The Chicago City Council on Wednesday approved more than $16.5 million in two police-misconduct settlements that together cleared one of the largest single-day liability dockets the council has taken up this year. The vote was 41 to 8, with a small bloc of progressive members opposing one or both items on the grounds that the underlying officers had not been disciplined.
The larger payment, $13 million, will go to Arnold Day, who served twenty-three years in Illinois prisons for a 1990 murder before his conviction was vacated in 2024. The Cook County state's attorney's office concluded that detectives had withheld exculpatory evidence and that a witness identification had been coerced.
The smaller settlement, $3.5 million, resolves a civil case brought by the family of 14-year-old Jose Almanza-Martinez, who was struck and killed in 2020 in Little Village by a driver fleeing a Chicago Police Department pursuit. The pursuit, prosecutors found, had violated departmental policy at three separate junctures.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, presiding over a council meeting that ran more than five hours, defended the settlement-by-settlement approach against renewed calls for a structural overhaul of the police-discipline regime. He told reporters afterwards that the city's settlement bill was "the inheritance of a deeper failure" and indicated his upcoming 2027 budget would carry a "first-time reserve" to absorb expected future awards.
Wednesday's docket also included a separate, unrelated item: a proposed sale of long-term rights on the city's parking-meter concession, which has lost the city an estimated $1.7 billion since the original 2008 lease. The council deferred a vote pending an independent valuation.