New York City has agreed to pay more than $21,000 each to hundreds of protesters who were surrounded, arrested and subjected to excessive force by police during a George Floyd protest in 2020, according to court documents. A spokesperson for the New York City Police Department said in statement that the 2020 protests were a “challenging moment for the department as officers who themselves were suffering under the strains of a global pandemic did their utmost to help facilitate people’s rights to peaceful expression all while addressing acts of lawlessness including wide-scale rioting, mass chaos, violence, and destruction. Floyd, a Black man, was killed by Minneapolis police May 25, 2020, igniting a national and global reckoning on racial disparities and fueling calls for police reform