15 September 2021
Santa Rosa will pay $105,000 to a protester who a city police officer shot in the forehead with a rubber bullet last summer amid protests against systemic racism and police brutality, bringing the total in damages paid out to people injured by police in the city’s protest response to $2.3 million.
The settlement is the third the city has reached with a combined total of seven protesters who sued over injuries sustained after the Santa Rosa Police Department used a barrage of rubber bullets and tear gas to clear downtown protests that authorities deemed unlawful assemblies amid national unrest over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
The city settled with five protesters for a total of $1.9 million in April. In November 2020, the city paid $200,000 to protester Argelio Giron, a Healdsburg man who was shot in the groin with a round designed to penetrate physical barricades. Officers fired four of those rounds at protesters by mistake, according to internal investigations the department published in early June.
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