Allegations of police abuse cost Chicago taxpayers more than $175 million through April 30, and $16.5 million is about to be added to the pile.
The City Council’s Finance Committee will be asked next week to approve two more settlements for that amount, the larger of which is tied to one of the ugliest and most notorious chapters in the history of the Chicago Police Department.
The $13 million settlement would go to Arnold Day, who claims he was beaten into confessing to a pair of murders he did not commit by detectives trained and supervised by former Area 2 Commander Jon Burge.
Day was 18 years old in 1992 and living in Chicago when he was arrested for the unrelated shooting deaths of Raphael Garcia and Jerrod Erving from a year earlier. His 2019 lawsuit claimed that he “falsely confessed” to shooting both victims to death after officers “choked” him and threatened to toss him out a window if he didn’t start “cooperating.”
“In fear for his life and as a result of the officer defendants’ unlawful coercion, Mr. Day agreed to cooperate,” according to the lawsuit. “Only then was Mr. Day un-handcuffed from the wall.”
Day then “falsely confessed” to murdering Garcia and Erving, according to the lawsuit.
Day was found guilty of murder and attempted robbery in the Erving case, but acquitted in a separate trial of the Garcia case. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison for the Erving case.
In December 2018, a Cook County judge overturned Day’s murder conviction based on evidence he was tortured into confessing. He was released from prison, and Cook County prosecutors agreed not to retry the case.
In 2019, Day, then 46, talked about his move to Texas, a state he called a “beautiful place” and a “land of opportunity for me” to “rebuild my life.”
“These detectives, they were hired by the city of Chicago to serve and protect, not abuse and neglect,” Day said on that day.
Day’s attorney Jon Loevy accused Chicago police officers of having a “pattern of picking on people who basically couldn’t withstand coercive interrogations using physical violence, as in Arnold’s case, and psychological intimidation.” One of the officers in the Day case was Kenneth Boudreau, who has been named in number of other wrongful conviction lawsuits.
The second police-related settlement — for $3.5 million — would go to Jose Almanza-Martinez. The 67-year-old street vendor was run over and killed by a car being chased at high speeds by Chicago police in 2020.
On the day he was killed, Almanza-Martinez had wrapped up his sales for the day, dropped off his remaining merchandise at home and was walking to a Little Village Walgreens to buy bottled water.
The incident was the latest in a long string of high-speed police chases gone wrong, and occurred when a motorist stopped for a traffic violation suddenly took off in an attempt to evade police.
Before initiating a car chase, Chicago police officers are required to conduct a “balancing test” that weighs weather, road and traffic conditions as well as the risk to other motorists and pedestrians.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hard-fought 2026 budget set aside $82.5 million for police-related settlements for the entire year. The city had already spent twice that amount in the first four months of this year alone.
Burge was fired by the Chicago Police Department in 1993. Nearly 20 years later, he was sentenced to serve prison time on federal perjury charges for denying allegations of abuse raised in a civil lawsuit. He died in 2018.
The Finance Committee will also be asked to sign off on a third settlement unrelated to police wrongdoing.
The $2.25 million proposed settlement would go to Access Living, an advocacy organization for people with disabilities.
The group’s 2018 lawsuit accuses the city of building affordable housing that neglected or shortchanged residents with disabilities.
A random test of affordable rental units conducted by Access Living in 2016 concluded that residents confined to a wheelchair were unable to enter “without assistance” one-third of the buildings examined.
“Over the last three decades, the city has funded and developed tens of thousands of affordable rental housing units without ensuring that a significant number are accessible to people with disabilities” as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other applicable federal laws, the suit states.
“As a consequence, low-income people with disabilities struggle to find suitable housing and are often forced to live on the street, in nursing homes, in homeless shelters or in other inadequate and dangerous housing.”
The investigation was triggered by complaints from a wide range of people with disabilities.