A family, traumatized by a warrant-less police search, has sued the Chicago Police Department after cops allegedly pointed guns at two young girls and their elderly grandfather.
Police burst into Regina Evans and Steven Winters’ home in August 2019 and told a confused Winters to ‘get down on the f**king floor’, states the lawsuit filed on Wednesday, according to Reason.
The family argues that about a half dozen officers entered the house and pointed their firearms at two girls, ages 4 and 9, along with their 74-year-old grandfather.
They claim that cops terrorized family members and that the incident violates their Fourth Amendment rights, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
The family’s lawyer, Al Hofeld Jr, said it is his 11th lawsuit with the same premise, arguing that the Chicago Police Department has a problem with pointing guns at the wrong households of black people, specifically homes with children inside.
‘We have an epidemic of violence, and the police contribute to it,’ Hofeld said during a press conference Wednesday. ‘Chicago police routinely do what they’re not supposed to do, which is point their guns at young children, often during wrongful home entries.’
The lawsuit says the police were pursuing someone who does not live at Evans and Winters’ residence.
To cover up they mistake, the cops wrote a false police report claiming that the suspect had actually entered the family’s apartment, the suit alleges.
However, the person in question neither was there nor was found inside the apartment.
‘I think the officers need to be held accountable for their actions’, Evans said, according to the Chicago Tribune. ‘And I also think they need better training on how to deal with people. Because I think, in my own opinion, I think that they treat blacks worse than they treat whites. I can’t call them…because I don’t feel like they would help me at all.’
In a similar case in 2018, the Chicago City Council approved a $2.5million settlement to a family who said police stormed their house and pointed a gun at a three-year-old girl.
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