The city of Minneapolis agreed Thursday to pay nearly $9 million to settle lawsuits filed by two people who said former police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into their necks years before he used the same move to kill George Floyd.
The plaintiffs – John Pope and Zoya Code – alleged police misconduct, use of excessive force and racial discrimination in the suits against the city of Minneapolis, Chauvin and seven other officers.
“In their 2017 encounters with Chauvin, both Code and Pope experienced excessive force tactics that foretell Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd a few years later,”
civil rights attorneys Robert Bennett and Katie Bennett said in a statement
John Pope Jr. will receive $7.5 million and Zoya Code will receive $1.375 million. The settlements were announced during a meeting of the Minneapolis City Council.
Both lawsuits stemmed from arrests in 2017 — three years before Chauvin killed Floyd during an arrest captured on video that sparked protests worldwide, prompted a national reckoning on racial injustice and compelled a Minneapolis Police Department overhaul.
At a news conference Thursday, Mayor Jacob Frey apologized to all victims of Chauvin and said that if police supervisors “had done the right thing, George Floyd would not have been murdered.”
“He should have been fired in 2017. He should have been held accountable in 2017,” Frey told reporters.
Both lawsuits named Chauvin and several other officers. The lawsuits alleged police misconduct, excessive force, and racism — Pope and Code are Black; Chauvin is white. They also said the city knew that Chauvin had a record of misconduct but didn’t stop him.
“The notion that we are dealing with the bad actions of one employee is false,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said.
“We are dealing with the ugly consequences stemming from a systemic failure within the Minneapolis Police Department that has allowed for and at times encouraged unjust and brutal policing.”
In edited body camera footage released Thursday by Bennett’s law firm, Pope is heard crying while lying on his stomach, his hands cuffed behind his back and Chauvin’s knee on his neck.
“My neck really hurts,” he says more than once. At one point, the videos show the other officers in the room walked out after Pope began crying.
“The easy thing is to blame Chauvin for everything,” Bennett said in a written statement. “The important thing that the video shows is that none of those nine to a dozen officers at the scene ever reported it, ever tried to stop it. They violated their own policy and really any sense of humanity.”
