City council approves latest settlement over Denver PD’s use of excessive force during the 2020 George Floyd protests.
DENVER—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.
The plaintiffs’ complaint alleged and documented how, though the protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, the DPD and officers from other agencies in its mutual-aid network used violent and unlawful crowd control tactics against the protesters. This included the launching of tear gas and flashbangs into crowds and at individuals, and shooting projectiles at protesters. The complaint documents many instances of DPD using such “less-lethal” tactics, without provocation, and usually without any warning, resulting in physical injury, escalated danger, and the illegal suppression of exercises of First Amendment rights.
“‘Less-lethal’ is very different from ‘non-lethal,’” explains Wang. “Tear-gas, flashbang grenades, rubber-ball grenades, beanbag shotgun blasts: these are violent measures that can and have caused serious injury, even death. There was no justification, and no excuse, for using them against peaceful protesters just because you don’t like their message.”
Denver’s Office of the Independent Monitor, tasked with ensuring police accountability, largely concurred with these conclusions in a scathing 94-page report on the DPD’s response to the protests in December 2020. The investigation cited numerous cases of inappropriate force being used against protesters without sufficient warning—often by officers with insufficient training in the weapons they were using—and stated that the available video did not show any justification for such actions. “The damage to trust between officers and the community that resulted from the (protests) is impossible to quantify,” the report concludes.
That report recommended several reforms and policy changes for Denver law enforcement, including banning certain weapons, creating stricter rules for the use of violence, and providing more training on crowd control.
“The compensation for the individual plaintiffs—for their injuries, trauma, and the violations of their rights—is important,” says Wang. “But more important is the message this sends to the City of Denver: you need to do better, and you need to make sure that this never happens again.”
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A copy of the complaint can be found here.
