The City of Charlotte and its police officials have settled a class-action lawsuit on controversial tactics used to trap and gas protesters who were marching against police brutality in 2020.
More than 60 plaintiffs hinged the 2021 lawsuit on claims that police acted unlawfully when they used a now-banned kettling technique to corral more than 400 protesters down uptown’s Fourth Street, herd them into a police trap and pummel them with tear gas, smoke grenades, pepper balls and other chemicals on June 2, 2020. At the time, protesters had been filling the city’s streets for nearly a week — as they had in cities across the United States — in response to the 2020 Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
Body-worn camera footage captured a sergeant’s words as the protesters marched by that night: “Wave goodbye,” he said to another Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officer. “They’re all about to get gassed.”…