Chicago police raiding the wrong house once can be a forgivable mistake but when they make a habit out of raiding the wrong addresses, it quickly turns into a nuisance. Reports indicate that the police officers in Chicago raided the wrong homes at least 21 times between 2017 and 2020.
The Chicago Office of Inspector General released a report on the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) search warrant policies, stating that “CPD’s inadequate record keeping made it impossible to count or fully analyze wrong-door raids.” The records revealed that “inexperience and failures to do basic investigative work” led to poorly executed raids.
The search warrants carried out by officers was under tremendous backlash in 2020, after surveillance cameras captured police officers embarrassing a naked woman during an incorrect raid in 2019. Chicago police barged into Anjanette Young’s apartment after a wrong tip and handcuffed her while she was naked, making her stand in front of male officers as they searched her home. Young eventually settled a lawsuit for $2.9 million.
Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a new search warrant policy after Young’s case.
“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. “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.”
The unfortunate part is that it’s not just one naked woman affected by the wrong house raids. Lawyer Al Hofeld Jr. has represented 11 families in different lawsuits who all say CPD directed guns at their children during incorrect SWAT raids. Police went as far as putting handcuffs an eight-year-old child.
In a different case, 17 Chicago police officers invaded a family’s house with their guns out during a four-year-old’s birthday party.
In 2018, there was a civil lawsuit filed by a family who claimed Chicago officers arrived at their house and pointed a gun at a three-year-old girl. They walked away with a settlement of $2.5 million.
“The IG’s findings are entirely consistent with what our office has discovered in our clients’ lawsuits against the City of Chicago: sloppy, unsupervised investigations of uncorroborated tips from informants that then led to rubberstamped, search warrants for the wrong homes and resulted in serious emotional trauma to innocent families of color, including literally thousands of children over the years,” Hofeld said.
“And this description does not even address the way in which officers have treated and ‘policed’ people once they enter their homes to execute the warrant. With this kind of police work, it’s no surprise at all that community trust has been and remains CPD’s biggest challenge.”
In a lawsuit by Jasmine Vale and her family in 2020, Vale blamed the officers for keeping a grandmother and child at gunpoint while screaming profane language. If that wasn’t bad enough, the constables left thousands of dollars in damage to the property. The search warrant was carried out after an anonymous tip that the grandmother’s son had an unlicensed handgun. Chicago police were ignorant to the fact that the son had moved to California a few years ago.
Despite so many failed attempts, “the report praises CPD for taking encouraging steps toward increased accountability by drafting revisions this January to its search warrant policies, including a newly proposed electronic data application that could significantly improve record keeping.”
Chicago law enforcement needs to redirect their energy from the vulnerable populations to more worthy concerns. Pulling people out of the shower, scaring grandmothers out of their wits, and crashing children’s birthday parties isn’t part of an officer’s duty to serve and protect. Once they are done investigating the red herrings, there are bigger fishes to catch.