Mayor Lori Lightfoot enlisted a former federal judge Tuesday to do an outside review of the botched Police Department raid that has consumed her administration for more than a week, as Chicago aldermen called for changes in the way such search warrants are served.
During a joint hearing of the council’s public safety and human relations committees, council members said the Anjanette Young raid and the nationwide attention it has received recently are symptoms of a bigger problem that needs to be fixed.
“The incident that happened with, not only Anjanette Young, but the other incidents around this issue of warrants and wrong addresses and the violation of citizens’ of our communities rights is the reason that we’re all here today,” said Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, chairman of the council’s Black Caucus.
The Young case has turned into a major problem for Lightfoot since WBBM-Ch. 2 aired police body camera footage last week showing officers mistakenly raiding Young’s home in February 2019. Officers found Young naked, then handcuffed her, while she repeatedly told officers that they had the wrong place, the video showed.
Lightfoot continued trying to deal with the situation Tuesday, tapping former federal Judge Ann Claire Williams to lead an outside investigation of the Young case and how it was handled.
“Her mandate will include every relevant department, including the Mayor’s office,” Lightfoot said in a letter to aldermen. “We want a review of the procedures and processes in place that allowed this incident and subsequent actions to unfold as they did.”
Williams and her law firm, Jones Day, will conduct their investigation without charging attorney’s fees, Lightfoot said.
In the council hearing, police Superintendent David Brown promised changes in the department’s search warrant policies in a bid to recognize “human dignity and human rights.”
Brown said the department will include a human rights statement as part of its search warrant policy, will restrict which teams within the department can serve warrants, and require that supervisors at the rank of deputy chief or above approve them.
In cases where police rely on information from paid informants to justify search warrants, the department also will seek additional corroboration, Brown said.
He agreed with Ald. Leslie Hairston, 5th, that a female police officer should be a member of all search warrant teams going forward.
And the superintendent said Chicago police would mostly stop serving so-called no-knock warrants, though that was not the type of warrant in the raid on Young’s home. A department spokesman later said the no-knock warrant changes Brown outlined are “under review and the Department intends to engage with the community around the policy change recommendations.”
Some aldermen on Tuesday also called for a 12-month moratorium on no-knock warrants. But a majority of committee members voted against including that proposed order on Tuesday’s agenda.
Instead, the committees simply heard testimony on the issue. No vote was taken on any proposal.
Lightfoot critic Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, criticized the decision not to take more concrete steps.
“People are looking for action. People are looking for results,” Beale said.
Testifying to aldermen, Sydney Roberts, chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which is investigating the Young raid, said her office only heard about the incident from her department’s Office of News Affairs.
Young already had filed a lawsuit by that point, but the Law Department did not inform COPA about the situation, said Roberts, who called it a “nontraditional manner” for her department to find out about such a case.
In recent days, Lightfoot has had to apologize for the search warrant raid itself and the officers’ treatment of Young, which occurred before Lightfoot was elected mayor and before Brown joined the department.
But she has also had to try to clean up missteps she and her Law Department have made in dealing with the incident’s fallout, the kind of gaffes that increasingly leave the scandal at her doorstep.
The mayor acknowledged last week that “There’s a lot of trust that’s been breached, and I know there’s a lot of trust in me that’s been breached, and I have a responsibility to build back that trust.”
Lightfoot said she sought and accepted Corporation Counsel Mark Flessner’s resignation over the weekend. A Law Department deputy and spokeswoman also have resigned.
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Those moves came after the mayor apologized last week for the Law Department taking the unusual step of attempting in court to block CBS from airing the body camera footage.
City lawyers also filed a request to have Young sanctioned in federal court for allegedly violating a judge’s confidentiality order on the video, for which the mayor also apologized. On Friday, Lightfoot released a statement saying she also wanted the Law Department to stop trying to sanction Young’s attorney.
In federal court Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Tharp said he was still considering sanctions against Young’s attorney, Keenan Saulter, for releasing the videos to CBS even though the city withdrew its request amid the uproar.
During a nearly hourlong hearing, Saulter apologized repeatedly for his decision, saying he made a “significant mistake” and could have handled it differently. Saulter also indicated he was confused by whether the videos themselves were part of the judge’s protective order, given the strong case that could be made that Young should have been given the footage by the city after she filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year.
But Tharp said his order had nothing to do with the city’s response to the state FOIA law — and Saulter should have known that.
“I’m still somewhat at a loss as to understanding how an experienced lawyer like Mr. Saulter could, upon review of this order, conclude that it was appropriate or proper to disclose the video recordings to a news agency, or any other third party,” Tharp said. “If the answer is, ‘We were confused and thought we were entitled to it under state law,’ that doesn’t do a whole lot to alleviate my concern.”
Tharp says he wants a fuller explanation in writing from Saulter and his attorneys and gave them until Jan. 8 to file their response.
With the furor not abating over the incident and the city’s handling of it, Lightfoot announced Monday that 12 police officers who took part in the raid had been placed on desk duty as COPA continues to investigate.
Brown reassigned the officers nearly two years after the raid, only after it erupted into a full-blown scandal. A Police Department spokesman on Monday declined to explain the timing of the reassignments or point to the department policy used to justify it, on the grounds that it’s a personnel matter.
Brown on Tuesday told aldermen he moved them to desk duty because he thought doing so was appropriate while the investigation continues.
Lightfoot also falsely denied last week that her administration withheld footage of the raid from Young, before reversing course and acknowledging Young had filed an open records request, which the city did not grant.
And she told reporters she only found out about the botched raid after seeing the TV report, before revealing the next day that members of her team told her about the raid in November 2019, as CBS was doing continued reporting on search warrants being served at the wrong addresses. Lightfoot said her administration would release the emails, though they have not yet done so.
