Last week, I told you about how New York City's (blessedly) former Mayor Bill DeBlasio agreed to spend $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to settle a lawsuit by teachers who claimed the city’s occupational exam was racist because they couldn’t pass it (that included an interview with a man who got $2 million for repeatedly flunking the exam, and whose quotes suggested that he might have only a nodding acquaintance with the English language.)

Well, this is less expensive, but maybe even more galling: last week, the city agreed to pay $13 million of taxpayer money to settle a lawsuit by approximately 1300 people who accused the police of brutality and mistreatment when they were arrested for engaging in the George Floyd riots. These are the people who looted stores, set police cars on fire and threw rocks and bottles at officers, and now, they’re getting a big cash reward for it. They were represented by the National Lawyers Guild (which explains the old joke about why acts of God are exempt from prosecution: because Heaven has no lawyers.)

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2023/07/23/crime-pays-nyc-shells-out-13m-to-george-floyd-blm-rioters-in-legal-settlement-n780970

I’m sure that Republican Councilwoman Vickie Paladino summed up the feelings of many law-abiding New Yorkers when she tweeted, “Thank you for burning down our city, here’s millions of dollars we can’t afford. Where’s the settlement for all the actually peaceful anti-mandate protesters who were arrested and blacklisted and lost their jobs for no reason whatsoever?”

But as infuriating as this is, expect a lot more of it. As Bob Hoge at Redstate points out at the link, suing police departments and getting fat settlements is one of the ways that leftist anarchists fund their movements. It was bad enough that so many of them were caught and released. I hope political leaders in other cities will refuse to pay these extortionists off. If not, their voters need to let them know that they’d better grow a spine or start looking for another line of work. I hear “professional rioter” pays really well.