Anjanette Young Ordinance: alderwoman to seek vote on CPD search warrant reforms
CHICAGO (CBS) -- It's been nearly two years since the CBS 2 Investigators first broke the story of the botched raid on Anjanette Young's home, and the Chicago City Council is still trying to figure things out.
Ald. Maria Hadden (49th) plans to call for a vote next week on a long-delayed proposal to revise Chicago Police Department search warrant policies, known as the Anjanette Young Ordinance.
Hadden is one of five Black alderwomen who began the push to overhaul the Chicago Police Department's search warrant procedures in February 2021, months after CBS 2 first aired video footage of the botched 2019 raid on Anjanette Young's home.
The innocent social worker was changing her clothes when a team of officers burst into her home. She was handcuffed naked as officers swarmed her home with guns drawn. She can be seen on police body camera video repeatedly telling officers they were in the wrong place. The CBS 2 Investigators found the suspect police were looking for, based on a tip from a confidential informant, was living in a neighboring apartment. He also was wearing a police tracking device while awaiting trial for a recent arrest.
A year after our investigation, the City of Chicago settled a lawsuit filed by Anjanette Young, paying her $2.9 million in damages. Since receiving that settlement, Young has continued to push the City Council to pass the search warrant reform ordinance that bears her name.
The original Anjanette Young Ordinance languished for months before its first public hearing in July 2020, and even after that, it got no vote by the Public Safety Committee before Hadden and her colleagues introduced a revised proposal this past April.
Hadden now plans to call for a vote on that revised ordinance at the next City Council meeting on Wednesday. While it's unclear if Hadden and the co-sponsors of the ordinance have enough support to pass it, it's rare for aldermen to call for a vote on a proposal if they don't have the votes.
Young's case already has spurred key search warrant reforms and policy changes within the Chicago Police Department, but Hadden and her allies want to go further by requiring other changes through city ordinances that can only be changed by City Council votes, not through CPD internal policies that can be changed by unilaterally by the mayor or police superintendent.
The search warrant changes already implemented by CPD include a first-ever requirement for the department to track wrong raids that result from faulty information, such as the raid on Anjanette Young's home nearly three years ago.
So-called "no-knock" warrants also will be banned "except in specific cases where lives or safety are in danger," and must be approved by a bureau chief or higher, and will only be served by SWAT teams, rather than the officers who obtained the warrant.
All other search warrants will now have to be approved by a deputy chief or higher. That's a huge move, because that's three ranks above the previous requirement of a lieutenant approval.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who has said she "was completely and totally appalled" by what happened to Young, nonetheless has opposed the reforms sought in the Anjanette Young Ordinance.
"Since we learned about the unfortunate circumstances with Ms. Young, the search warrant policy has gone through at least two iterations that I'm aware of; one that I specifically directed before I knew about Ms. Young, because I was seeing this reporting on the so-called wrong raids, and then another round since has been signed off on by all of those folks," she said last December after the City Council approved the $2.9 million settlement with Young. "I think we have a very good policy."
If the City Council were to approve the ordinance over Lightfoot's objections, she could still veto the measure, and aldermen would need 34 votes to override her veto.
