Mayor Lori Lightfoot unveiled a series of proposed changes to the city’s search warrant policies on Wednesday, amid ongoing pressure from City Council members to implement police reforms in the wake of the wrongful raid on Anjanette Young’s home.
The measures outlined by Lightfoot stop short of stricter rules proposed by aldermen and in some cases reflect basic steps such as reviewing mistakes after the fact to find out what went wrong.
“It’s always the right time to do the right thing,” Chicago police Superintendent David Brown said, noting the department had previously revised its search warrant policy in January 2020. “We should always be evolving to improve our policies, training and accountability.”
Under Lightfoot’s proposed new policies, which were criticized by some police reform advocates and Young’s attorney for not going far enough, all search warrants would need to be approved by a deputy chief or higher. The current standard calls for a lieutenant’s approval. All “no-knock” warrants will be banned from use except when there’s a safety threat, which the Police Department previously said already was its practice. These warrants will need to be approved by a bureau chief or higher and executed by SWAT, officials said.
Cops also will be required to perform a planning session before serving a search warrant, and an independent investigation of the raid will be conducted to make sure the information used to obtain the warrant was accurate.
A female officer must be present for the search and a lieutenant or higher must be there as well, Lightfoot said.
The city also will conduct an after-action review any time the city performs a wrong raid, Lightfoot said.
“Each of these reforms was crafted for the sole purpose of ensuring that the rights and the basic human dignity of all Chicagoans, no matter what the circumstances, are respected and protected, and that the wrongs of the past are made right,” Lightfoot said. “This moment, however, is not the end. It’s the beginning.”
The measure doesn’t go as far as a plan proposed by aldermen last month with Young’s support. That ordinance would prohibit officers from pointing guns at kids or handcuffing them, or doing so to relatives while kids are present.
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Since December, Lightfoot’s been forced to confront the fallout from an errant February 2019 police raid at Young’s home, during which she was handcuffed naked by officers who had wrongly entered her residence. Lightfoot’s Law Department worked to keep video of the raid under wraps before WBBM-Ch. 2 published the video last year.
Lightfoot’s administration filed an emergency order to prohibit the publication, which she later said she didn’t know about.
Lightfoot initially said she only learned about the video when CBS aired police body camera footage that showed Young repeatedly telling officers who barged into her home that they had the wrong place. But the mayor later acknowledged she had received a November 2019 email about the “pretty bad wrongful raid” that was explicit about the details.
Lightfoot also had falsely denied 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.
The mayor previously said her administration’s handling of the crisis led to a breach in trust between her and the public. Asked Wednesday if the latest measures were aimed at regaining trust, she acknowledged working to rebuild her relationship with residents and said it’s an “ongoing process.”
“Trust is not something that is a static thing. It has to be constantly worked upon and you have to make sure that you’re committing yourself fundamentally to being present, and to listen, and to making sure that you’re being responsive to the feedback,” Lightfoot said. “It’s an ongoing process I think that any leader has, and me in particular.”
The Young raid also has generated three investigations. Lightfoot asked the law firm Jones Day to do a review.
Meanwhile, Chicago Inspector General Joseph Ferguson and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability have had investigations going since 2019, Lightfoot said. The mayor reiterated her criticism of the investigations’ slow pace, saying, “We haven’t heard a peep from the inspector general on this issue. Where’s he been?”
Ferguson in January released a limited report recommending that CPD “modify its directive on search warrants to require verification and corroboration of information in all circumstances, and broaden the circumstances in which supervisors must initiate an investigation to determine whether discipline is necessary and appropriate when a search warrant execution goes wrong.” Brown accepted both recommendations.
The inspector general, however, is still working on a broader report on search warrants, and has yet to release a specific report on the Young case.
In a statement, Ferguson’s office said, “We are heartened to see that the policy changes announced this morning reflect the adoption of our recommendations.”
“In the meantime, the disciplinary investigation being conducted by OIG’s Investigations section into possible misconduct by City employees and officials in connection with the raid on Anjanette Young’s home specifically, which we undertook in December, continues,” the statement said.
Brown said Wednesday the search warrant policy will be posted as a draft on CPD’s website for the public to weigh in on it over a 15-day period before a final policy is implemented. He encouraged the public to review the new policy during that time and offer feedback.
Brown said that once the search warrant policy is final, it will be explained in a department training video and will be discussed at officer roll calls in police stations. He also said the policy draft has been shared with the court-ordered monitor overseeing CPD’s federal consent decree to improve its policing practices.
“We must always work to improve. We must always focus special emphasis on continually improving our policies, training, transparency and accountability,” Brown said.
Last year, CPD had focus groups — which included a civil rights lawyer and a community activist among other participants — to propose changes to its use-of-force policy. But the groups chided department leaders late last year, saying officials adopted very few recommendations made by the groups. CPD leaders, however, disputed that contention.
Either way, Brown said Wednesday, the new search warrant policy would be “direct reflections of lessons learned.”
“As police officers we need to be the first to admit our mistakes, and what we can do to make sure we learn from those mistakes,” Brown said.
Asked whether the new search warrant policy might make officers hesitant or somehow endanger them, Brown disputed the notion, saying that everyone deserves respect.
“If Ms. Young was the biggest drug kingpin, we still should have treated her with dignity and respect,” said Brown, who was not Chicago’s top cop during the February 2019 raid at her home. “That should be clear to everyone that her dignity and respect had nothing to do with whether or not she was actually the focus of this or this was a mistake and it was the wrong house. She still deserves a measure of respect.”
Brown said CPD averages about 1,500 search warrants a year, which aren’t limited to those executed on people’s homes. But with the new policy, Brown said he expects that number to slow down.
He also said the department will be reviewing the officers’ use of overtime when conducting these search warrants, a thorny issue for CPD, which routinely exceeds millions of dollars each year in its overtime budget.
Young’s attorney, Keenan Saulter, released a statement saying the mayor’s proposals fall “woefully short of the types of reforms that the citizens of Chicago require to feel secure in their homes from these violent and often wrongful raids.” He urged passage of the proposal pushed by aldermen including North Side Ald. Maria Hadden.
Hadden, 49th, who with other aldermen last month co-sponsored a proposed search warrant policy ordinance, said Lightfoot reached out to her and other aldermen after the morning news conference to offer a detailed briefing on the mayor’s proposal.
Hadden said she would take Lightfoot up on the offer. She wants more clarity about how the mayor’s plan would address several guidelines, among them the treatment of children in homes during raids, the times of day when warrant raids can be conducted and the standards for records the Police Department must keep on the outcomes of raids.
“Our proposal goes into a lot of detail about these rules, so we want to see what the mayor’s guidelines have to say about them,” Hadden said.
But Hadden said she’s hopeful that she and other supporters of warrant reform both among community groups and in the City Council can reach agreement with the mayor’s office and the Police Department on how to proceed. “I’m always open to find ways to solve the problem,” Hadden said. “We just want to make sure it works and it sticks.”
The City Council Public Safety Committee should also proceed with a hearing on warrant reform to discuss the situation in an open forum and try to come up with mutually agreeable solutions, Hadden said.
Under a new state law taking effect July 1, all officers executing no-knock warrants must be equipped with body cameras if their agency has passed the law’s rolling deadline for implementing universal body cameras. Chicago and the sheriff’s offices in the most populous counties have until Jan. 1 to equip all officers, while departments in the smallest towns and counties have until 2025.
An officer seeking a no-knock warrant also will have to describe steps taken “to ensure accuracy and plan for children or other vulnerable people on-site.” If a warrant is executed at the wrong location, the officer will be required to notify a supervisor immediately to begin an internal investigation.
The requirements are part of a sweeping criminal justice overhaul crafted by the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus and signed into law last month by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Police accountability experts involved in the consent decree litigation criticized the new proposal announced by Lightfoot and Brown, saying it does not go far enough to protect citizens at the homes that could be subjected to search warrants, including that it doesn’t codify how officers should be as “least intrusive” and “least harmful” as possible when executing them.
Sheila Bedi, a civil rights attorney at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, noted that the new proposal also does not prohibit no-knock warrants, which are only permitted in safety emergencies. She also raised concern that since SWAT officers would execute such warrants, the aggressive style of their work could potentially exacerbate some of these incidents.
“There are sort of hints at understanding how serious and devastating these practices have been,” Bedi said of the proposal announced Wednesday. “But the remedies just fall far short of really addressing the harm.”
The experts said there are some redeeming qualities of the new proposal, including how officers involved in the raids must use body cameras, there must be some special verification of information for conducting all warrants and a requirement that wrong raids be tracked.
University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman said city officials ignored some community concerns about these search warrants for months before the Police Department came out with this new proposal.
“The mayor then puts out with the superintendent their own independent edict … without engaging the community and then saying almost as an afterthought, the form of community engagement will be that you can comment or anyone can comment … after we’ve already written this policy,” Futterman said. “So the process is just backwards.”
baiduhai’s Dan Petrella contributed.