Woman blinded at protest gets $3M from Sacramento
SACRAMENTO — The city of Sacramento has paid a $3 million settlement to a woman who was blinded in one eye by a police officer’s rubber bullet during a protest against police brutality in 2020.
It’s one of the largest settlements the city has paid in connection with an officer-inflicted injury or death in recent years.
Nia Love, 33 of Natomas, was participating in a demonstration at a south Sacramento police station on May 29, 2020, following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
Although she heard no warning from police that the crowd needed to disperse, she felt apprehension and decided to head home, she told The Sacramento Bee last month. While walking away, she turned back, trying to find her brother. That’s when she felt a projectile, fired by an officer, strike her eye socket.
She needed to have two emergency surgeries to prevent losing her eye, she said. Over three years later, she still gets frequent headaches, and eye pain, sometimes so bad she is unable to get out of bed for a whole day.
The city signed the settlement agreement in July, and posted it online to a city web page last month.
City spokesman Tim Swanson said police officers were charged with dealing with “chaotic and dangerous situations” during the 2020 demonstrations.
“Officers deployed crowd-control measures and used lessthan-lethal tools to disrupt these acts of violence and other crimes,” Swanson said in a statement. “Unfortunately, in a small number of cases, individuals who were not the intended recipient of those tools were injured during those very dynamic situations. While each such instance is extremely regrettable, it must be remembered that the scenes of these deployments were perilous, rapidly changing, and unprecedented.”
Following the protests the department has examined its techniques and policies, Swanson said. Also a new state law, Assembly Bill 48 which went into effect in January 2022, restricts the instances in which officers can shoot projectiles into crowds to disperse them.
The public still does not know which officer fired the projectile that hit Love, or whether he or she was disciplined.
A state law called SB 1421 requires law enforcement agencies to release the names of officers and all disciplinary records regarding incidents in which officers cause so-called “great bodily injury” to citizens. Love’s injury, which required surgery, would fall under that category, according to David Loy, an attorney with the First Amendment Coalition. But the city has still not released any records related to Love’s injury.
“We have to go through these surgeries, have to live through these life-altering injuries,” Love told The Bee last month. “To not be considered great bodily harm, I think, is a slap in the face.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office and the Sacramento Police Department have released more records after receiving questions from The Bee for its November report, but there are still roughly 100 incidents, including several other 2020 protest injuries, for which it has not yet released records, including final internal affairs disciplinary documents. That leaves the public in the dark about which officers are causing the injuries and if they are being disciplined.