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By Samah Assad, Dave Savini, Michele Youngerman, and Todd Feurer
CHICAGO (CBS) — Aldermen on Monday overwhelmingly backed a $2.9 million settlement with Anjanette Young, the innocent social worker who was handcuffed naked during a wrongful police raid nearly three years ago.
The City Council Finance Committee on Monday unanimously approved the proposed settlement, sending it to the full City Council for a vote on Wednesday.
Chicago Corporation Counsel Celia Meza told aldermen “this is a fair and just settlement” for Young and the city.
The settlement agreement comes nearly a year after CBS 2 aired the damning body camera video of Anjanette Young with her permission. It revealed how, in February of 2019, a dozen male Chicago Police officers burst into Young’s home with guns drawn and handcuffed her while she was naked.
As she stood unclothed, surrounded by officers, she told them they were in the wrong place dozens of times and begged them to let her get dressed. For minutes, officers failed to fully cover her body.
“I can just remember crying and yelling, ‘Please let me put my clothes on…you have the wrong place,” Young said in a previous interview. “I can see it all over again…I can see them walking around my house and feeling like, feeling humiliated.”
Moment after moment, the video echoed what Young described happened to her in an initial interview to CBS 2 just months after the raid. Except at that time, the city had not yet released the video.
The airing of that video in December of 2020 – and the city’s attempts to keep it hidden –sparked public outcry. Lightfoot’s law office tried to go to federal court to stop CBS 2 from airing the story, but CBS 2 aired it anyway. Young’s story sent shockwaves across the country and spurred a hashtag in her name.
“Seeing it makes it real,” Young said when she watched the video. “Seeing it validates that I didn’t make this story up. Seeing validates my memory.”
Using that body camera video and police and court records, CBS 2 pieced together – moment by moment – not only how Young was treated during the raid, but also how police failed to check the bad tip that led them there. The suspect they were looking for, who had no connection to Young, was on electronic monitoring next door at the at the time of the raid, CBS 2 found.
As the images went viral, nationwide criticism forced officials, notably Mayor Lori Lightfoot, to publicly acknowledge and apologize for Young’s mistreatment at the hands of the officers involved.
Months later, Lightfoot and Police Supt. David Brown pushed through key reforms in CPD’s search warrant policy. That was also more than two years after CBS 2’s reporting on wrong raids began, which found Young’s case fits a troubling pattern of bad raids on innocent families in Chicago.
Young filed a lawsuit in state court in February, and it took nearly a year to come to Monday’s resolution. Previously, settlement talks between Young’s legal team and the city stalled.
In March, and then again in June, Young and her attorney, Keenan Saulter, said the city was dragging its feet on the case despite Lightfoot’s public promises to quickly resolve it.
Saulter said in a March interview the city, at that time, had offered Young “zero dollars to resolve this case, still.” Lightfoot was also previously criticized for publicly apologizing for what happened to Young, while her law department attempted to dismiss the case in court. City representatives, however, said they had made efforts to settle and that Lightfoot was committed to resolving the case quickly so Young “can continue her process of healing and moving forward.”
The settlement agreement is another step toward closure in Young’s case. In November, the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) recommended termination or suspension for multiple officers for their role in the botched raid – a first sign of potential discipline and accountability within CPD.
The COPA investigation was one of multiple probes into how the raid on Young’s home was handled by police. The Chicago Inspector General’s Office completed its investigation into the raid and how the city, including Lightfoot, handled the fallout. The findings were sent to Lightfoot’s office and have not yet been released.
Lightfoot also asked a former federal judge to conduct an outside investigation, which is ongoing.
As Young’s lawsuit nears a resolution, the city continues to litigate several other lawsuits filed by families who were also wrongly raided by CPD officers. This includes the family of Peter Mendez, who was 9 when police raided his home and pointed guns at him in 2017.
The city previously spent millions settling similar cases. That includes a $2.5 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit filed by the family of Davianna Simmons. She was 3 years old when officers wrongly raided her home and pointed guns at her in 2013. She now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It’s very disheartening” that multiple families who filed lawsuits have not had resolutions in their cases, Young said in a recent interview with CBS 2, prior to the settlement agreement.
“I stand on their shoulders,” Young said. “…And it’s just not fair. But it’s also why each time that I ever speak in any public forum, I’m mentioning those other families because that means that much, too.”
With unanimous approval of the settlement by the Finance Committee, it’s all but certain the full City Council will back the deal on Wednesday.
Source: ChicagoCBS
