Chicago Police Raided at Least 21 Wrong Houses

[Kamaji]

Chicago Police Raided at Least 21 Wrong Houses

But poor record keeping hides the real number.
C.J. CIARAMELLA
6.30.2023

Chicago police raided the wrong house at least 21 times between 2017 and 2020, according to an inspector general report released this week, but shoddy record keeping means the true number is unknown.

The Chicago Office of Inspector General released its final report Wednesday on the Chicago Police Department's (CPD) search warrant policies, concluding that CPD's inadequate record keeping made it impossible to count or fully analyze wrong-door raids. The records the inspector general did get, however, showed that inexperience and failures to do basic investigative work contributed to botched raids.

The CPD's search warrant policies have been under scrutiny since 2020, when body camera footage was published showing officers humiliating a naked woman during a wrong-door raid in 2019. Chicago police burst into the apartment of Anjanette Young based on a faulty tip and handcuffed her while she was naked, forcing her to stand in full view of male officers as they searched her home.

Responding to the furor over Young's case, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a new search warrant policy for the CPD. The city eventually settled a lawsuit filed by Young for $2.9 million.

"Chicago has learned painful lessons over the last several years about what happens when the search warrants go wrong," Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said in a press release. "The raid on the home of Anjanette Young laid bare deep deficits in CPD's policies and practices around the service of residential search warrants."

But Young was far from the only victim. Chicago-area lawyer Al Hofeld Jr. has represented 11 families in separate lawsuits who all say CPD pointed guns at their children during botched SWAT raids.

A yearslong investigation by the local news outlet CBS 2 repeatedly uncovered Chicago SWAT teams relying on unverified search warrants to ransack houses; hold families, including children, at gunpoint; and, in one case, handcuff an 8-year-old child. In another case, 17 Chicago police officers burst into a family's house with their guns drawn during a 4-year-old's birthday party. The members of one Chicago family say officers raided their house three times in four months looking for someone the residents say they don't know.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2023/06/30/chicago-police-raided-at-least-21-wrong-houses/