The Chicago City Council's Finance Committee unanimously approved Monday a recommendation to give Anjanette Young $2.9 million after her home was mistakenly raided by police and she was handcuffed naked.
The entire council will consider the committee's recommendation Wednesday. The council is known to usually follow the committee's suggestions.
The settlement is in response to when officers raided Young's home in 2019, not allowing her to get dressed.
Kristen Cabanban, a spokeswoman for the city's legal department, said an investigation into the incident showed that while Young was only completely naked for 16 seconds, the jacket and blanket officers put on her kept falling off. She was not allowed to get fully dressed until 40 minutes after officers had initially arrived.
In a Chicago Sun-Times report, the city's Corporation Counsel Celia Meza told the council that while the officers had a "valid, legal search warrant," it was under false information that a man with a gun was in the home.
"The city has never disputed Ms. Young suffered an indignity," Meza told the council, according to the Chicago Tribune.
In February, Young filed a lawsuit against the city and a dozen police officers involved in the raid. Chicago's legal department said they are still working on a resolution.
The proposed settlement is an effort to make amends for a national embarrassment for the police department and a scandal for Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Lightfoot's claims that she had no knowledge of the raid were proven false when emails revealed that her staff had told her. Lightfoot came under more criticism when city attorneys tried to get a court order to prevent a local television station from airing video of the raid at Young's home.
The episode was damaging to Lightfoot, who ran for office as a reformer only to be caught up in a scandal similar to the one that embroiled her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, who just a few years earlier tried to prevent the release of dashcam video of the fatal police shooting of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Young filed a lawsuit in February that named the city and 12 police officers as defendants and contended that police officials had failed to independently investigate and verify the search location. Young filed a federal lawsuit against the city as well, but that lawsuit was dismissed in 2020.
The proposed settlement was not a surprise, as the city's legal department said earlier this year that it was working to resolve the matter. Such a settlement became even more likely when the city's Civilian Office of Police Accountability recommended that eight officers face suspension or firing in a November report.
The settlement will add to a staggering sum that the city has paid out in police misconduct cases in recent years. According to a 2016 AP analysis, the city paid about $662 million on the cases since 2004, with the Chicago Tribune reporting in 2019 that the total had climbed to more than $750 million.
Since then, there have been other big payouts, including a settlement of more than $20 million to two men who had their murder convictions overturned after they were allegedly framed by the same detective. And settlements like the one for $1.2 million with the family of a teenager fatally shot by a police officer in 2014 that was announced by attorneys this month have become almost routine.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
