Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has become the most high-profile go-to lawyer for families who have lost a loved one to police misconduct and brutality. His most prominent clients are the family members of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody one year ago in Minneapolis.
In March, Minneapolis agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from Floyd’s family. The size of the settlement, Crump said, is what counts here.
“It was significant because it represented the most that was ever paid out by a city police department in a pre-trial police brutality death case of a Black person,” Crump told Yahoo Finance. “One of the things that I have tried to do, even if sometimes single handedly, as I fight in cities and states all across America, is to raise the value of Black life,” he said.
Crump said he plans to continue to seek multimillion-dollar settlements on behalf of clients who have been unjustifiably killed by police. “My goal is to make it financially unsustainable for them to keep killing Black people, unjustifiably, as we continue to fight for these policy reforms to prevent the next George Floyd,” he said.
Crump has successfully won multimillion-dollar settlements on behalf of family members in other highly-publicized cases, including Breonna Taylor, who was killed in the exchange of gunfire between her boyfriend and police in March 2020 in Louisville, Ky. The city settled with Taylor’s family in September.