Minneapolis agrees to pay almost $9M to settle lawsuits involving Derek Chauvin

The city of Minneapolis on Thursday agreed to pay roughly $8.9 million to settle two lawsuits involving former police officer Derek Chauvin, who was charged with killing George Floyd in 2020.

In the lawsuits — which stemmed from 2017 arrests — two people alleged that Chauvin pressed his knee into their necks years before the same tactic was fatal during his arrest of Floyd.

The city announced that John Pope will receive $7.5 million and Zoya Code will receive $1.375 million.

“He should have been fired in 2017. He should have been held accountable in 2017,” Mayor Jacob Frey said of Chauvin (D) at a news conference, adding that “If the supervisors had done the right thing, George Floyd would not have been murdered.”

Floyd’s killing sparked nationwide protests and a reckoning about race and police brutality.

Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara called Chauvin, who is now in federal prison for Floyd’s murder, a “national embarrassment to the policing profession” and “an example of the cancer that has infected this department.”

He apologized on behalf of the department to Pope, Code and their families.

“To the officers that are presently in our Minneapolis Police Department that are enraged by the kind of conduct that Derek Chauvin committed, that is the kind of person that we want in our police department,” Frey said. “That is the direction we need to go.”

The former officer had already been convicted criminally on federal charges related to the incident involving Pope and pleaded guilty in 2021, according to the city. He was not charged in Code’s case.

Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder in Floyd’s case and was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison. He was sentenced to a concurrent 21 years for violating Floyd’s civil rights.