The city of Minneapolis will pay nearly $9 million to settle two lawsuits alleging misconduct by former police officer Derek Chauvin prior to the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
According to the lawsuits, Chauvin kneeled on two people during arrests in 2017, years before the ex-officer used the same tactic during the fatal arrest of Floyd, per The Hill.
John Pope will be awarded $7.5 million and Zoya Code will receive $1.375 million, per the city's agreement to settle the suits.
“He should have been fired in 2017. He should have been held accountable in 2017,” Mayor Jacob Frey said of Chauvin during a press conference. “If the supervisors had done the right thing, George Floyd would not have been murdered.”
Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said Chauvin was a “national embarrassment to the policing profession” and “an example of the cancer that has infected this department.”
“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.”
Chauvin was convicted on federal charges in connection to the incident involving Pope and pleaded guilty in 2021. He faced no charges in Code's case.
The former officer is currently serving time in federal prison for Floyd's murder. Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison on second-degree murder charges and was handed down a concurrent 21 years for violating Floyd's civil rights.
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