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The City of Chicago is searching for financial solutions amidst hundreds of pending police misconduct cases, spending more than double the $82 million budget.
Eight years ago, police burst down the door of the Mendez family home unannounced, pointing guns at Hester and Gilbert Mendez, and their sons Peter and Jack (who were 9 and 5 at the time) – only to find they’d raided the wrong apartment.
After years stuck in the legal pipeline, between COVID delays and multiple changes in the judge presiding over the case, Mendez et al. v. City of Chicago finally began on Monday, April 21, 2025 in Courtroom 1941 at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in Chicago.
The Mendez family was seeking financial compensation for their rights being violated and the trauma their children endured.
The city of Chicago has already spent more than $164 million in taxpayer money this year on police misconduct settlements and judgments – more than double its $82 million budget. With hundreds of cases pending, including from people alleging torture by notorious former officers, the Mendez case illustrates how these situations often play out: the city launches into a costly trial, putting families through trauma and stress, only to settle for a large sum at taxpayer expense. Officials say there’s a better way to do it – offering substantial settlements earlier – not the unfairly small settlements that the city often uses to avoid trial, as lawyers see it; or ideally avoiding police misconduct in the first place.
During the Mendez family’s trial, a now 17-year-old Peter Mendez described on the stand how he was traumatized on the evening of November 7, 2017. “My life flashed before my eyes, my heart was pounding, and I thought maybe I could die.”
To this day, the event has left Jack, the youngest child, with the same recurring nightmare of police shooting his mother, cuffing and taking his father away to jail, and separating him and his brother as they get taken to different orphanages.
The Mendez family filed suit against the city and officers involved on the grounds of psychological damage and multiple fourth amendment violations, including raiding the wrong home, breaking in without knocking or announcing their presence, and pointing guns at innocent children.
Attending the trial, I first introduced myself to Hester Mendez during a recess. She was crying.
She’d just faced cross-examination from the defense, who argued the family sought psychiatric treatment for Peter Mendez only after consulting with lawyers (who contacted them just days after the event).
I remarked on the strength she’d shown on the stand. Trying to smile through tears, she thanked me.
Days later, I approached Gilbert Mendez outside the courtroom on another recess. He offered me a smile and a friendly handshake. He had started telling me his wife had mentioned me, when his phone rang from his pocket.
It was the youngest son, Jack, calling to check in on his father. After telling Jack “I love you buddy,” and hanging up, Mr. Mendez showed me his phone.
I smiled at the home screen backdrop as he swiped – a photograph of his wife and two children. He opened the photos app to show me a picture of him, Jack, and a scary-looking buff guy: Jack loves professional wrestling, so he’d taken Jack to a meet-and-greet to see and take a picture with his favorite professional wrestler over the weekend.
It was only then his smile started to falter, as sadness crept into his voice. He told me how hard the entire trial process had been for his family, and how the event had marked them.
How it would never go away. How it will follow them for the rest of their lives.
Part way through the trial, Mr. Mendez summarized how he and his family were feeling in a simple text message to me on April 29th.
“Just tired or if I may say exhausted, me and my whole family,” Mr. Mendez texted.
He sent this the day before they officially reached a settlement agreement with the city.
The amount agreed upon between the Mendez family and the city is expected to be approved by City Council at a meeting in July, until which time the agreed amount will remain confidential.
Al Hofeld, the Mendez family’s lawyer, said the amount they held out for was appraised in part based on past jury verdicts and settlements, including wrongful raids such as the Anjanette Young case ($3 million settlement), Simmons v. The City of Chicago ($2.5 million), and since the Mendez family alleged cognitive damage to their children, a recent PTSD case involving a child ($750,000).
When I asked Hofeld about the Mendez’s settlement, he said: “the family is very relieved and very satisfied with the result.”
Squeezed by the system
The outcome of the Mendez case represents a relatively rare triumph over many systemic obstacles that plaintiffs struggle to overcome in most cases against the city and police.
According to Lisa Thurau, a licensed lawyer practiced in juvenile justice who appeared as an expert witness for the plaintiff during the trial, making a successful claim – which allows a case to go to trial – presents an early challenge.
“The first thing the police department will do is say, “We’re going to move for summary judgment to say this case has no claim,” Thurau said.
Even amongst those with a successful claim, most cases against the city never see the courtroom.
“Most firms, for financial reasons or other reasons, will settle the cases well short of trial,” Hofeld said. “And those settlements tend to be for much less than the case could get if they took the case to trial, so there are a lot of relatively low settlements out there.”
Hofeld explained that this occurs in large part due to the contingent fee structure upon which his and most other firms take these kinds of cases.
“Firms are not going to be able to get paid until the end of the case,” Hofeld said. “It’s very difficult for a plaintiff’s law firm to hold out financially and keep investing money into a case for three or four or five or six or seven years.”
When asked if this is something the city is aware of and relies on in their strategy for offering settlements, Hofeld responded “absolutely!”
He continued, “It is a calculated policy on the part of the city. They know that most plaintiff’s attorneys will settle for significantly less than the case is worth. They know that most plaintiffs are low income people who, for one reason or another, need the money.”
Thurau says the city’s strategy in rolling out settlements is less focused on morality and more on avoiding culpability and financial loss by fighting plaintiffs in court.
“The general thinking here is “is the juice worth the squeeze?”” Thurau said.
In the Mendez family’s case, the city squeezed hard – holding out on offering a settlement the family found reasonable until far into the trial.
“There was a lot of media coverage of this case and several other similar cases, so that caused the city to fight us extra hard in terms of the litigation,” Hofeld said.
Even in cases like the Mendez’s where the plaintiff eventually gets a favorable settlement payment, the city benefits from more than just avoiding potentially higher financial costs.
If a case is settled, the city avoids officially admitting culpability for any wrongdoing and gets a release signed – protecting them from being sued again for the same misconduct.
Hofeld says the justice system doesn’t hold police accountable often enough, referencing how officers almost never have to pay out of pocket in legal cases against them.
“When there’s a jury verdict against a police officer, the city or the municipality will pay the judgment,” Hofeld said. “The only circumstance in which the officer has to pay out of his or her own pocket is when the jury awards punitive damages against the officer – and an award of punitive damages is relatively rare.”
Officers are rarely named as defendants due to “qualified immunity,” which, according to the Legal Information Institute (LII) run by Cornell Law School, “protects a government official from lawsuits alleging that the official violated a plaintiff ‘s rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right.”
Furthermore, Volume 89, Issue Number 3 of the New York University Law Review, from 2014, illustrated that police officers are almost always indemnified (protected from financial/legal liability) even when they are defendants. During the period of the review’s study, 99.98% of the dollars plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement were paid by the government.
In the study, officers “never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments – even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy.”
“In a case where there’s a risk of a jury awarding punitive damages against the officers, the settlement protects the officers,” Hofeld said.
A question of rights and wrongs
There are conflicting narratives amongst even the most in-the-know individuals as to whether or not the city settles too often and too readily.
According to Dr. Wesley G. Skogan, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Urban Affairs at Northwestern University and a member of the training advisory committee for the Chicago Police Department, “for the last 25 years, the city has, by policy, largely negotiated settlements rather than contesting cases – often to great disappointment among police officers
who think that the city is caving on something that was a clear cut case” in the officer’s favor.
“And one reason, of course, is that there’s enough people in Chicago who are sufficiently hostile to the police that you could easily get a jury that would buy many sketchy stories and make a big award,” Skogan continued.
Some city officials assert a different recent pattern. According to Josue Ortiz, a spokesperson for the 36th Ward and an associate of 36th Ward Alderman Gilbert Villegas, “right now, what we’re seeing is that it’s more of the exception that the city tends to settle.”
The city is currently facing hundreds of wrongful conviction cases dating back to the 1990s and 2000s. Dozens name former Police Commander Jon Burge, more than 39 name former Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara, and another 193 name former Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts.
The lawsuits accuse Burge of torture, Guevara of framing defendants through fabricated evidence and coercion, and Watts of corruption and extortion.
Ortiz said that in order to slow the spiraling of settlement spending, at least for the wrongful imprisonment cases from the 1990s and 2000s, the city needs to fight less and be willing to settle earlier on.
A “tsunami” approaches
Piled in with more recent police misconduct charges like that of the Mendez family, this spate of backlogged cases threatens the city with devastating financial burden.
This year’s budget for police misconduct settlements and judgments, set by Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration, was $82 million. Unfortunately for Chicago taxpayers, the budget is just an estimate – meaning if the city goes over budget, spending doesn’t stop. Rather, the tab will just keep climbing.
“Crisis is putting it lightly. I’d call it a settlement tsunami,” said Alderman Gilbert Villegas of Chicago’s 36th ward, who has led City Council on seeking a resolution to the spending spiral.
“The 82 million that was originally appropriated for settlements – we’ve really blown past that,” Villegas said. “Matter of fact, we’ve doubled it and we’re not even halfway through the year.”
He continued, “What we’re seeing here is an unfunded liability where we have hundreds of cases around wrongful convictions.”
In his role as an appropriator, Villegas worries recent wrongful conviction verdicts which gave high awards could set a dangerous precedent.
“You’re talking approximately 2.5 million per year of wrongful conviction. And if you take a look at the 200 cases outstanding, you do the math,” Villegas said. “If you do 200 cases times 2.5 million for 1 year of wrongful conviction, that’s why I’m concerned, because those numbers are staggering.”
Police-related verdicts and settlements cost the city more than $1.11 billion from 2008 to 2024, including more than $140 million spent on police-related verdicts and settlements in just 2024 alone.
Police settlement and judgment spending in 2025 has already surpassed the entirety of that in 2024, and there is little reason to expect the pace of payouts would slow down.
Saving the city
The city is in a tight spot, seeking a resolution that will balance its financial needs with justice for victims of past police misconduct.
“We have this essentially multi-billion dollar liability the city is looking at, and we have no answer for it currently,” said Ortiz.
While there have been City Council committee discussions on reining in settlement spending, “at this moment there isn’t” any strategy to address them, according to Ortiz.
“We were trying to get it out of committee and into city council for a larger vote, but it’s been stalled for some time,” Ortiz said.
Dr. Skogan said the city has long had a recurring problem with setting the budget for police settlements and judgments too low, and he feels Mayor Brandon Johnson isn’t motivated to “fix” the police department.
“The city budgets a ridiculously small amount of money for settlements,” Skogan said. “Everybody knows, by March it’s going to be gone.”
Dr. Skogan outlined a resolution strategy he’s observed in other mayors’ attempts to handle settlements.
“What they do is they sell high-interest-rate bonds, almost junk bonds, into the bond market and raise money from the bond market to pay the settlement,” Skogan said. “So the next mayor is going to deal with it.”
According to Alderman Villegas, the city doesn’t plan to take this approach going forward.
“It would take legislative action to pass to allow the chief financial officer of a corporation council to issue high yield bonds,” Villegas said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable as an appropriator taking on and selling bonds at a high rate in order to pay a bill.”
He feels the solution is much simpler.
“I think we’re going to try to do it in a predictable way where we see how much settlements are coming in that we have to pay for and then we’ll budget it accordingly,” Villegas said.
The caveat, Villegas said, is that payments from these cases will have to be stretched over a longer time period.
“That may mean a delay in payment, or maybe a structure of making yearly payments until we get there, but there’s going to have to be a lot more flexibility given this unfunded liability that we have,” Villegas said.
Making the system squeeze itself
Villegas said while he can’t predict what will happen with settlement totals once the Burge-related lawsuits have been resolved, he thinks police misconduct lawsuits will always be an issue the city has to deal with. separate from wrongful imprisonment cases, he couldn’t make a judgment on how high police settlement and judgment spending will be in future.
“We can’t legislate morality,” Villegas said. “Whatever policies that are in place, that doesn’t guarantee that everyone’s going to abide by those rules and regulations.”
As far as the Mendez family – according to Hofeld, due to widespread media coverage of the case and the family’s grit, the police department changed its policy to require more scrupulous review before allowing search warrants.
“The department now executes less than 100 search warrants per year on average, whereas at the time the Mendez’s apartment was raided the police department was executing on average 1500 to 2000 search warrants per year,” Hofeld said.
As such, police spending, at least for incidents related to search warrants, should stand to decrease.
“As long as they adhere to policy and training, it’s much less likely that you’re going to see cases like the Mendez’s case in the future,” Hofeld added.
Just two days after the Mendez family’s settlement was agreed upon, Mr. Mendez already felt as though a weight had been lifted.
“The healing started Tuesday when we got the news,” Mr. Mendez texted. “Thank you for your concern sir.”