Dr. Lawrence Crosby has reached a $1.25 million settlement with the City of Evanston and four police officers who arrested him during a traffic stop in 2015.
The arrest was captured on dashcam video, and showed the doctor, then a PhD student at Northwestern University, being beaten and arrested for stealing his own car.
“It is not easy for me to go back to that situation,” Dr. Crosby said in a press conference. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get over that in my lifetime.”
Crosby says that he’s spent the last three years trying to clear his name for a crime that he was acquitted of in criminal court. Crosby was ultimately charged with disobeying a police officer and resisting arrest in the case, but was acquitted at trial.
In the incident, which occurred in Oct. 2015, Evanston police responded to a 911 call about a suspicious African-American man breaking into cars. They then pulled Crosby over in a church parking lot, and they wrestled him to the ground.
After the settlement was announced, the city of Evanston released the following statement:
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“The settlement is a compromise of disputed claims and the parties have not admitted liability or validity of any defense in the litigation.”
The settlement must still be approved by the Evanston City Council in an open session, and is scheduled to be considered at the council’s Jan. 28 meeting.
As for Dr. Crosby, he no longer lives in Evanston, but this spring, he will return to his alma mater at Stanford University to engage in a forum on implicit bias, participating with students and faculty at the school.
