After Anjanette Young raid snafu, Lightfoot pledges, ‘We will do better’

A contrite Mayor Lori Lightfoot acknowledged Thursday she was made aware more than a year ago of the botched raid on Anjanette Young’s home.

Two days earlier Lightfoot’s office issued a statement saying the mayor only learned this week of the now-infamous police operation in which the social worker was handcuffed while naked as officers searched her Near West Side home.

“We will do better, and we will win back the trust that we have lost this week,” Lightfoot said.

Lightfoot said she had “come to learn that, in November 2019, the case was lifted up to me as another example” of bad searches by CPD officers. But she doesn’t have any recollection of it. And the first time she saw the video was Tuesday morning.

The mayor vowed to release those emails in full. But she described them as broad strokes in nature, essentially saying, “Here’s another one.” Lightfoot said she was alerted to the case because she had ordered her staff to reform the Police Department’s policy for executing search warrants.

And though Lightfoot offered Young a televised apology a day earlier, the mayor said Thursday that her office has reached out to Young’s attorney in the hope that the two could speak in person.

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

Nearly a dozen officers went to Young’s home in February 2019 to execute a search warrant, though they were acting on bad information. Young could be heard on the video telling the officers — more than 40 times — that they were in the wrong home.

Young, a social worker, was getting ready for bed at the time and was naked when officers came inside. The encounter was captured on an officer’s body-worn camera and was broadcast by CBS earlier this week.

Young previously tried to obtain the footage herself through the Freedom of Information Act, but she was denied.

Young initially filed a federal lawsuit against the city in connection with the raid. As the suit was progressing, the city turned over the video footage to Young and her attorneys with a protective order in place that prevented it from being shared with anyone else.

CBS Channel 2 — which has in recent years reported extensively on bad raids by the CPD — and Young’s attorneys have remained mum on how the video was made public. In a court filing Wednesday, attorneys for the city called for sanctions against Young’s lawyers, but they also told the judge that “the city intends to release the remaining videos in their entirety, with appropriate redactions related to plaintiff’s privacy.”

Earlier this week, Lightfoot said her voice was hoarse from having read the riot act to Corporation Counsel Mark Flessner, whose office put Lightfoot in a politically untenable position by seeking to prevent CBS from airing the footage.

The mayor said she made it “very clear to the corporation counsel that I will not be blindsided by issues like this.” She also told Flessner that “filing a motion against a media outlet to prevent something from being published is something that should rarely, if ever, happen.” Had she been made aware of that motion she would have “stopped it in its tracks.”

On Thursday, Lightfoot was asked why, if she’s so furious with Flessner, she doesn’t fire him. She didn’t rule it out.

“There’s a lot of facts that I still need to understand, and we are looking at everything. And I will make decisions about personnel once I have a better handle on what happened, particularly over the course of this week,” she said.

Lightfoot and Flessner are friends from their time as colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern Illinois. Earlier in her term, Lightfoot stuck by Flessner even after learning he had, for several years, received homestead tax exemptions by claiming both a west suburban home and a condominium on the Near South Side as his primary residence in an apparent violation of a state law that prohibits homeowners from claiming that tax break on multiple properties.