Via Turley, the story is troubling on more levels than I could imagine.

[Christina] Eilman was arrested and held overnight after she was found behaving strangely at Midway Airport. She was having a bipolar meltdown. She continued to display obvious signs of mental illness when the police simply released the former UCLA student into the high-crime neighborhood around the Wentworth District police station. She was wearing short shorts and a cut-off top and was near the exceptionally dangerous Robert Taylor homes project.

[S]he was kidnapped and raped before she fell from the seventh floor of a public housing apartment building.

The fall from the building left her with a devastating brain injury and several broken bones, including a shattered pelvis. She now requires around-the-clock care.

The Chicago Police Department settled the case for $22.5 million after six years of fighting it. While in police custody, her parents told the police that she was bi-polar, making the situation sufficiently outrageous that even 7th Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook noted :

Eilman was in an acute manic phase. She did not tell the police about her mental-health background, however, and was uncooperative after her arrest—sometimes refusing to answer questions, sometimes screaming, sometimes providing false or unresponsive answers. Phone calls from her mother and her stepfather told officers in Chicago that Eilman had bipolar disorder, but the officers did not believe the stepfather (they thought that the call was fake), and the officer who took the calls from Kathleen Paine, Eilman’s mother, failed to tell anyone else or record the information in Eilman’s file. While Eilman was in custody, some officers thought that she was just being difficult, some thought that she was on drugs (expert reports relate that methamphetamine could cause similar symptoms), some thought that she was no worse than the run of loud and uncooperative people who don’t want to be in custody, and those who thought that she needed mental-health care were ignored or overruled.

Inherent in the fault is pretty much every trope and prejudice that is typically used by the police against defendants. High crime area. The implicit assumption that a white girl in somewhat revealing clothing is almost certainly a target for rape by black men in the projects.  And that’s exactly what happened, this time.

The police should have known that the woman in custody was suffering from mental illness, but that would have required them to both think and care. The only time those two things happen simultaneously is when it personally affects a cop. If a police officer had scraped his thumb during her capture, you can bet the farm that he would have been taken straight to the hospital.

That they could chalk up this crazy white girl to just another druggie, another pain in the ass, was sufficient to absolve themselves of any concern for the person in custody.  She hadn’t done enough wrong to get anyone a medal for arresting her, and was too much trouble to keep around.  Just get rid of her as quickly as possible, and so they did.  She signed off an a personal recognizance bond and walked out of the stationhouse. 

This raises some questions that aren’t as easily answered.  While Eilman should not have been arrested or released, as she was suffering from a manic phase of mental illness that a reasonable person would have believed required medical treatment, was it wrong to let her walk out of the stationhouse and into the “high crime area” of the projects?

The gut reaction is that this was just inexplicably stupid, lazy and dangerous. The cops, of all people should have known the risk they were subjecting her to, particularly in light of her mental state.  Would it be different if the ghetto was comprised of fine single family houses occupied by white families?  See the problem?

Are we to assume, as a matter of law, that it’s negligent, if not reckless, to let a white girl in a shirt that exposed her midriff stroll into a poor black neighborhood?  Why is that? Are poor blacks so likely to rape white girls? Mentally ill girls? Girls wearing shirts that expose their midriff?  How much prejudice belies the assumptions that make the conduct of the Chicago police monumentally stupid?

There is, of course, a far clearer answer to the wrong done to Christina Eilman by the cops. Having taken a person into custody whose mental state, for whatever reason, was insufficiently stable to be able to negotiate her way to safety, the police assumed a specific duty to make sure she was not harmed upon her release.  They could have taken her to the hospital. They could have returned her to the airport, where they found her, though that would have accomplished nothing. They could have told her parents, with whom they spoke (and note how well the police document stuff that doesn’t suit their need to convict), to come get her or make arrangements for someone to get her as she could not be safely released on her own. 

There were options. The police used none of them. Instead, they did what was easiest for them, which was nothing to assure the safety of an unstable person in their custody.

But, the harm that gave rise to a $22.5 million settlement was the rape and brain damage that followed her fall from a seventh story window after the rape.  Was that foreseeable?  Should it have been foreseeable?  In the real world, the answer is probably yes, but then we concede things about ourselves and our society that we spend an awful lot of time denying.

This all could have been avoided if the Chicago cops had made the slightest effort to care for Christina Eilman’s safety and welfare.