Milwaukee Bucks: Sterling Brown reaches settlement with city of Milwaukee
According to a report from The Athletic, Milwaukee Bucks wing Sterling Brown has reached a $750,000 settlement with the city of Milwaukee, stemming from his civil suit.
Sterling Brown’s focus is fixed on his NBA future as he heads into free agency, but an incident from his past looks to have finally been resolved.
First reported by The Athletic’s Shams Charania ($$) Monday morning, the Milwaukee Bucks wing has reached a $750,000 settlement in his civil suit against the city of Milwaukee, all of which stems from his unlawful arrest back in January of 2018.
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As Charania noted in the piece and on Twitter, the city of Milwaukee would admit a constitutional violation as part of the settlement and are committed to making procedural changes within the city’s police department, which have to be made within the next 180 days.
The Bucks organization provided a statement on Twitter, which you can read in full here.
On January 26, 2018, Brown was wrongfully arrested after illegally parking in a parking spot at Walgreen’s store in the city of Milwaukee. Instead of being issued a citation, Brown was subsequently thrown to the ground, tased and was brought into a custody without being issued a formal charge.
It was in June of that year where Brown officially filed his lawsuit against the police department and the city of Milwaukee for their wrongdoing and shining a light on their practices.
Back in October of 2019, the city had originally offered a $400,000 settlement towards Brown and his legal team, which he had turned down. Brown later talked about the original settlement offer to ESPN’s Eric Woodyard in December of 2019:
"“They tried to get me to settle for it. I feel like it was just a slap in the face, and I can’t go into too many details, but there’s other things that we’re trying to push,” Brown told ESPN. “The money is not the biggest concern. It’s not a priority for me. It’s the other things involved, so we’re going to keep fighting.”"
Whether the city through the police department had admitted they violated Brown’s constitutional rights as part of the original settlement offer is unknown.
For as painful as the incident has been in Brown’s life, he has made some good come out of it by becoming a leading voice in the fight against racial injustice. Among the many roles he’s taken on, Brown was recently appointed to the NBA’s newly formed social justice coalition last month.
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This chapter in Brown’s life may be closed by reaching this settlement, but it shouldn’t have charted Brown going down this path to begin with, given the trauma it has induced. Still, the change that Brown has inspired ever since then will go a long way in the fight against racism and police brutality.