The federal lawsuit filed on Tuesday is the latest allegation that the city’s police department made a false search of houses of people of color. A few months ago, a black woman filed a lawsuit after police broke into her apartment and forced her to stand naked and put on handcuffs for a search. In that case, the police got the wrong address.
According to the latest lawsuit, 4-year-old Reshyla Winters and her 9-year-old sister Sevayla Winters were lying in bed on the night of August 7, 2019. At that time, the police broke into the house and rushed in without an arrest warrant. The girl’s father Steven Winters was approved. When a police officer knelt on Steven Winters’ back with a gun against his head, another police officer walked into the girls’ bedroom, where he pointed a flashlight at them and pointed a shotgun at them. The third police officer entered the girl’s grandfather’s bedroom and pointed a gun at him while he was sleeping on the bed.
The lawsuit alleges that the girls were so scared that they wept and wetted the bed. According to the press release announcing the lawsuit, the raid caused “enduring trauma…in the form of nightmares, bedwetting, difficulty sleeping, decreased appetite, crying, and fear and distrust of the police.” The person involved is the defendant.
The lawsuit argued that the police officers not only used excessive force, but based on vague descriptions of suspects armed with guns at nearby gas stations, they entered the wrong home. It argued that their body camera footage showed that they had made a mistake, and that no guns were found in the family’s apartment and no suspects were arrested.
The lawsuit alleges that the police officers tried to cover up their mistakes, claiming in their report that they heard and saw the suspect they were pursuing running into the apartment and then running out from behind-these statements were proved to be wrong by the body camera lens, the family Attorney Al Hofeld Jr., obtained through a public record request.
“They did not show anyone entering or leaving the plaintiff’s building or the plaintiff’s apartment,” the lawsuit said. “The officials did not find any signs of the suspect entering. The officials did not arrest anyone. The fear and pressure on this innocent family were futile.”
The lawsuit also stated that the city has not yet handed over all body camera lenses.
The police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.
Horfield said this is the 11th lawsuit involving 32 children of color who suffered similar trauma. One of them is a three-year-old girl who was at home in August 2013 when the policeman executing the search warrant aimed a gun at her chest. According to published reports, the city finally settled the case for US$2.5 million, and the two police officers involved in the incident were deprived of police power.
The city government and department were prosecuted for a police raid in 2019. In this raid, the police rushed into the home of an innocent black woman, Anjanette Young, and forced her to stand naked for more than half a while searching the place Hour. The wrong address came out. Mayor Lori Lightfoot revealed in an email that she was severely criticized when she learned of the raid in 2019 rather than at the end of 2020, because she first told reporters when a local TV station first aired a video of the raid taken by the police.
Chicago has paid hundreds of millions of dollars for police misconduct cases. In 2016, an analysis by the Associated Press found that the city had paid US$662 million for judgments, settlements, and external legal fees. Although the city’s legal department could not immediately provide cost statistics since then on Wednesday, news reports indicate that total costs have increased by tens of millions of dollars each year.
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