Settlements cost Denver $40M over last 7 years
Majority were due to law enforcement misconduct claims
All things considered, Lindsay Minter feels lucky.
She only needed to have a tooth pulled after she was hit in the face with a projectile from a rubber ball grenade flung in her direction by an unidentified Denver police officer in May 2020 during that year’s racial justice protests. She’d been headed back to her car after helping to lead a march, according to a description of the events in the lengthy lawsuit her attorneys filed against the city on her behalf.
“It was just chaotic. There were more bloody, gory injuries,” Minter said of what she saw before she was injured that day.
Minter, 42, settled with the city last year for $50,000, just a small fraction of the millions of dollars the Denver City Council has approved to pay claims resulting from police conduct during the 2020 protests. Those cases are a big factor in soaring payouts to the public by the city of Denver to resolve large legal claims — a total that reached nearly $39.5 million between 2017 and 2023, according to a Denver Post review of data provided by the City Attorney’s Office.
The Post found that roughly 9 in 10 of those dollars were paid for claims involving the Denver Police Department or Denver Sheriff Department. That continues at least a decade-long trend in which public safety agencies’ share of the total has ratcheted up as jail- and police-related misconduct claims have mounted.
While the physical impact of Minter’s incident was relatively small, she says it still affected her — as did the treatment of other protesters in the spring and summer of 2020, including some episodes she witnessed.
The city has approved settlements in cases that stemmed from injuries from projectiles, including being blinded or losing eyes, as well as police officers’ targeting of protesters and the use of tear gas. The city has paid seven figures to settle some of the suits, and still unresolved is a pending $14 million jury award to a dozen protesters for violations of their rights. It’s not included in The Post’s seven-year total because the city plans to appeal it.
“The people who got more money definitely deserved that,” Minter said, “because they were violently victimized for standing up for their rights.”
Just in 2023, the city paid $17.3 million to resolve cases and claims involving
the Denver police — a chunk that on its own makes up roughly 44% of the seven-year total in large payouts. Just under $10 million of that was attributable to cases stemming from police actions during the protests, according to City Attorney’s Office records.
The department’s response to the massive, recurring racial justice protests in May and June 2020 in downtown Denver spurred several other settlements prior to last year. The protests initially were organized in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Minter, who has a long history of advocacy and activism around police reform in Aurora, where she lives, felt it was necessary to come to downtown Denver not only to call for justice for Floyd and his family but also for Elijah Mcclain, the 23-year-old Black man
who died after a violent arrest in Aurora in 2019. As a Black woman, Minter said the broader issue at the center of the protests was calling out disparities in how people of color are policed in this country.
In the aftermath of the demonstrations — which brought thousands of people to the heart of the city and at times were accompanied by vandalism and looting along the 16th Street Mall — the city’s then-independent Monitor Nick Mitchell assessed the police response. In a scathing report in late 2020, Mitchell detailed problems with inadequate training and multiple violations of DPD’S use of force policies, including officers firing less-lethal munitions (such as pepper balls, foam bullets and tear gas) at protesters without warning.
The police chief at the time agreed to nearly all the recommendations, including
better training for officers on crowd control and tracking the use of less-lethal weapons.
In the overall picture of the large claim payouts reviewed by The Post, the annual average during those seven years was more than $5.6 million — or enough to pay the salaries of 85 entrylevel firefighters. The Post focused in on the years since the newspaper’s last comprehensive report on Denver legal payouts in early 2017.
Most of that time was during the administration of Mayor Michael Hancock, who left office in July after three terms. Mayor Mike Johnston, in his first six months, has renominated Hancock’s public safety director, police chief and sheriff to continue serving.
The Department of Public Safety and the City Attorney’s Office did not grant requested interviews with Armando Saldate, the safety director, and City Attorney Kerry Tipper, also a Hancock holdover, instead responding to questions in writing.
Johnston said in an interview Friday that city officials were seeing the tide of settlements begin to recede.
“To be clear, this is not the police chief or the manager of safety that oversaw the George Floyd responses,” he said. “We’ve made a dramatic set of changes to policies and practices since then that I think are going to provide much better public safety — and also much less risk of that bad behavior.”
But in the wake of the city’s 2023 legal bills, some City Council members and the Denver Citizen Oversight Board are calling for more transparency around law enforcement settlements and a deeper focus on the training and accountability protocols meant to correct or prevent them.