New York City agreed Wednesday to pay $13.7 million to more than 1,000 protesters who took to the streets during the George Floyd protests in 2020.

The city’s huge payout settles a major class-action lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court that claimed police violated the civil rights of protesters.

The lawsuit dealt with clashes between protesters and police at 18 protests that happened during the week after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody at the end of May.

Protesters who are eligible for a payout can receive $9,950 in compensation, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.

Some of the protesters who are eligible for payouts were arrested, while others were not arrested, but had their First Amendment rights infringed by police, their lawsuit claimed.

Protesters who were arrested on charges of violence including trespassing, property destruction, assaulting an officer, or arson or weapons possession will not be eligible for a payout, and those who blocked police from arresting other people may also not be eligible.

The settlement must still be approved by a judge. It would reportedly be one of the most expensive payouts ever over mass arrests.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild, a left-leaning group, accused the NYPD of violating protesters’ First Amendment rights by taking an excessively violent approach and making illegal arrests.

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In some instances, police beat and kicked protesters, the lawsuit claimed.

“N.Y.P.D.’s suppression of dissent has continued through numerous mayoral administrations,” one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a statement.

The city argued the NYPD did not try to quash lawful protests and take away the protesters’ constitutional right to demonstrate.

“There is no history – or present or future – of unconstitutional policing,” read a memo from Georgia Pestana, an attorney for the city. “There is no frequent deprivation of constitutional rights.”

In the days after Floyd’s death, about 10,000 people were arrested across the country. The property damage from the riots across the country totaled nearly $2 billion.

In New York, police arrested just over 2,000 people between May 28, three days after Floyd’s death, and June 7, according to the New York State attorney general’s office.

Thousands of people protested in New York City, some violently. Rioters injured dozens of police officers, damaged dozens of police cars — setting some of them on fire and graffitiing them — and looted or damaged at least 450 businesses.

In one instance, two NYPD officers in Brooklyn were shot and one was stabbed in the neck as they tried to prevent looting during a protest.

The mayor placed the city under a curfew for the first week of June, the city’s first curfew in 75 years, but the curfew was frequently violated by protesters.

Although it is the largest, this is not New York’s first settlement with protesters who demonstrated over George Floyd.

In March, the city settled with about 300 people who were arrested on June 4, 2020, in the Bronx. Those protesters were awarded $21,500 each.

Police boxed in the hundreds of protesters using a police tactic known as “kettling,” the lawsuit from those protesters claimed. Officers restrained them with zip ties and swung at protesters with batons, and sprayed pepper spray at them, the lawsuit said.

A top official at the Drug Enforcement Administration has stepped down after reports indicated that he previously engaged in consulting work for the pharmaceutical industry. 

Louis Milione, who was appointed in August 2021 to be principal deputy administrator, the agency’s second-ranking position, resigned after the Associated Press reported that Milione had consulted for several large pharmaceutical companies, including Purdue Pharma, a defunct company which was accused of helping to facilitate the opioid crisis. 

“Working for Purdue Pharma should not help you get a higher job in government,” Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, told the AP. “Too much collegiality is a problem. It’s hard to view your past and potentially future colleagues as scofflaws. Any independent person would find this abhorrent.”

Milione first worked in the DEA from 1997 to 2017 before he left government work for the private sector. He was paid $600 an hour by Purdue Pharma to consult after they were sued by Ohio and Oklahoma over their marketing for the addictive painkiller OxyContin.

Other work in the pharmaceutical industry included giving testimony for drug wholesaler Morris & Dickson, a company that faced scrutiny after a judge said it should lose its license to ship painkillers. The DEA did not move on that recommendation until four years later. 

In May, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said the company failed to acknowledge “full extent of their wrongdoing … and the potential harm it caused.”

According to his bio from the DEA, Milione “is a recognized expert on a broad range of issues, including transnational illicit networks, the diversion of pharmaceutical controlled substances, narco-terrorism, America’s opioid epidemic and the threat of synthetic drugs.”

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The resignation was reportedly due to personal reasons and not recent reports. “I care deeply about the DEA, its mission and the brave men and women that sacrifice so much to protect the American public,” Milione said in a statement. 

He was first brought in through a loophole that meant that he would not have to be confirmed by the Senate. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said the news only raised more questions about the administration of the DEA. 

“DEA has demonstrated a willingness to take painstaking measures to avoid the Senate’s watchful eye – including by potentially using a technicality to shirk Senate confirmation of a key agency decision maker,” Grassley said. “Avoiding congressional oversight is a tired game the DEA can’t stop playing. It begs the question: What else is the DEA trying to hide?”