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.
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. The lawsuits stated that if the city had acted sooner to discipline Chauvin, “history could have been stopped from repeating itself with George Floyd.”
Bob Bennett, the attorney for Pope and Code, noted in a statement that other officers failed to intervene or report Chauvin, and police leaders allowed Chauvin to “field train and indoctrinate dozens of young MPD officers to his ways without fear of discipline or negative sanction and to continue his predatory ways for years.”
Council member Elliott Payne said what happened to Code and Pope were reminders of what happened to Floyd and rekindled those emotions.