The city of Northport paid nearly $30,000 to a woman who spent a night in jail after being wrongfully arrested in 2017.

A case of mistaken identity led to the woman's arrest, The Northport Gazette reported Wednesday. Two Northport police officers and a dispatcher were at fault when she was mistaken for someone who had an outstanding warrant in Jefferson County, City Attorney Ron Davis told the newspaper.

The paper obtained the information after filing a public records request on April 9. Davis provided the reporter with a redacted report detailing the incident, saying the city had entered into a confidentially agreement with the claimant. He urged her to not print a story, saying publicity could cause “further psychological issues or emotional trauma for the resident who was totally without fault,” although the woman's name wasn’t released.

According to Davis, the woman was involved in a car crash in December 2017. The date of the crash was redacted. The officer who responded entered her driver’s license information and called it in to a dispatcher. The dispatcher ran the information through a database which pulled up a warrant from a woman in Jefferson County. The birth date, race and gender were the same, but the names and addresses were different. The officers arrested the woman, who spent a night in the Tuscaloosa County Jail.

“The dispatcher should have not made this mistake,” Davis wrote in the response to The Northport Gazette. “This case of mistaken identity was also not discovered by the officer that arrested the resident nor by the officer transporting the resident to (the) metro (jail). This error should have been caught by all three Northport employees; none did.”

With no public discussion, the Northport City Council agreed to pay the resident $28,600 at its March 4 meeting. The item was listed on the agenda only as “Claim 19-14.” According to the proof of claim form the woman filed with the city, the amount is intended to cover past and future services of a clinical psychologist. Davis told the Gazette the woman is not connected in any way to the city, any elected official or city employee.

Davis told the newspaper the officers and the dispatcher had been disciplined and the city “is taking steps through training to help prevent a mistake like this from occurring to someone in the future.”