The city of Los Angeles will pay $1.95 million to the family of Charly “Africa” Keunang, an unarmed homeless man whose fatal shooting by LAPD officers in 2015 set off days of protests and denunciations of the department’s treatment of skid row’s mentally unstable population.
The City Council on a 12-2 vote Tuesday approved the settlement, which had been reached tentatively after a federal jury in May found two officers liable in Keunang’s videotaped death.
Councilmen Joe Buscaino and Mitchell Englander cast the “no” votes. Buscaino’s spokesman noted that the city’s civilian Police Commission had found the shooting justified. The district attorney declined to file criminal charges against the officers, stating that the officers “acted lawfully in self-defense and in defense of others.”
A cellphone recording that captured the March 1, 2015, shooting, which took place on a Sunday morning in broad daylight, was viewed millions of times around the world. Keunang, a native of Cameroon with a history of mental illness, was shot five times on the sidewalk outside his tent in the middle of skid row.
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