Black Lives Matter wins historic police brutality lawsuit over George Floyd protests; NYPD to pay $13 million

• The NYPD will pay $13 million to settle allegations of widespread brutality at George Floyd protests in 2020.
• The federal lawsuit's 1,380 plaintiffs based their case on video from 7,000 citizen and NYPD recordings.
• It's the largest settlement by police in a protester civil-rights case in US history, plaintiff lawyers said.

"I'm injured! I'm not resisting!" a young male protester tells the five NYPD officers who push him face down into the pavement of Manhattan's Union Square.

"Stop resisting," an officer shouts in response, "or we'll punch you right in the face."

A class-action brutality lawsuit has settled for $13 million in New York City, allowing lawyers for some 1,300 protesters in the now-resolved federal case to release their evidence footage to Insider.

It shows repeated instances of police using pepper spray and batons during the largely non-violent George Floyd protests that swept through the city's five boroughs in the spring and summer of 2020.

The $13 million represents the largest settlement in a protester civil rights case in US history, the lawyers said. New York City has agreed to pay millions more in yet-calculated legal fees.

"Their experiences were horrible and traumatic," lead attorney Elena Cohen told Insider of the plaintiffs, who she said will receive up to $9,950 each.

"This is about people in New York City being able to protest, being able to be in the streets, being able to say what they think about the government," she said. 

"And to do it without being afraid that they're going to be physically hurt."

New York City is not admitting wrongdoing in the federal class-action lawsuit, which resolved early Thursday morning. The NYPD has referred requests for comment to the city Law Department, which issued this statement: 

"The City and NYPD remain committed to ensuring the public is safe and people's right to peaceful expression is protected.

"The NYPD has improved numerous practices to address the challenges it faced during the pandemic. This settlement was in the interests of all parties."

"I don't know what motivates the NYPD to settle," Cohen said.

"My hope is that this was based on an acknowledgment — even if it wasn't formal, in writing, 'We did something wrong' — that the way policing worked in the summer of 2020 is not okay," she said.

"And that, if these cases made it to a trial, a jury of people's peers would also agree that this was not OK." 

The policing tactics fell into two overlapping categories, excessive force and improper arrests, said Cohen, a partner at Cohen & Green in Queens, New York. 

"We saw officers tackling people to the cement," she told Insider of the lawsuit's many hours of video evidence. "We saw officers kicking, punching, including punches to the face."

Non-violent protesters were also struck with batons, Cohen said, "even after they were already on the ground."

One example cited by Cohen happened May 29, 2020, outside the Barclay Center arena in Brooklyn, after several protesters pushed at police barricades and threw water bottles at officers.

"Police take out these large canisters of pepper spray that they have, and just blanket this entire crowd of people who are standing outside the Barclay Center in pepper spray," Cohen said video evidence showed.

The evidence footage also showed repeated examples of the police tactic called "kettling," she said. 

That tactic involves officers using plastic netting, or shields, bicycles, or bodies, to surround and then push a group of protesters together, trapping them into a very small area so they can be more easily controlled and arrested.

"Police will make an order to disperse, to say leave the area. But people actually can't leave," and would instead be arrested for disobeying disperse order, she said. 

On June 4, 2020, just before the 8 p.m. curfew, NYPD officers used the tactic to detain a large group of protesters on 136th Street in the south Bronx, in a neighborhood known as Mott Haven, according to witness video.

The so-called "Mott Haven kettle" resulted in 60 protester injuries and 263 arrests, according to the lawsuit's lawyers.

Plaintiff Dara Pluchino, a Bronx social worker, was both arrested and injured at that protest, she told Insider.

"Oh shit, it's happening," she recalled thinking as she felt the crush of her fellow protesters. 

Soon after, "I saw police hitting people with their batons, including when they were struck to the point of falling," said Pluchino, 30.

"There was a lot of pepper spray used," she remembered. "I was pouring water on folks who had been pepper sprayed."

She also remembered a fellow protester who sat rear-cuffed alongside her on the pavement.

"He was a younger Black man," she remembered. "He had lost a shoe and he was bleeding from a cut on his forehead. And I remember, really strongly, that he and I were talking, and he said to me, 'This is what freedom feels like.'

"And I understood that he meant that this is what it takes. Change won't happen otherwise," she said. "Like, this is to be expected if we are ever going to get to a better place."

Because she is white, "my body, even during arrest, was handled with much more care than those who were Black and brown," she said she believes.

Still, within 1o minutes of being flex-cuffed, "I was losing sensation, like when your fingers fall asleep, or your hand falls asleep." She has suffered minor, but ongoing, nerve damage in her left hand, she said.

Of the settlement, Pluchino said no amount of money will mend what protesters went through.

"But hopefully it will help them access the healing and support that they deserve and need," she said.

"They're extremely inhumane," Cohen agreed of the flex cuffs. Some plaintiffs "have had multiple wrist surgeries," she said. 

So many protesters would be arrested at a single time, that paperwork was routinely filled out by officers who had nothing to do with a particular protester's arrest, Cohen said.

"The issue with this is, you end up having arrest paperwork filled out by officers who are absolutely not involved in an arrest, did not see this person pre-arrest, saying, under penalties of perjury, under oath, 'I saw this person doing X, Y, Z,' and they just didn't,"she said the evidence showed.

Force would escalate, she said, because often there would be more police than protesters. Complicating this, the NYPD brought in officers from specialized units that more typically handle terrorism or riot situations, Cohen said.

The plaintiffs were also represented by Wylie Stecklow of WylieLaw,  and by the firms Gideon Orion Oliver, and Beldock Levine & Hoffman.

The attorneys used some 7,000 videos to bolster their case, including footage from civilian cellphones and from NYPD helicopter and body-worn cameras.

The Brooklyn-based firm SITU Research helped the lawyers by using 3-D modeling to make sense of their thousands of evidence videos.

SITU's modeling of the June 4, 2020, Mott Haven kettling was used in a September, 2020, report by Human Rights Watch.

The NYPD's conduct that day "amounts to serious violations of international human rights law," the report said.