The mayor of Minneapolis said George Floyd would still be alive if the city’s police department had “done the right thing” and fired officer Derek Chauvin in 2017 after complaints he knelt on the necks of two people he arrested.
Jacob Frey was speaking at a press conference on Thursday announcing the city had reached a $8.9m settlement in two excessive force lawsuits.
Chauvin was convicted of murder and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison in 2021 for killing Floyd the year before by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. The episode ignited Black Lives Matter protests and a national reckoning over race and policing.
Two Minneapolis residents, John Pope Jr, and Zoya Code, arrested by Chauvin in separate incidents three years earlier, filed federal lawsuits last year. They will receive $7.5m and $1.375m respectively.
“He should have been fired in 2017. He should have been held accountable in 2017,” Frey said, apologizing to the victims and blaming the officer’s supervisors for failing to act.
“[If they] had done the right thing, George Floyd would not have been murdered.”
The lawsuits, citing Chauvin and several other Minneapolis officers, alleged police misconduct, excessive force, and racism. Chauvin is white, both plaintiffs are Black.
Edited police bodycam footage released on Thursday by Bob Bennett, an attorney representing the pair, shows Chauvin kneeling on their necks. In the video of Pope’s arrest, numerous other officers are seen standing by.
“The easy thing is to blame Chauvin for everything,” Bennett said in a written statement.
“The important thing that the video shows is that none of those nine to a dozen officers at the scene ever reported it, ever tried to stop it. They violated their own policy and really any sense of humanity.”
Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, said his department was “forced to reckon once again with the deplorable acts of someone who has proven to be a national embarrassment”.
He also cited “systemic failure” within the department.
“I am appalled at the repetitive behavior of this coward and disgusted by the inaction and acceptance of that behavior by members of this department. Such conduct is a disgrace to the badge and an embarrassment to what is truly a very noble profession,” O’Hara said in a statement.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
