs who were the victims of excessive force while peacefully protesting in late-May and early-June of 2020.
Denver’s extreme reaction to the protests has already proven controversial and costly for the city. In March 2022, a federal jury awarded 12 protesters $14 million after finding that the DPD had used excessive force against them in 2020. A class-action suit with over 300 people detained for violating the city’s emergency curfew was settled for $4.72 million in August 2023. Other individual suits have been settled for lesser amounts, with additional lawsuits still pending.
Attorney Elizabeth Wang, a partner at the civil rights law firm of Loevy + Loevy, has represented plaintiffs in all of these cases, and (with Loevy attorneys Maria Makar and Jordan Poole) represents the 13 individuals who brought the suit settled today.
“Our clients stood up against police brutality in 2020, and they have furthered that commitment by telling the City, through this lawsuit, that it is wrong to meet a protest against violence with further violence,” says Wang.
Read the full press release on the case here.
