- Minneapolis has agreed to pay $600,000 to journalist Linda Tirado.
- Tirado lost her left eye after police shot rubber bullets at her during a Black Lives Matter protest.
- The settlement also acknowledges changes to police training in the wake of the 2020 incident.
For two years, Linda Tirado has had to relive the day that Minneapolis police opened fire on her while she covered a Black Lives Matter protest in the city, blinding her in one eye with a "less-lethal," but nonetheless life-changing, round of ammunition.
The incident — which she believes was deliberate targeting of the press — prevented the freelance writer, photographer, and mother of two from continuing to cover social movements. Lacking health insurance, she racked up six figures of debt paying for her own (and ongoing) physical and mental therapy.
Still, while she could not forget that day in May 2020, Tirado could not fully process it. One of the "specific cruelties of litigation," she said in an interview, is that she couldn't write anything down about what happened to her.
That changed Thursday night when Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey signed a settlement agreement under which the city has agreed to pay Tirado $600,000, resolving a lawsuit she filed against the city and its law enforcement.
The settlement also affirms the Minneapolis Police Department's stated commitment to, going forward, using "only the force that is objectively reasonable to effectively bring an incident under control" — and only using crowd-control methods explicitly authorized by top brass, rules added to the force's training manual after, but not explicitly because of, the Tirado incident.
There is no apology — indeed, the city insists it is not an admission of liability (a spokesperson declined to comment). But Tirado is nonetheless pleased, even if the money she gets will not even cover her own medical bills. Now, at least, she can keep a journal again without fear that it will be subject to discovery in a lawsuit; she can process her trauma.
"There's something incredibly freeing about being able to write without having to think of how my rough drafts will be perceived," she said. After pivoting to nature photography in the year after she was blinded, Tirado can also now return to telling human stories — of people on the margins — without fear that those communications could too end up in a court of law. She's now in Germany, reporting for Substack on the plight of Syrian and Afghan refugees.
"I couldn't say it's a homecoming, because nothing is the same — it never will be again," Tirado said. "But it does feel like I'm walking on some familiar paths again."
When civil unrest broke out across the country following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, dozens of journalists were injured while trying to report on the aftermath. Tirado is not the only one who believes they were targeted, and not just by police in Minnesota.
In Portland, for example, photographer Trip Jennings recounted in an interview with Insider how he was lucky to avoid serious injury. "As soon as I exposed something that was vulnerable, which was my face, they shot me," he said of federal agents that had been deployed there by the Trump administration.
Tai-Heng Cheng, a partner at the high-powered corporate law firm Sidley, who represented Tirado pro bono, said it was his hope that such incidents would be reduced by the settlement. At the very least, others who believe they are victims of unjustified force will have a document they can use in their own litigation.
"Now we have it in writing — and in representations in this settlement — that this is what police are supposed to do," Cheng said, a fact that should help any future victims. "You cannot tell me that you could have shot and blinded a journalist such as Linda if you were following the police department's manual."
That, more than the money, is why Tirado says she agreed to the settlement. It's just a shame, she said, that the $600,000 is coming from the city's general fund, not the police. "It's frankly bullshit," she said. She plans to give a percentage of the settlement back to the community herself.
And while she doesn't think it alone will change policing in America, Tirado does hope her ordeal and the settlement it resulted in will nudge the country in the right direction.
"I think that these reforms take a thousand pushes and a thousand nudges until you hit a tipping point," she said. In a free and fair society, she argued, for police as for everyone else: "there will be consequences if you go out and shoot civilians."
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