Yet another city will pay the “peaceful protesters” of Black Lives Matter a bundle of money for showing up at riots where BLM goons rioted, pillaged, looted, and burned down businesses after the George Floyd Hoax.
Seattle is the latest big city to pay up. The plaintiffs will receive $10 million to settle a lawsuit filed three years ago.
But cities across the country have shelled out nearly $100 million, in effect paying “peaceful protesters” to participate in riots that threatened the lives of police and the lives and property of law-abiding Americans.
50 Plaintiffs
The one-sided story in the Seattle Times told a tale of woe about people who thought it might be a bright idea to join a mob of rioting street thugs.
“Among the 50 plaintiffs were a woman who had a heart attack when she was struck in the chest by an SPD [Seattle Police Department] blast ball, a man who was hospitalized in a coma after his arrest and a veteran who uses a cane and was ‘gassed and tackled because he didn’t retreat fast enough,’ according to the attorneys,” the newspaper reported:
Others included a teenager whose finger was partially blown off by a blast ball and “dozens of others who suffered permanent hearing loss, broken bones, concussion, wounds, bruising and emotional damage” at the hands of Seattle officers, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said.
The city settled for one reason: Litigation would be expensive, and a leftist jury might clobber the city for more than $10 million.
The city did not admit wrongdoing, and “argued that protesters ‘assumed the risk’ of being injured by police when they chose to exercise their First Amendment rights to peacefully protest,” the newspaper reported.
The leftist judge rejected that argument.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Karen Koehler, acted the part of the stereotypical Karen: $10 million wasn’t enough. The city should have confessed wrongdoing. “They should have said, ‘We’re sorry that we were punks and brutalized peaceful protesters,’” Koehler told the newspaper.
The Times claimed that police “indiscriminately deployed tear gas, blast balls and pepper spray into crowds of mostly peaceful protesters,” that last locution being the leftist Mainstream Media’s description of riots that left cities aflame. “Officers were criticized for targeting the entire crowd, rather than vandals who were using the protests to damage or destroy property, including burning police cars.”
The reporter apparently forgot that Floyd Hoax rioters attacked a police station in July 2020 and wounded 59 officers.
The newspaper shut down comments on the story because it is “particularly sensitive.”
Early this year, Seattle paid $3.6 million to property owners victimized by the “mostly peaceful” protesters.
Nationwide
But, again, Seattle isn’t the first city to pay off rioters, and likely won’t be the last. BLM ambulance chasers have been fleecing taxpayers nationwide.
Early this year, Denver settled for $1.6 million with seven “protesters.” Last year, it settled for $4.7 million with 300 BLM “protesters,” and the city is fighting a $14 million judgment for 12 “protesters” in federal court.
As well last year, New York City paid $13 million to 1,300 “protesters.” Undoubtedly, they were “mostly peaceful,” too, rather like the protesters who exercised their First Amendment rights in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Nineteen cities have paid out some $80 million, and more is come, a “civil rights” lawyer told The Guardian:
Carol Sobel, a civil rights attorney in southern California, said that ongoing litigation in the US, which can take years to resolve, is expected to further boost the national payout total.
“As I see this now, when all of these cases are concluded, it will probably be a record amount, total, paid out across the country,” said Sobel, as well as a record number of settlements.
“That’s a consequence of the fact that the outrage of the killing of George Floyd was national and was represented nationally in a way that has never occurred before,” she said.
The news reports omit, of course, the cost of the riots in which these plaintiffs participated, at least as spectators too close to police: $1 billion across 140 cities, as Axios reported.
The bill from those race-hoax riots wasn’t the biggest, though.
In 1992, after a jury acquitted Los Angeles police officers in the justified beating of “motorist” Rodney King, “mostly peaceful” protesters caused $1.42 billion in damage in the city of Angels. Sixty-three people died.
Like George Floyd, who died of a fentanyl overdose while policeman Derek Chauvin restrained him, the 6-foot-3-inch King was a drug addict and career criminal. Out of prison on parole, he resisted arrest after leading police on an eight-mile car chase with speeds of up to 115 mph. He was drunk when arrested. And as with Floyd, video of the confrontation, in which King charged police, hit television screens nationwide.
The city paid him $3.8 million.
After the big payday, King was repeatedly arrested, sometimes with no charges filed. In 2012, he drowned in his swimming pool under the influence of PCP, alcohol, and cocaine.
