Chauvin Kneed People Before Floyd. It'll Cost His City $8.9M

Minneapolis will pay to settle two lawsuits filed over 2017 incidents
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Apr 14, 2023 10:39 AM CDT
Chauvin Kneed People Before Floyd. It'll Cost His City $8.9M
In this image taken from video, former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin addresses the court at the Hennepin County Courthouse on June 25, 2021, in Minneapolis.   (Court TV via AP, Pool, File)

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 in 2017—three years before he used the same move that killed George Floyd. John Pope Jr. will receive $7.5 million and Zoya Code will receive $1.375 million. 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.

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, reports the AP. Code, who has a history of homelessness and mental health problems, was arrested in June 2017 after she allegedly tried to strangle her mother with an extension cord. Code's lawsuit said she was in handcuffs when Chauvin slammed her head to the ground and pinned his knee on the back of her neck for 4 minutes and 41 seconds. A second officer didn’t intervene and a responding police sergeant approved the force, the lawsuit stated.

Pope was 14 in September 2017 when, according to his lawsuit, Chauvin subjected him to excessive force while responding to a domestic assault report. Pope’s lawsuit said his mother was drunk when she called police because she was upset that he and his 16-year-old sister left their cellphone chargers plugged in, leading to a physical confrontation. It alleged Chauvin struck Pope in the head with a large metal flashlight at least four times. It says he then put Pope in a chokehold before pinning him to the floor and putting his knee on Pope's neck. "Chauvin would proceed to hold John in this prone position for more than fifteen minutes, all while John was completely subdued and not resisting,” the complaint alleged. “

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In edited body camera footage released Thursday by the law firm of Bob Bennett, an attorney for Pope and Code, 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."

(More Derek Chauvin stories.)

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