The City of Burlington will pay three Black men a total of $750,000 to settle an excessive force lawsuit filed in the spring of 2019.
The Burlington City Council approved the agreement with brothers Jérémie, Charlie and Albin Meli on Tuesday, but officials withheld the full details until a federal court judge accepted the deal.
Released Friday afternoon, the settlement says the city’s insurer will pay out $500,000 to the Meli family. The remainder will be covered by the city’s liability insurance reserve fund, which officials say has a current balance of $1 million.
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The settlement also required the Melis and Mayor Miro Weinberger to craft a joint statement to the media, which was included in a press release Friday.
“The Melis are longstanding and valued members of the Burlington community, and this incident was an important catalyst for change,” the statement says. The city also pledged to work with the Melis “on continued efforts to improve public safety and foster belonging in Burlington.”
The Melis’ case stems from an incident in September 2018 when the three brothers were at a bar downtown. Responding to a call about a fight, former Burlington police sergeant Jason Bellavance approached Jérémie and shoved him against a wall. The young man hit his head and collapsed on the ground, unconscious.
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Police arrested Albin and Charlie when they protested, though the charges were later dropped. Bellavance was temporarily suspended from the force without pay.
The incident spurred a racial justice movement in which protesters camped outside police headquarters for a month and demanded Bellavance be fired. He eventually took a $300,000 buyout to leave the force and agreed not to seek another job in law enforcement for three years.
The city has since changed how it handles use-of-force cases. The mayor is now required to review any incidents that result in injury, and the Police Commission rewrote policies to emphasize the need to de-escalate tumultuous situations. The department now also posts some body camera footage of use-of-force incidents on its public YouTube page.
But the city still has not overhauled its police oversight system despite calls to do so after the Meli case became public. Progressive city councilors in 2020 attempted to create an independent “community control board” whose members would have been able to discipline, and even fire, police officers, but Weinberger vetoed it. The proposal was resurrected for a ballot item in March, but voters handily defeated it. The council is now working on an alternative oversight model.
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Concerns about racial disparities also persist. Data show that Burlington police are more likely to use force on Black people than white people, particularly during arrests for nonviolent crimes. The American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont has long contended that Burlington police have a pattern of charging Black people with disorderly conduct when they’re expressing free speech. The Melis are immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Meli settlement is sizable compared to others in recent years. In 2019, the city paid $270,000 to the estate of a New North End man who was fatally shot by police. In 2021, the city agreed to a $45,000 settlement with the family of a man who died two years prior after being punched by a Burlington police officer.
The city is still facing a lawsuit from Mabior Jok, who alleges Burlington police used excessive force against him during an arrest in fall 2018, the night before the Meli brothers’ incident. Jok, who is also Black, was knocked unconscious during that encounter.
