Jury awards $5.7 million to family targeted in botched police raid on Chicago’s South Side in 2018
A federal jury on Wednesday awarded $5.7 million to a family targeted in a wrongful raid nearly a decade ago in which Chicago SWAT officers were accused of storming into their home without knocking, aiming guns at the children and forcing their grandmother outside in her underwear.
The three-week trial at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse took jurors back to a time when lawyers for the Tate family argued there was a widespread pattern of excessive force against children that went unchecked because of the cops’ so-called code of silence..
The case centers on a set of search warrants executed on Aug. 9, 2018, in the New City neighborhood. Officers were told a convicted felon lived in one home in the 5000 block of South Hermitage Avenue and kept drugs and weapons in Ebony Tate’s home next door, records show.
Tate, her four minor children and their 55-year-old grandmother reported hearing loud explosives, but no knock announcing their entrance. The officers pushed them out of the home at gunpoint, according to the family’s lawyers. The grandmother, Cynthia Eason, wasn’t given time to grab clothes and was forced out on the sidewalk in just a t-shirt and underwear.
They weren’t considered suspects and no contraband was found.
“This family has scars,” Al Hofeld Jr., a lawyer for the family, said earlier this week. “You can see and feel this family’s pain … for almost eight years they have been asking for justice in this case.”
The raid happened before the Chicago Police Department was placed under a federal consent decree mandating sweeping changes, including reforms to its policies and practices for executing search warrants.
Those reforms were only enacted after troubling raids garnered media coverage and drew outrage. Anjanette Young, who was undressing when officers conducted a botched raid of her apartment in 2019, became a crusader against the use of no-knock warrants.
Lawyers for the city and the officers have offered a drastically different version of events on the day the Tate’s home was raided. They argue the officers didn’t point weapons at any members of the family and were serving a valid search warrant.
They also deny a pervasive pattern of excessive force against children at the time.
“Those men are the best of the best,” Marion Claire Moore, a lawyer for the city of Chicago, said of the officers. “They did not target their weapons at the children during that search warrant.”
There's no body camera footage of the raid because the department didn’t have the ability or resources to give SWAT officers cameras at the time, a city lawyer said.
During the trial, Hofeld tried to call former Mayor Rahm Emanuel to testify about the police department's code of silence, which he’d famously acknowledged during a speech he gave after the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
U.S. District Judge John Tharp originally allowed for Emanuel’s potential testimony, but reversed course days later.