The city of Louisville has agreed to pay $ 75,000 to a black couple who claim that police removed them from the car and broke them because of their race and that they were driving a nice vehicle.
According to Lousiville Courier-Journal, as a condition of payment, the couple and their lawyers are prohibited from criticizing the Louisville subway government or the cops involved in the incident, in the media or on social media.
Michael Abbot, a lawyer with the Courier Journal and the Kentucky Press Association, said the terms of the agreement were “completely inappropriate.”
“The city is paying to silence its critics,” he said. “It pays off. And it seems to be aimed at hampering reforms. It’s a bad policy and really disturbing.”
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First Assistant District Attorney Ingrid Geyser said in a statement that the couple “is not forbidden to speak genuinely about what happened during the traffic stop”, although she added that the language “should have more accurately reflected the agreement of the parties”.
In his federal case, Anthony Parker Sr. and Demetria Firman claim to have been interrupted in 2018 because they did not use turn signals, although footage from the body’s camera shows they turned it on. On their way home from church, they were subsequently stopped and searched without reasonable suspicion in front of their 9-year-old son in a “desperate attempt by officers to find weapons and drugs.”
None of them were found.
The case also states that Firman was allowed to leave the scene of the accident only when it was obvious to the officers that Demetria and her current husband were personal acquaintances with a colleague of the officers, Courier-Diary reports.
The city agreed to the agreement on September 9, with the stipulation that the subway government does not recognize violations.
Lawyers wrote in the traffic stop case that the couple was stopped “because they are black, were in a nice car and were in a specific LMPD neighborhood.”