*Anjanette Young was naked and handcuffed when Chicago Police officers burst into her home on Feb. 21, 2019 during a wrong raid incident that Mayor Lori Lightfoot tried to cover up.
CBS 2 first interviewed the social worker last November. Young filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the video last year, but was denied by the police department. CBS 2 was also denied a similar FOIA request, the outlet reports.
“I feel like they didn’t want us to have this video because they knew how bad it was,” Young said. “They knew they had done something wrong. They knew that the way they treated me was not right.”
A federal court ultimately forced CPD to turn over the video as part of Young’s lawsuit against the CPD.
CBS 2 obtained the video and aired it while a judge denied the city’s motion to block the broadcast.
READ MORE: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightoot Issues Stay-at-Home Advisory Amid Rise in COVID Cases
The City of Chicago tries to block the release of a video showing CPD raid the wrong home – causing trauma and humiliation to a Black woman who was naked and sobbing. Transparency is central to accountability for Chicago police, who must treat people with respect.
— ACLU of Illinois (@ACLUofIL) December 15, 2020
Here’s more from the report:
The video reveals on Feb. 21, 2019, nine body cameras rolled as a group of male officers entered her home at 7 p.m. Not long before, the licensed social worker finished her shift at the hospital and had undressed in her bedroom.
That’s when she said she heard a loud, pounding noise.
Outside, officers repeatedly struck her door with a battering ram. From various angles, the video captured the moments they broke down the door and burst through her home.
“It was so traumatic to hear the thing that was hitting the door,” Young said, as she watched the video. “And it happened so fast, I didn’t have time to put on clothes.”
As they rushed inside with guns drawn, officers yelled, “Police search warrant,” and “Hands up, hands up, hands up.” Seconds later, Young could be seen in the living room, shocked and completely naked, with her hands up.
“There were big guns,” Young remembered. “Guns with lights and scopes on them. And they were yelling at me, you know, put your hands up, put your hands up.”
Young looked terrified and confused as she watched officers search the home. An officer put her hands behind her back and handcuffed her as she stood naked.
“What is going on?” Young yelled in the video. “There’s nobody else here, I live alone. I mean, what is going on here? You’ve got the wrong house. I live alone.”
Disturbing body camera footage reveals how Chicago police raided the wrong apartment in a 2019 raid, and detained an innocent woman.
12 male officers entered the home of Anjanette Young and handcuffed her while she was naked.@cbschicago‘s @davesavinicbs2 broke the story. pic.twitter.com/eKproa2uKw
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) December 16, 2020
“It’s one of those moments where I felt I could have died that night,” Young told CBS 2 Chicago. “Like if I would have made one wrong move, it felt like they would have shot me. I truly believe they would have shot me.”
When the Chicago Tribune asked Lightfoot at a news conference Tuesday why her administration attempted to kill the CBS story, she avoided the question and pointed to changes that the CPD allegedly made to its search warrant policy earlier this year, which include mandatory pre-checks and two supervisors must be on raid teams, the report states.
But as CBS 2 has found, the police department has failed to enforce these changes as they continue to raid the wrong homes (of Black and Latino residents) and are not held accountable.
“And I am not going to sit here and tell you that we’ve solved every problem, but we responded to what we were seeing was way too many circumstances of officers going into the wrong home,” Lightfoot said at the news conference.
“And I watched that video and I put myself in that poor woman’s place,” Lightfoot said about Young. “And thinking about somebody breaking into your home, you have no idea who they are, in the middle of the night and with a child, and the trauma that that causes. So, I think we have taken steps to address that issue.”
Watch the body cam footage via the YouTube clip above.
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