Chicago Police officer yells at reporters and photographers to get back as officers take into custody a protester during a scuffle at a bicycle barricade on Chicago's Magnificent Mile, December 24, 2015. (photo: AP)
Chicago
Police Settlements Cost Taxpayers $210 Million Plus Interest
By Mercy Yang, Reader
Supported News
15 July 16
A new database reveals the city paid off 655 lawsuit settlements
over four years, often using borrowed money.
As
the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the
hands of police officers stir up national debate on law enforcement practices,
a new database unveils hundreds of Chicago Police Department misconduct lawsuit
settlements between 2012 and 2015 ― costing a whopping $210 million in total
and revealing yet another financial burden on taxpayers.
“Settling for Misconduct,” an extensive
database from The Chicago Reporter published this week, highlights allegations
of Chicago’s excessive policing methods, ranging from false arrest to
unwarranted killing, particularly in Latino and black communities, leading to
655 settlements in four years.
Multimillion-dollar
police misconduct settlements, such as the one stemming from the killing of
Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald, tend to
garner national attention. But the database reveals that the City of Chicago
pays much smaller sums of money to plaintiffs on an average of every other day.
The average payment was just $36,000.
The
City of Chicago settled 86 percent of the lawsuits against the police
department. However, as the database’s front page introduction says, “The
city may pay, but a settlement is not an admission of guilt.”
The
frequency of payment raises the question of whether the police department is
using money the city doesn’t have to cover up or wave away instances of
misconduct.
To pay
for these lawsuit settlements, Chicago had to borrow money using long-term
bonds ― interest on which taxpayers could be paying for the next 30 years.
Chicagoans will expect to pay double the cost of the settlements in interest,
The Chicago Reporter revealed.
Following Illinois’ recent budget crisis,
such costly settlements pose additional and unnecessary financial pressure on
taxpayers. Chicago residents not personally involved with police brutality will
still have to pay for their city’s officers alleged wrongdoings, emphasizing
the idea that everyone is a victim in these lawsuits, not just the plaintiffs
involved.
“We’re
a publication that is focused on race, poverty and income inequality, and I
think those are the lenses that we look at police misconduct through ... but we
were looking to broaden the lens to see how police misconduct affects everyone
in the city in a fiscal way,” lead reporter Jonah Newman said.
In
addition to underlining the lawsuits’ widespread financial impact, the database
holds police officers accountable by including the names of officers involved,
allegation details, addresses of incidents and settlement amounts ― detailed
information gathered from the City of Chicago Law Department’s public records,
with very little contribution from the police department itself.
“They
[the police department] put the onus on the city’s law department ... and I
think that was part of the problem,” Newman said.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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