Chicago police have paid more than $200 million in payments to private lawyers and settlements in civil rights cases brought against the city, according to the Chicago Tribune. In one case, the city was billed for more than 21,200 hours of legal work over six years, after Detective Reynaldo Guevara and other officers manipulated a 12-year-old boy into identifying Jacques Rivera as the man who fatally shot a 16-year-old in 1988. 

Rivera, including many other men who were convicted because of Guevara, was allowed to walk free after the witness recanted and Cook County prosecutors dropped the case. Rivera spent 21 years in prison before filing a lawsuit against the city upon his release.

“I think in most of our cases, particularly the ones where we’ve had these big results, the city had a problem and should have realized it," Jon Loevy, Rivera’s attorney, said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.

Jurors awarded Rivera $17 million, and the private attorneys working for the city added $5.8 million to the taxpayers’ tab for the case.

The Tribune obtained records on the city's spending for outside lawyers dating back to 2004, which was the first year such a database was kept. From 2004 to 2010, the amount rose steadily, totaling about $68 million in lawyers’ fees and civil rights case costs. From 2012 to early 2019, under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city paid more than $129 million, with an large uptick during Emanuel’s last three years in office.

A 2015 report by the Wall Street Journal showed that between 2010 and 2015, the 10 largest police departments in the nation spent a combined $1.02 billion in such cases, with New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore joining Chicago for the most money spent on legal fees surrounding police misconduct cases.