Ebony Tate and her family waited nearly a decade for the city of Chicago to answer for the botched raid of their South Side home.They were almost ready to give up. But on Wednesday afternoon, they were given a sense of justice. A federal jury ordered the city to pay the family $5.7 million to addres s the toll of the traumatic search. SWAT officers had stormed their home without knocking, aimed guns at the children and forced their grandmother outside in her underwear."I’m just praying that this will put a stop to the wrongful raids," Tate said after the verdict. "The next family shouldn't have to go through what we went through.” The three-week trial at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse took jurors back to a time when lawyers for the 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 centered 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 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.“The eight jurors believed this family — grandma, mom and children — versus the officers who were dishonest about what happened,” said Andrew Stroth, one of the family’s lawyers. “They pointed guns, they scared this family, and now there is a verdict against the city of Chicago.”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. This meant jurors largely had to weigh the testimony of the family against that of the nine police officers involved. After deliberating for less than six hours, jurors found, there was a pattern of excessive force against kids. Tate’s four children were each awarded $1 million in compensatory damages and $45,000 in punitive damages.
Tate and her mother were both awarded $750,000 in compensatory damages and $45,000 in punitive damages.“The city of Chicago put truth on trial over the last four weeks,” said Julian Johnson, another lawyer for the family. “They called Children liars. They called this family liars. … They bet big and they lost big.”Lawyers for the defendants didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.Al Hofeld, another lawyer for the family, had tried to call former Mayor Rahm Emanuel to testify about the police department's code of silence, which Emanuel had 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 testimony, but reversed course days later.Hofeld said the family’s case has already resulted in significant reforms to how Chicago cops conduct search warrants.But advocates are still working to get the city to adopt a formal policy on gun-pointing, especially at children, Hofeld said.“It's been a real fight.”
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