Less than a week after twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Cleveland police officers who thought Rice’s toy gun was real, nine other members of the Cleveland Police Department filed a lawsuit that accuses the department of discriminating against non-African American officers who used deadly force.

In the suit, the plantiffs claim that the department treated non-African American officers involved in the 2012 shooting of two African Americans “substantially harsher” than African American officers involved in the same incidents. The lawsuit deals with the aftermath of a deadly November 2012 car chase. During the car chase, 13 police officers fired over 130 shots at a Chevrolet Malibu. Both people in the car were shot over 20 times and killed. Neither had a weapon. During an investigation of the car chase, it came out that officers had omitted events in their statements, misidentified the suspects and did not specify that police officers had fired shots. Earlier in November, the city settled a lawsuit over the incident for $3 million....

The officers’ share of the punishment was 3 days of administrative leave, followed by restricted duty for a period of time — typically 45 days — during which they say they were asked to do “menial and unpleasant tasks” and denied overtime pay. The nine officers were not allowed to return to active duty for 16 months due to media and political pressure, which hurt their ability to apply for promotions and denied them “a substantial amount of income,” the suit alleges. The suit also argues that the nine officers should not have been disciplined individually because Ohio’s attorney general Mike DeWine attributed the incident to systemic failure within the entire department.

While the city is on the hook for the $3 million settlement over the incident, individual officers in Cleveland paid about 1 percent of the settlement. A study in the NYU Law Review found that it is rare that individual police officers actually pay the plaintiffs in such lawsuits. The study found that individual police officers in New York City and Los Angeles paid .03 and .008 percent of settlement money to plaintiffs respectively.