The family of George Floyd, the Black man whose death set off a wave of protests after a video showed a white police officer kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes last May, has settled a lawsuit against Minneapolis for $27 million, city officials said on Friday.
The City Council voted unanimously to approve the settlement, and a spokeswoman for the city said Mayor Jacob Frey would sign the measure.
The settlement was among the largest in a case of police misconduct, and was announced as Derek Chauvin, the former officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck, sat less than a mile away in a courtroom where jurors were being chosen for his trial. He has been charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
It also came after several other large settlements in high-profile police killings, including a $12 million payout in September from Louisville, Ky., over its officers’ killing of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, last March.
Minneapolis had previously paid one of the largest settlements in a police misconduct lawsuit in May 2019, when the city agreed to pay $20 million to the family of Justine Ruszczyk, a white yoga instructor who was fatally shot by Mohamed Noor, a Black Minneapolis police officer, in 2017.
Mr. Floyd’s family had sued the City of Minneapolis in July, saying that the police had violated his rights and failed to properly train its officers or fire those who violated department policies.
“It was the knee of the entire Minneapolis Police Department on the neck of George Floyd that killed him,” Ben Crump, the prominent civil rights lawyer who is among those representing Mr. Floyd’s family, said at the time.
The $27 million includes a $500,000 donation to “the community” at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, the corner where the police had confronted Mr. Floyd over a convenience store clerk’s claim that he had tried to use a fake $20 bill to buy cigarettes, and where a bystander’s video capturing the arrest brought worldwide attention to his death.