As part of the settlement, the city will pay $9.25 million to 350 demonstrators and their attorneys, according to reports. In Philadelphia, peaceful protests turned violent on June 1, 2020, as police fired rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at demonstrators who blocked traffic on an expressway, a widespread activist tactic for drawing public attention during the Floyd protests. The report, “ Lethal in Disguise: How Crowd-Control Weapons Impact Health and Human Rights ,” found that more than 121,000 people globally were injured or killed by so-called less lethal crowd-control weapons such as chemical irritants, “flash bang” grenades and rubber bullets since 2015, although many other injuries likely went unreported. Injuries from crowd-control weapons are increasing and widespread both in authoritarian nations such as Iran and China as well as “democratic” countries that supposedly tolerate dissent and public assemblies, according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO).
The settlement comes as researchers report that police in dozens of countries have routinely injured and even killed demonstrators with crowd-control weapons since 2015 as governments cracked down on protests. Such accountability for police who crush protests with crowd-control weapons is rare both in the United States and across the world. This week, the City of Philadelphia agreed to a $9.25 million settlement with protesters who were brutalized with tear gas and pepper spray during demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in late May 2020.
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