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 on 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 Floyd died after Chauvin used unreasonable force during an arrest. The lawsuits stated that if the city had acted sooner to discipline Chauvin, “history could have been stopped from repeating itself with George Floyd.”…