The Arlington City Council agreed Tuesday night to pay $1.9 million to the family of a man shot and killed by police in 2017, settling a lawsuit that was taken by pretrial appeals all the way to the Supreme Court.
The family of Tavis Crane sued the city after Crane was fatally shot by Craig Roper, an Arlington police officer. Roper was cleared by a grand jury of criminal wrongdoing but was still open to civil action.
The family did not speak at the council meeting, according to video. One man who did speak told the council that “$1.9 million is not enough for an Arlington resident’s life,” and that he thinks Roper should be stripped of the city’s Medal of Valor he won in 2018 and fired from his job.
Attorneys for Roper tried to knock down the lawsuit under qualified immunity, a federal legal principle that in some instances protects some government officials, like police, from lawsuits resulting from actions performed in an official capacity.
The Supreme Court ruled in November that Roper could not use qualified immunity to avoid civil litigation brought by Crane’s family.