Boston will pay $850k to settle police brutality lawsuit brought by Black Lives Matter protesters

Boston will pay $850,000 to four people who say they were beaten by city officers in the aftermath of a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest.

The settlement, reached Monday, does not include any admission of wrongdoing by the city, according to the law firm Loevy and Loevy.

The lawsuit was brought by Jasmine Huffman, Justin Ackers, Caitlyn Hall and Benjamin Chambers-Maher over Boston police officers' actions to disperse crowds of anti-police brutality protesters on May 31, 2020.

The demonstration in Boston was one of several that took place across the country, as thousands gathered in outrage in the days after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis.

"Unfortunately, in Boston — as in many other cities across the country — those protests went on to inspire further police brutality," lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a statement, "as law enforcement officers employed excessive force and unreasonably violent crowd control measures against the very people calling for an end to police violence."

Three of the plaintiffs claimed officers beat them with wooden batons as police drove protesters away from the area near the State House and Theater District. Two said they were pepper sprayed. Nearly all submitted video evidence to support their claims, the statement said.

None of the named defendants were charged with a crime following the protest and police removal.

WBUR has reached out to the city for comment.

With reporting from the WBUR Newsroom