The city of Seattle, Washington will pay rioters who demonstrated in the name of “Black Lives Matter” $10 million to settle a lawsuit over allegations of excessive force from more than four dozen plaintiffs.
The deal was announced Wednesday with no admission of wrongdoing from the city as part of the settlement related to mass demonstrations in 2020.
“This decision was the best financial decision for the City considering risk, cost, and insurance,” said City Attorney Ann Davison in a press release. “The case has been a significant drain on the time and resources of the City and would have continued to be so through an estimated three-month trial that was scheduled to begin in May.”
Demonstrators filed the lawsuit in September 2020 involving more than a million documents, over 10,000 videos, and “hundreds of interactions between the plaintiffs and law enforcement officers.”
“This settlement resolves the majority of the remaining claims arising out of the 2020 demonstration period and is a big step toward allowing the City to focus on the important work of today, while moving forward from events four years ago,” Davison said.
The far-left city of Seattle became a hotspot for the politically charged riots in 2020 when violent demonstrations erupted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. According to the Associated Press, demonstrators were hit with crowd control devices the city council had previously banned.
“Among the plaintiffs in the [lawsuit] was Aubreanna Inda, who was standing in the middle of a street before a phalanx of officers in riot gear when a blast ball hit her in the chest and exploded, causing her to go into cardiac arrest,” the AP reported. “Volunteer medics and other protesters performed CPR and brought her to a hospital.”
In February last year, the city settled a separate lawsuit in federal court related to the summer demonstrations. Seattle agreed to pay more than $3.6 million after a federal judge found officials deleted evidence of government failures to protect businesses during the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” (CHOP).
“More than a dozen businesses and residents, led by the investment group Hunters Capital, sued the city over its handling of the three-week CHOP protests, claiming the city’s decision to tolerate — and in some cases aid — the closure of an eight-block section of Capitol Hill hurt their businesses,” the Seattle Times reported.
CHOP is more popularly known as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ), wherein far-left anarchists annexed a six-block area the group declared “autonomous” with their own border control and I.D. checks. Then-Democrat Mayor Jenny Durkan compared the autonomous zone to a “block party” and celebrated the demonstration as a “summer of love.”
The utopian project, however, was far from the peaceful “block party” the city’s mayor made it out to be.
“Over its 24-day history, the autonomous zone saw two gun homicides and four additional shooting victims,” reported City Journal. “All the identified victims were black men—precisely the demographic for whom the CHAZ had claimed to offer protection. In the absence of a legitimate police force, armed criminal gangs and untrained anarchist paramilitaries filled the void. Almost every night, gunshots rang through the streets.”
