Sisters amongst plaintiffs awarded $21,500 EACH after suing NYC

A doula and a former Peace Corps employee are among 300 who will each receive $21,500 for being wrongly assaulted by police during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in The Bronx.

Samira Sierra, 31, and Amali Sierra, 25, both from The Bronx, are among five listed plaintiffs who won a lawsuit against the New York Police Department after accusing them of killing them on June 4 between 7 and 7:30 p.m. on 136th Street to have surrounded. 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest.

Officers brandished batons at protesters and beat them with pepper spray, before restraining hundreds of protesters with plastic zip ties for violating a citywide curfew, which was at 8 p.m.

Samira, who used to work for the Peace Corp, shared The New York Times“We had every right to protest, but the City of New York made an explicit statement that day that the people of the Bronx are willing to be terrorized.”

Her sister, who works as a doula, told her USA today“This settlement serves as testimony to the wrongdoing at the hands of the NYPD, and it is a reminder that this institution was not built to protect black and brown communities.”

The two sisters are listed as plaintiffs alongside Ricardo Nigaglioni, Alex Gutierrez and Charles Wood.

The city could spend between $4 million and $6 million on the settlement. If a judge approves the settlement filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, it would be one of the highest ever awarded per person in a mass arrest class action case.

Amali is a doula for Sacred Light Services, who works to “strengthen black(s) brown bodies during birth and postpartum.”

Describing herself as a “South Bronx Afro Dominican,” she graduated from the University at Albany with a degree in anthropology. She also works as a Community Research Liaison at Mount Sinai at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Her sister, Samira, served as a former consultant to the National Financial Network and was a former Health Extension Volunteer for the Peace Corps.

A report from the time said officers raised their bicycles against protesters, while another group of officers emerged at the top of the street and began to charge down the hill, pushing protesters into the advancing group of bicycle officers.

Soon, the lawsuit says, “police indiscriminately beat protesters with batons, threw them to the ground, and sprayed them with a chemical.”

Videos posted online also showed police shoving protesters and arresting legal observers and even medical personnel in the early days of the COVID pandemic.

At one point, a video posted by Human Rights Watch showed the police body knocking a woman to the ground and surrounding protesters with their batons before beating those in the suburbs.

In the video, people could be heard yelling, “We’re getting maced,” and telling police officers, “You’re going to kill someone.”

“The violence that erupted on us that night was deliberate, unwarranted and will stay with me for the rest of my life,” prosecutor Charles Henry Wood told USA Today. “What the NYPD did, aided by New York City’s political powers, was an extreme abuse of power.”

This tactic, the lawsuit argued, was directly endorsed by city leaders such as then-mayor Bill de Blasio and former police chief Terence Monahan, who spoke out against the protests that led to widespread looting and property destruction.

Together, they “attempted to suppress the protests with well-orchestrated operations in which the protesters were rounded up and violently arrested,” the lawsuit alleges.

Many demonstrators were left injured and bleeding. Some demonstrators fainted or lost consciousness and had convulsions.’

In doing so, the lawsuit alleged, the NYPD violated the protesters’ right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment, as well as their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to equal protection of the laws.

Prosecutors also filed state laws for false arrest; attack and battery; refusal of medical care; inflicting emotional distress; negligent hiring, training and supervision; and excessive detention.

A subsequent report from the Human Rights Campaign found that police acted in a manner that was “unprovoked and without warning, chasing with their batons, knocking people off car roofs, pushing them to the ground, and pepper spray in their faces to shoot’.

But the kettle strategy was widely defended at the time by Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, who said it was necessary because the protesters defied curfews put in place after looters looted parts of Manhattan.

Shea also claimed that the Bronx protest was organized by “outside agitators,” and De Blasio said, “There was a specific pre-announced threat of violence, and then people showed up at the protest with guns and gasoline.”

“It’s absolutely the job of the police to make sure this doesn’t happen because we don’t tolerate violence,” he said.

However, no gasoline or weapons were ever recovered from the crime scene, and the lawsuit states that “there is no justification for the brutal and indiscriminate force used against Plaintiff and other peaceful protesters.”

And those who were arrested eventually had their cases dropped.

New York City will now pay those protesters $21,500 under the proposed settlement agreement, as well as $2,500 to each class member issued a Desk Appearance ticket and all “reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses.”

The attorneys are seeking an additional $2.5 million for those fees, according to court documents obtained by DailyMail.com.

They described the agreement to the Times as “historic,” noting that the highest amount paid per person in a mass arrest case was earlier in 2010, when a federal judge awarded $18,000 per person to protesters arrested during a protest in 2000 near the World Bank. and International Monetary Fund buildings in Washington DC as part of a $13.7 million settlement.

Lawyers said while about 330 people were eligible to receive the payments, 90 have already settled with the city in separate complaints.

Others may have decided to file separate claims against the city, especially those who reported more serious injuries.

According to the Gothamist, the settlement is expected to close in October, with victims likely to receive compensation before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the New York Police Department said its policies and training for large-scale demonstrations have been revised, based on internal assessments and recommendations from three outside agencies that examined police actions following the 2020 mass protests.

“The NYPD remains committed to continually improving its practices in every way possible,” the department said in a statement to the Times.

It went on to say that the 2020 protests were “a challenging moment for the department as officers who themselves suffered under the pressure of a global pandemic went to great lengths to facilitate people’s right to peaceful expression, all of which while addressing acts of lawlessness, including large-scale riots, mass mayhem, violence and destruction.”