The city will pay $10 million to protesters harmed during the Seattle Police Department’s response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the city and the CHOP Capitol Hill protest camps, settling a sprawling lawsuit and bringing to a close one of the last major legal battles from the period of unrest and heavy response from law enforcement.
“A historic legal battle of epic proportions brought by 50 George Floyd/BLM Peaceful Protesters against Seattle and its Police Department has ended,” the Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore announced Wednesday.
“This decision was the best financial decision for the city considering risk, cost, and insurance,” Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison said in a statement on the deal. “The case has been a significant drain on the time and resources of the city and would have continued to be so through an estimated three-month trial that was scheduled to begin in May.”
Davison said the city “admits no wrongdoing in the case, which was significant in scope, with plaintiffs alleging injuries sustained during the protests.”
Included in the plaintiffs is the estate of Summer Taylor, the Capitol Hill resident and protester who died in a July 2020 crash on I-5 as a driver attempted to speed through a demonstration on the freeway. In September, CHS reported on the plea deal that brought a 6 1/2 year sentence for the driver in that case.
That sentence and the newly announced settlement mark some of the last major legal maneuverings as the City of Seattle has been tied up in court for years in battles over civil rights and wrongful death lawsuits stemming from the protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the flawed Seattle Police response.
There have been additional important milestones in criminal cases including a 14-year sentence in the case of Marcel Long, the teen who shot and killed 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Jr. on the edge of CHOP in June 2020.
The $10 million settlement is the largest financial hit from the legal battles. Last February, the city reached a $3.6 million settlement with a group of Capitol Hill property owners and businesses over allegations city officials showed “deliberate indifference” in allowing the CHOP occupied protest camps to grow.
Another legal matter from the protests, meanwhile, has also been wrapped up. Late last year, it was determined no charges will be filed against former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Police Chief Carmen Best over deleted text messages from the time of the 2020 protests, after a King County Sheriff investigation found no evidence of criminal intent to destroy public records. The deleted texts had been a centerpiece of the lawsuit brought against the city by Capitol Hill property owners and developers with claims of “Spoliation of Evidence” and intentional subterfuge.
The newly announced $10 million settlement with the group of protesters comes after expert reviews have documented multiple errors in the flawed response of Seattle Police and city officials to the 2020 protests.
Last year, a panel representing community groups, Seattle Police, and neighborhood businesses and organizations analyzing the 2020 protests in Seattle and the response to the waves of demonstrations and unrest that embroiled the city and made Capitol Hill a flashpoint in the Black Lives Matter and police reform movements concluded its work with a call for city leaders to issue “a sincere, public apology.”
The panel concluded Seattle Police made mistakes in its heavy-handed, overly dangerous crowd control strategies and response with communication failures playing what the panel said were especially large parts in the damaging events as protesters fought back and set fires in solidarity with crackdowns in Portland.
Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore described some of the most significant injuries suffered by the plaintiffs:
“All of the Protesters were engaged in First Amendment speech and activity against the very police brutality which they were met with,” the firm’s announcement reads.
The firm also says the city’s attempts to fight the lawsuit including a failed argument that the protesters bringing the suit “assumed the risk” of exercising First Amendment rights to protest and also attempted to force the plaintiffs to “attend involuntary psychiatric and medical examinations.”
“During the three-and-a-half-year fight, the City paid tens of millions of dollars to its outside
counsel K&L Gates, one of the largest firms in the country,” the firm said in its announcement. “No expense was spared.”
Despite the findings and settlements, a federal consent decree was lifted from the Seattle Police Department last year, ending 12 years of controls and oversight after a civil rights investigation found evidence of excessive force and biased policing.
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Well at least we can take comfort in knowing that only us taxpayers will suffer any repercussions for SPD’s gross negligence, incompetence, and violence.
Our new conservative council will make sure this is paid for by cutting social services so we can keep paying these exact same sadists hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep assaulting civilians with impunity.
It’s really amazing you already know what the “conservative council will do by cutting social services” since they just elected the last member and have yet to make any decisions to do anything as of yet.
What exactly was the “harm” done to the plaintiffs? Was anyone physically injured enough to require medical care? Or is this just a cash grab by a bunch of leftists who want to get revenge on the police?
As usual, the lawyers get well paid.
There’s a list of serious injuries right there in the post, quoted from the lawsuit: cardiac arrest, seizure, coma, amputated finger, hearing loss, broken bones, concussions, wounds, bruising…
SPD hurt a lot of people, some of them rather badly. Between the cost of medical care and the cost of the lawsuit, I seriously doubt anyone will come away from this feeling like they succeeded at a “cash grab”.
Of course, the death of Summer Taylor is tragic, and her estate probably deserves some kind of settlement (best done separately from this class-action?). However, the fault lies entirely with the man who negligently ran into her, and not with the City or the SPD.
Anyone who plays on a freeway deserves nothing… Certainly not anything from the city or SPD, who had no hand in it anyway, as the safety of the highway is the jurisdiction of the state.. In any case those protesters put themselves and all of the state troopers who had to go out there to protect them at risk. The man who ran the barricades and hit her is paying for it, in jail as the criminal that he is.
After reading an article in today’s Seattle Times, I now realize that there were some people who were genuinely injured. So, I would like to retract my previous posts. Apologies.
Maybe take this as a learning moment that your biases on this issue are wrong…
Honestly, it takes alot to not only standup to your own previous assumptions but to also post a retraction about it. I wish more people had the kind of integrity you show. Good on ya!
They don’t have to admit wrongdoing. The feds have decided there was wrongdoing and as a result will continue under the consent decree.
The police lie and lie and lie about their wrongdoing. Their lying continued in the incident where the officer struck Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk at 73mph and then the VP of the Guild laughed about it – “he self-reported,” “the officer was responding to an opiate overdose” and more.
We cannot trust the police. This means we cannot trust our government. This is appalling.
The police should admit wrongdoing because as public servants they are obliged to report the truth and hold themselves accountable. Instead they protect their own.
They seem to be more interested in punishing the people of Seattle for standing up to them and calling them out rather than making any real changes.
$10 million?
Cheap payout for the city.
The attorneys who filed will get paid, unsurprisingly. If the attorneys would have had a real case then payout would have much, much higher.
The attorneys obviously knew not to push it any farther and picked a number that they knew the city would pay to settle the case.