Anjanette Young is so traumatized by the wrongful police raid on her Near West Side home that she will leave town for its fifth anniversary on Wednesday.
The pain is too much for her, she said Friday, a tear inching down her cheek.
But she’s not abandoning her fight to change the way police execute search warrants, including a ban on no-knock warrants.
“I need city government to know that Anjanette Young is not going away until we have some real accountability in this city,” she told reporters outside City Hall.
After an attempt to pass an ordinance in City Council failed in 2022, Young hopes reforms will be addressed in the ongoing federal consent decree process with the Chicago Police Department. Beyond a ban on no-knock warrants, she wants stronger police department guidelines for tracking raids and a time delay between when officers announce themselves and knock down someone’s door.
Young said she met the new judge in charge of the decree at the last public hearing.
“I spoke to her directly,” Young said of Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. “I asked her to look at me and hear what it was that I was saying because I’m committed to this process.”
Young has been a vocal critic of the police department’s search warrant policy since the botched raid on Feb. 21, 2019, in which Young was forced to stand naked while a dozen male Chicago police officers searched her home. Police had the wrong address. Details of the raid became public when police body-cam video aired in December 2020.
Since then, the police department has reduced the number of no-knock warrants executed and requires a female officer to be present at every search warrant execution.
Young wants the city to do more. She said she won’t hesitate to seek the reintroduction of the ordinance named for her if the reforms are not addressed in the consent decree.
After the city settled Young’s civil lawsuit Young’s civil lawsuit for $2.9 million, Young endorsed Johnson over Lightfoot for mayor and even campaigned for him. At the time, she said it’s “time for [Lightfoot] to move out of City Hall to give someone else room to do the work that she has refused to do.”
On Friday, Young said she wants Johnson’s administration to “get (to) the table and make this happen.”
Young has been working with Ald. Maria Hadden (49th), who introduced the failed Anjanette Young ordinance. Then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her allies voted it down in committee. At the time, Hadden called it “stronger in 17 different ways” than the internal reforms authorized by Lightfoot and then-police Supt. David Brown.
Hadden said Friday she’s still seeking the reforms in the ordinance, though she hopes they can be addressed in the consent decree.
“We understand that [search warrants are] a necessary part of policing when there are really serious things that they’re looking for,” Hadden said. “We just need a higher level of accountability so that we’re not damaging that trust — so we’re not traumatizing our residents.”
