$6 million is the price we pay so cops can beat and kettle protestors.
Meanwhile, there's no funding for libraries and mental health care.
A judge has awarded $21,500 to each of hundreds of demonstrators, after a class-action lawsuit found that police had “kettled,” and beat them during the George Floyd protests of 2020. Officers boxed in hundreds of peaceful protestors in the Bronx—a practice called “kettling”—and restrained them with tight plastic gloves. Then they beat them with batons and pepper sprayed them.
In a statement, the police said that two and a half years after the protests, many of the department’s policies and training for large-scale demonstrations have been revised. Those revisions were made based on internal reviews and recommendations from three outside agencies that investigated police actions during that period.
“The NYPD remains committed to continually improving its practices in every way possible,” the statement said.
The 2020 protests were “a challenging moment for the department as officers who themselves were suffering under the strains of a global pandemic did their utmost to help facilitate people’s rights to peaceful expression all while addressing acts of lawlessness including wide-scale rioting, mass chaos, violence, and destruction,” the statement said.
Really! Because, that’s exactly what officers did during the Occupy protests in 2011. There was no pandemic. And, apparently, in the years since, no one bothered to come up with new policies. But now that a cop is Mayor I’m sure it’ll be the first priority.
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