NYC to pay millions to police brutality protesters violently arrested by NYPD

Hundreds of people who were trapped, beaten, and wrongfully arrested by New York City police officers during a nonviolent 2020 racial justice protest in the Bronx will each receive $21,500 if a judge approves the terms of a settlement filed in federal court late Tuesday.

Around 300 people were arrested, many of them brutally, on June 4, 2020 in the Mott Haven neighborhood while peacefully protesting police violence and systemic racism following the May 25 murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“We had every right to protest, yet, the city of New York made an explicit statement that day that the people of the Bronx are at will to be terrorized,” 31-year-old Samira Sierra of the Bronx, one of the protesters who sued the city, told The New York Times.

Joshua S. Moskovitz, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told BuzzFeed News they hoped the settlement “marks an inflection point for policing in New York City.”

“This unprecedented settlement recognizes that the NYPD’s actions in Mott Haven were grievously wrong,” he said.

In social media posts, organizers of the June 4 “FTP4” protest—Take Back the Bronx and Bronxites for NYPD Accountability—urged participants to “take back the streets.” One Instagram post featured a burning New York Police Department (NYPD) van.

The protest was overwhelmingly peaceful. However, less than an hour into the demonstration—and 10 minutes before an 8:00 pm curfew—a phalanx of heavily armored NYPD officers and cops on bikes began “kettling,” or trapping, protesters so they could not leave. Attorneys for the arrested protesters—whose cases were ultimately dismissed—called it a “preplanned show of force.”

After 8:00 pm, officers began violently attacking and arresting people for violating curfew. They beat demonstrators “packed like sardines” and unable to escape, with some officers standing atop vehicles swinging their batons down at bodies. Some protesters said they saw officers smiling as they swung into the crowd.

“We went there to protest police brutality and we became victims of police brutality,” one demonstrator recounted.

“They dragged me on the ground and beat me with batons,” one protester told Human Rights Watch after his arrest. “Somewhere in the process of being cuffed, I had a knee on my neck.”

According to the demonstrators’ lawsuit: “Many protesters were left injured and bleeding. Some protesters fainted, or lost consciousness and went into convulsions.”

Among those arrested—and sometimes brutalized—were medical and legal volunteers, as well as journalists covering the demonstration and even passers-by.

Arrestees were held in “dangerously overcrowded and unsanitary detention conditions with many people who lacked masks, exacerbating health risks during the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to Physicians for Human Rights. Many officers wore no masks.