Excerpt from The Guardian | Read the entire article, including the interview with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard at The Guardian.
At least 19 cities will pay settlements to protesters who sustained injuries as a result of law enforcement action.
“There are a lot of pending cases,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation. “I think it’s reasonable to expect that numbers will eclipse past numbers,” she said.
Verheyden-Hilliard noted that mass settlements were paid out for police violence experienced during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and 2012 and for police using excessive force during anti-globalization protests in the early 2000s. Then came 2020.
“We had millions of people flowing into the street to stand against racist police violence. And in city after city and small town after small town, law enforcement was deployed to violently repress demonstrators,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard said.
It is unclear exactly how many people were injured by police while participating in protests that erupted after video emerged of a white police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck during an attempted arrest, while Floyd repeatedly gasped that he couldn’t breathe.