Anjanette Young and her attorney demand public release of inspector general, COPA reports on botched Chicago police raid
Anjanette Young stood Friday morning outside the Daley Center in a semicircle of activists holding picket signs of her face.
“All of you know my name,” Young said, “but I want you to see that I am a person who deserves and demands respect.
“Since Feb. 21, 2019, I have been treated as if I’m invisible, both by the 12 men who entered my home that night and refused to treat me with respect and dignity and by City Hall, who has repeatedly used their powers to hide the truth of what happened that night and has refused to settle the case with me fairly and justly.”
Young was forced to stand handcuffed and unclothed in her home while officers mistakenly raided the residence in 2019. The Chicago police body camera footage capturing the raid went nationally viral last year, despite the city’s efforts to block its public release.
Young and her lawyer, Keenan Saulter, held a small protest and march downtown for the National Day of Protest. They shouted their message that they were still demanding transparency from Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her administration.
Since the release of the video, the city’s Office of Inspector General and Civilian Office of Police Accountability both launched investigations into the botched raid, but the reports of their findings have not been made public or available to Young.
A spokesperson for the city’s Law Department deferred questions about the release of the reports to the mayor’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lightfoot recently declined to commit to releasing the full inspector general’s report but a summary of it will be included in the inspector general’s January 2022 quarterly report.
Saulter said they are still trying to pass the “Anjanette Young ordinance,” which would outlaw no-knock warrants, require police executing warrants to use “tactics that are the least intrusive to people’s home, property and person and least harmful to people’s physical and emotional health” and to record information about warrants.
Young and Saulter are also demanding a financial settlement from the city, but they are prepared to go to trial if needed, Saulter said.
“Why is City Hall so fixated on denying justice to this woman?” Saulter said. “ … The legal maneuvers behind the scenes that don’t match the public words. That has to stop. ... Everyone saw. Everyone around the world saw the level of disrespect, the level of violence, the level of lack of basic human dignity that was visited upon Ms. Young while she was simply a Black woman at home.”
Young told a story about how she was born in Chicago but moved when she was 3 to Mississippi, where she lived with her grandmother, a civil rights activists who’d marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“I learned from her what it means to fight against inequality and to never give up on justice — no matter how slow the hand moves,” she said.
Young said her life has been a “perfect storm,” and that she now has the responsibility “to expose the city of Chicago for its corrupt practices as it relates to how Black and brown families are treated by the Police Department.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I didn’t come this far to compromise, and I demand justice.”
Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt contributed.
