Costly settlements and judgments tied to lawsuits against Chicago police have long been a serious drain on the city’s coffers.
But the annual exorbitant expense is set to spike even higher next year as Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration forecasts a $401 million price tag for such deals and verdicts in 2027.
It’s a sum Johnson called “quite severe” but has so far declined to explain. The city’s corporation counsel has also been tight-lipped, with no comment on what settlements on the horizon could be behind the eye-popping increase.
But recently filed federal court records seem to have provided the answer, and it comes in one of the biggest police corruption scandals in Chicago history.
In a filing quietly put on the public federal court docket Friday, a judge revealed that, pending City Council approval, a “global settlement” has been reached in dozens of pending lawsuits against former homicide Detective Reynaldo Guevara, who has been accused of manipulating lineups, threatening witnesses and beating suspects into confessions.
U.S. District Judge LaShonda Hunt wrote in her minute order that either a stipulation of dismissal or an “updated status report on settlement finalization” was due by Dec. 17.
Several other minute orders entered last week by judges in other pending Guevara cases appear to back up that a settlement was in the works. In at least three of the lawsuits, judges have stricken all future court dates — a clear sign that the litigation has come to a resolution short of trial, according to records reviewed by the Tribune.
No settlement amounts were revealed, and both Johnson’s administration and plaintiff attorneys declined to comment on the apparent global settlement. But with some three dozen lawsuits pending, such a deal in Guevara-related cases could easily run in the hundreds of millions of dollars — explaining the mayor’s $401 million request for next year.
For his part, Johnson has cast undetailed settlement costs as an unavoidable key driver of the city’s looming $882 million budget gap. And it’s one that has shocked aldermen who insist the mayor’s team must explain what underlies the big number.
The mayor is promising “the absolute maximum level of transparency” as the city deals with towering lawsuit liabilities, many set in motion long before he took office and tied to alleged forced confessions by detectives in decades-old murders.
“This has just been a long time coming,” Johnson told reporters while unveiling the budget deficit earlier this month. “Half of the people that work in my administration weren’t even born, and the rest of us were children.”
The figure marks a $266 million increase in the city’s expected settlement spending, though critics have long argued the city’s budgets have perennially undershot the true yearly cost. The city allocated $82.5 million for police settlements and judgments for 2026, a figure copied from several proceeding budgets. Aldermen have already approved $106 million in major police-related settlements through August, a figure that leaves out smaller settlements and the city’s first global settlement, a $90 million deal announced last year and paid for with separate debt.
The 2026 budget includes another $52.7 million for settlement expenses in other departments.
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With the jump, Johnson’s administration could resolve some of the most expensive cases menacing Chicago’s bottom line, without using multiyear debt. Even before the court record revelation, the sum appeared to be an early sign of yet another global settlement mediating dozens of related cases at once, a novel approach Johnson used last year to land almost 200 wrongful conviction lawsuits tied to an evidence-planting cop.
Sources in the mayor’s budget office and Law Department said the city continues to consider new global settlements, but acting Budget Director Jonathan Ernst declined to say whether such a deal is forthcoming.
“This forecasted number has been provided by (the Law Department), but it’s not my job to worry about what cases are settled. It’s my job to determine how much we need to put into the budget in order to make those payments,” he told reporters before Johnson pledged a “real robust conversation” around the undetailed estimate.
As the estimate draws a mix of scrutiny and praise from always-skeptical aldermen, many of whom criticized Johnson last year for using bonds to pay for the $90 million global settlement tied to corrupt former Sgt. Ronald Watts, it will also catch the attention of credit ratings analysts who cautioned against that debt use.
It is good practice to increasingly pay for settlements with the city’s operating funds instead of punting payment into the future, even if the long-looming liabilities are neither firmly one-time costs nor annual costs, Fitch Ratings Senior Director Michael Rinaldi told the Tribune.
But the plan is just a plan, Rinaldi stressed, adding that the budget process has become “interesting” in recent years, a neutral nod to the trend of intense political fights that ended last year with an opposition bloc passing a budget against Johnson’s will.
With more testy and volatile negotiations sure to come once Johnson presents his full budget proposal next month, the mayor’s $401 million pitch might not stick.
“We’ll see,” Rinaldi said. “We’ve got a long way to go before the budget is adopted.”
So far, aldermen who criticized Johnson’s borrowing for police settlements last year have signaled alignment with the principles of the mayor’s emerging approach, but called for a closer look at his math.
The city should not continue underestimating how much it needs to pay for settlements and verdicts, even as it also shouldn’t publicly reveal how much it expects to pay in each case under negotiation, said Finance Committee Vice Chair Ald. Bill Conway, 34th.
The moderate downtown alderman, who has taken a case-by-case approach when voting on proposed settlements, said the Law Department will need to explain how it arrived at $401 million. But he believes the city should put whatever amount is truly needed in the operating budget.
“Given the persistence of litigation costs, it is important that we recognize these settlements as an operating cost rather than something the city borrows to pay for, as has happened in recent years,” Conway said.
Finance Committee Chair Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, said she also favors paying with operating funds over debt and believes the city’s pending cases should be resolved “as soon as possible.”
“Every delay increases the city’s costs,” she said.
But the Johnson-picked chair, who has broken with the mayor on key votes, said she has questions about the $401 million number. Dowell said she will need to look at the entire budget, expected to be released next month, before deciding whether the projection is prudent.
“That number seems wildly overestimated. I would like to understand how they got to that,” she said. “I can’t talk about the strategy the administration wants to use to pay for it.”
Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, called the sum “an unacceptably and unsustainably large amount,” but agreed with his colleagues that it is too early to say whether Johnson’s team overestimated or simply inherited an unavoidable, daunting expense. He added that the cost highlights the need to fulfill the Chicago Police Department’s federal consent decree, an effort Johnson has recently touted as a way to avoid future policing scandal.
“It’s close to half of the projected gap for next year, and it’s also about the same size as the entire budget for the Department of Streets and Sanitation,” said Martin, who cited the use of debt in the Watts cases when he voted against Johnson’s last budget proposal. “We need to know more about the specific lawsuits associated with these numbers before we can have a better sense of who’s to blame.”
Even Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st, who is typically a Johnson ally, told constituents in a newsletter earlier this month that he believes budget forecasts “serve the purpose of creating a narrative,” citing the spike in settlement and judgment money as dubious.
“Right now, what makes up that $266 million (increase) is in a black box, which makes me both skeptical and more than a little uncomfortable,” he wrote.
Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson agreed that whether or not Johnson fulfills his pledge to transparently outline the projection will prove critical. He warned the $401 million line item could be used as a “placeholder” in the budget.
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But if the number is legit and the money is used to pay off a broad swath of the city’s liabilities without debt, it’s a smart move, he added.
“Yes, absolutely it’s what we want to do,” he said. “It is a good thing as an objective, assuming that this is actually grounded and not creating negative dynamics.”
If a new global settlement is driving the increase, the outstanding lawsuits involving Guevara have long been a top candidate for a sweeping deal.
A global settlement in the Guevara suits would mark the second such deal struck by Johnson’s administration in as many years, and it would wipe a large chunk of future liability off the books. It also would turn off the spigot on tens of millions of dollars in legal spending on outside counsel to defend the cases in court — a price tag that the Tribune has reported gave taxpayers little bang for the buck.
Depending on the final figure, Guevara would likely become the costliest single police scandal in the city’s history, outstripping the some $210 million spent so far on cases against former Cmdr. Jon Burge, whose “midnight crew” of detectives was accused of beating and torturing dozens of suspects into murder confessions beginning in the 1970s.
Guevara, who retired a decade ago and is still collecting a handsome city pension, has denied any wrongdoing. Still, in case after case, dozens of mostly Latino men previously convicted of murder have had their cases reversed and won certificates of innocence while accusing the 82-year-old retired homicide detective of manipulating lineups, threatening witnesses and beating them into murder confessions.
Guevara repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, putting the city on the financial hook for the collective centuries they spent in prison.
Even before any global settlement, Guevara cases have already cost nearly $150 million in verdicts and settlements, including $29.2 million for four settlements approved by aldermen this year. The Finance Committee approved another $13.75 million to settle two more Guevara cases Monday, teeing them up for a final vote next Wednesday.
As aldermen begrudgingly OK’d the costly deals many perceive as inevitable, several called on the Law Department to package the remaining Guevara cases into a cheaper agreement.
“I think it’s worth looking into, given the fact that we’re already damaged here,” Ald. Emma Mitts, 37th, said during the meeting. “Why keeping going down this individual road? See if we can save taxpayers dollars, look at how we could bundle this and do one mass settlement.”
But even with several expensive Guevara lawsuits resolved, Chicago has paid less this year for typical police settlements and verdicts than it did in 2025.
It’s a win the city’s tight-lipped Law Department noted in a statement to the Tribune. Spending on settlements and judgments has dropped 13% in the last year, outside the Watts cases, Law Department spokesperson Kristen Cabanban said.
Aldermen have approved $106 million in taxpayer spending to settle major police-related lawsuits this year through August, according to a Tribune analysis. Altogether, the city has spent $220.7 million on all settlements and verdicts, according to city data.