Mayor Lori Lightfoot has already added three City Council committees to appease more aldermen, secure more votes and get her “pandemic” budget passed 29-to-21 — the narrowest winning margin in decades.
That’s even though her transition team recommended reducing the number of committees from the 16 that existed under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Now, Black Caucus Chairman Jason Ervin (28th) is proposing a 20th committee that would chip away at the mountain of settlements and judgments, many tied to allegations of police abuse.
“We’re seeing the same types of activities over and over without proper evaluation and changing techniques that … lead to these huge settlements. Why do these things keep occurring? What do we need to do as a Council to put adequate policies in place to ensure that we don’t keep making the same mistakes?” Ervin said.
Ervin cited the botched police raid on the wrong house that humiliated an innocent woman and left her handcuffed while naked for 40 minutes.
“A lot of this stuff came out of the Anjanette Young case. It just caused us to take a serious look and say, `We need to get a little deeper into the details of what’s going on here,’” Ervin said.
“If we roll up our sleeves and work with the administration on risk management practices, that will overall have a better impact for the taxpayers by us not … having to pay out these huge settlements.”
For years, a parade of settlements tied to allegations of police abuse came before the Finance Committee, and aldermen routinely approved them.
That changed after African-American aldermen were harshly criticized for signing off on a $5 million settlement to Laquan McDonald’s family — even before a lawsuit had been filed — without asking enough questions or seeing the incendiary shooting video.
But Ervin said it’s time for aldermen to stop asking questions and start taking action.
“We, as a Council, need to get more involved in this stuff a little earlier. Us understanding this huge exposure that the city has would, hopefully, stem the tide on changing behaviors that create these situations where we ultimately have to pay out these settlements,” Ervin said.
Shortly after taking office, Lightfoot hired a professional outside claims administrator to ride herd over a $100 million-a-year workers compensation program so loosely-run by deposed Finance Committee Chairman Edward Burke (14th) that it was, as she put it, “ripe for corruption.”
The mayor also recruited Atlanta native Tamika Puckett to become Chicago’s first chief risk officer. Puckett’s charge was to overhaul worker’s comp, change the work rules that lead to accidents and on-the-job claims and stop the bleeding from police misconduct lawsuits that topped $113 million in 2018.
Puckett’s tenure was short-lived. A few months ago, she left City Hall to become manager of corporate security at Zoom video. She has not been replaced.
The resolution calling for creating the new committee will be introduced at Wednesday’s Council meeting.
It notes that, from 2008 through 2017, Chicago taxpayers shelled out $1.3 billion for settlements and judgments against the city.
In 2019, the city made “payments to plaintiffs in 116 of 184 settled or litigated lawsuits and claims involving allegations of civil rights violations against the Chicago Police Department or injuries due to a vehicle pursuit” involving a police officer.
As of September, there were “492 pending lawsuits against the city that involve allegations of civil rights violations or injuries related to a traffic collision involving a vehicle pursuit,” the resolution states.
