By The Vanguard Staff
SACRAMENTO, CA – A woman blinded by a Sacramento police officer rubber bullet fired indiscriminately into a crowd of demonstrators protesting police brutality in 2020 collected $3 million this week as a result of a lawsuit settlement.
The responsible officer won’t pay the bill, but city taxpayers will pay.
A story in The Bee said it is one of the “largest settlements” the city has paid in recent years involving police-inflicted injury or death.
But Nia Love, a 33-year-old Black woman residing in Natomas, isn’t the only demonstrator to be seriously injured by police at peaceful protests.
Increasingly, police use of so-called “non-lethal” projectiles—large, heavy “bullets” —are causing injuries, said The Bee, especially when used against unarmed civilians, often attending otherwise peaceful, free speech demonstrations.
Ironically, many of these incidents appear to have happened at protests in the past few years where people are protesting police brutality.
The Bee wrote, “As a result of police projectiles, legal observer Danny Garza suffered a concussion, Thongxy ‘Tee’ Phansopha needed two life-saving brain surgeries, according to lawsuits, Joshua Ruiz’s liver was lacerated and Foucha Coner was temporarily blinded and needed seven stitches.”
National Lawyers Guild Sacramento board member Garza was observing police as a non-participant legal observer on May 30, 2020, leaning against a wall on the sidewalk where police told him to go when he was hit just above his eye with a bullet fired by a SPD officer from about 25 feet away, said NLG. He wasn’t able to finish his studies for the state bar because of the serious concussion.
Love was participating in a demonstration at a south Sacramento police station on May 29, 2020, following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
She said she “heard no warning from police that the crowd needed to disperse, she felt apprehension and decided to head home,” she told The Bee, but, “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.”
The Bee reported Love “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 SPD has examined its techniques and policies, it claims, and 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,” said The Bee.
Sacramento police records show the officer who fired the projectile was Jeremy Ratcliffe, and that he was exonerated, but no details.
Ratcliffe won’t pay any part of the multi-million settlement—Sacramento city taxpayers will.
