Taxpayers shell out $250M in police-related settlements; new report slams city efforts to learn from those mistakes

Mayor Lori Lightfoot campaigned on a promise to implement a risk management system to rein in runaway settlements costing Chicago taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. She lured one of the nation’s top risk managers away from Atlanta to spearhead that effort.

Nearly four years later, those grand plans and lofty promises have fallen rather flat, according to an analysis released Thursday by Inspector General Deborah Witzburg.

The report concluded Chicago taxpayers shelled out $250 million in settlements and judgments arising out of legal claims against the Chicago Police Department and its officers in 2018, 2019 and 2020 — but glaring deficiencies in how data is collected about those cases made it virtually impossible for the city to learn any lessons from them.

Data collection and case management systems were lacking, so settlements were paid in a vacuum without the information needed to analyze trends, improve discipline and training or reform police policies to reduce similar costs or mitigate future risk.

“We are paying out a lot of dollars without giving ourselves the opportunity to learn any lessons as a result. The city is not collecting the sort of information which would allow practices and policies to be improved,” Witzburg said.

“We should be learning lessons from settlements and judgments being paid out. Those are taxpayer dollars being paid out, either because there has been a finding that something went wrong or the city has made a determination to settle a claim that something went wrong. We are missing very expensive opportunities if we are not informing ourselves and improving practices and policies as a result of those settlements and judgments.”

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that, after Tamika Puckett resigned as chief risk officer on Nov. 6, 2020, Lightfoot waited until August 17 of this year to fill the job, the report states.

That’s hardly acting with the urgency Lightfoot, a former police board president, claimed to have when she ran for mayor on a promise to chip away at the mountain of settlements and judgments stemming from allegations of police abuse and wrongdoing.

Witzburg served as deputy inspector general for public safety under her predecessor, Joe Ferguson, who was publicly criticized, then forced out by Lightfoot.

The report released Thursday was in response to the public safety section’s “ordinance mandate in the municipal code” to review settlements and judgments against the Chicago Police Department and make recommendations on ways to reduce future payouts.

“When we set about to do that, we found that the city doesn’t collect enough or high enough quality information about those settlements and judgments to learn any meaningful lessons,” Witzburg said.

The inspector general was asked what specific information the city needs to collect to mitigate future risk.

“Who is involved. Where they’re working. What watch they’re on. The nature of the claim. All of those things. You can imagine a world where good information about any one of those dimensions would allow for potentially really productive analysis,” she said.

“Are there clusters of misconduct in certain operational units? Are some watches more vulnerable than others to claims of misconduct? Do we have problematic supervisors who have lots of people under their supervision who are getting claims against them? … Which categories of claims might the city successfully fight in court? Which ones are more likely to result in high-dollar judgments? All of those sorts of strategic analyses which might inform risk management tools and strategies we’re not equipped to do because we don’t have enough information.”

To finally deliver on Lightfoot’s campaign promise, the report makes a series of recommendations embraced by all three departments involved. They include:

• Policies, procedures and training for Law Department staffers across all divisions “to ensure that litigation data is consistently and accurately collected” as it is in other major cities.

• Upgrading the Law Department’s case management system to an electronic system and removing the need to use “multiple systems and forms” to manage risk.

• Better coordination between the Law Department, the Chicago Police Department and the Office of Risk Management to “align goals and procedures to determine how to best collect litigation data” and merge Law Department information with CPD data.

• Using “best industry practices” to determine what information to collect within litigation data systems and coordinate that information between the three departments.

In addition to pegging the payouts at $250 million over the three-year period examined, the report includes a chart breaking down the most frequent causes for lawsuits against CPD that triggered payouts.

Excessive force topped the list, with 204 lawsuits, $76 million in payouts, including the largest for a single case — $16 million. Next were: false arrest (167 cases and $10.6 million in settlements); motor vehicle accidents (94 cases and $5.8 million); illegal search and seizure (85 cases and $7.2 million and FOIA-related (84 cases and $1.09 million in payouts).

There also were 19 cases of reversed conviction, costing taxpayers $72.2 million, and 17 “pursuit-related” cases that cost $42.6 million.

Contributing: Andy Grimm