In a letter to the Chicago City Council, Mayor Lori Lightfoot says that her office will fully cooperate with any investigation by the Inspector General’s office, and says that she has hired a former federal judge to conduct a full investigation into the city’s response to the botched raid at the home of Anjanette Young in Feb. 2019.
According to the letter, Lightfoot says she has selected former federal judge Ann Claire Williams to conduct a thorough review of the city government’s actions in the aftermath of the raid.
“Her mandate will include every relevant department, including the mayor’s office,” Lightfoot said in the letter. “We want a review of the procedures and processes in place that allowed this incident and subsequent actions to unfold as they did. She will follow the facts where they lead.”
According to the Chicago Tribune, at least 11 city aldermen have called for the Inspector General to look into the matter, and Lightfoot says she fully supports such an investigation, saying in the letter that she has directed her staff to fully cooperate with any investigation into the matter.
In the letter, Lightfoot also says that other individuals who have been subject to similar wrongful raids should be supported by the city, and as a result she has called on acting Corporation Counsel Celia Meza to look for similar incidents.
The flurry of announcements comes as controversy continues to boil over surrounding the aftermath of the raid, which took place in Feb. 2019.
Young and her attorney say police wrongly raided her home on Feb. 19, 2019, as they served a search warrant at the incorrect address. Recently released video showed that officers had handcuffed Young while she stood naked inside the residence for several minutes, despite her saying dozens of times they were in the wrong home.
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Video of the incident that Young obtained as part of her lawsuit against the city were released last week and obtained by NBC 5 Chicago. Lightfoot’s administration tried to prevent the footage from being aired on television in an emergency court filing, which a federal judge rejected.
The mayor originally said she had not been aware of the raid until the video was released, but later clarified that she had been aware of the raid, but had not seen the footage.
As the controversy continues, several city attorneys, including Corporate Counsel Mark Flessner, resigned their posts over the city’s handling of the aftermath of the raid. Lightfoot confirmed that she had sought out Flessner’s resignation as part of her administration’s response to the controversy.
The Chicago police officers involved in the raid have now been placed on desk duty amid ongoing investigations into the incident. In addition to any potential IG probe and the review ordered by Lightfoot, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability will continue its ongoing investigation into the incident, which began in Nov. 2019 after Young and her attorneys filed suit against the city.
The Chicago City Council has also called for investigations into the matter, with the council’s Committee on Health and Human Relations and the Committee on Public Safety held a hearing Tuesday to discuss the search warrants that had been issued for the 2019 raid.
