The city of Chicago has agreed to pay a multimillion-dollar lawsuit to a Black woman who was detained naked inside her house in an unlawful arrest in 2019.
As previously reported by Blavity, police raided Anjanette Young’s home in search of a male suspect who they believed lived there. The individual they were looking for, on the other hand, lived in the apartment next door and was wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet.
According to CBS, Young came on CBS Mornings and discussed the inciting occurrence with co-host Gayle King.
Young, who received a $2.9 million settlement, stated that the policemen should have been fired. “Money did not amount to justice,” she added.
“I would have been more satisfied if all 12 officers had gotten fired and I didn’t receive a dime,” she said. “I tell people that I didn’t lose my life that night, but I lost a lot of my life that night.”
“I actually thought that if I had done anything different than what I was doing, I would have died that night. They yelled, ‘Put your hands up,’ and that’s what I did. And I stood there in fear and praying and hoping that they would not shoot me,” she added.
Young said she stood in the center of her living room in “a total state of nude,” handcuffed, in the presence of a dozen male Chicago cops, as police officers raided her home for 40 minutes.
“Watching that video is always hard because it just takes me back to that moment,” Young said of the body camera footage of the incident. “And one thing that stands out the most to me as I think about this and live through this over the years is how vulnerable I was in that moment.”
Young, a social worker, had just returned home from a work event and was in the process of changing her clothing when the officers barged into her house. She begged one of the officers to let her dress herself.
“The fact that I continued to ask if I could get dressed. I continued to ask them if I could call someone. What stands out to me most is that I was invisible to them because no one even responded to me saying, ‘Yes, you can get dressed later,’ or, ‘Let us finish this,'” she said.
Young was first denied access to the police tape by the Chicago Police Department and local officials. Mayor Lori Lightfoot initially said she had no idea what had happened to Young. She later backtracked and confessed that she was briefed on the problem in November of this year.
Lightfoot solicited the help of a third-party investigator, who discovered “failures in monitoring and accountability” by a number of city agencies. Nonetheless, they came to the conclusion that neither the mayor nor the city collaborated to keep information about the bungled operation hidden.
The city allegedly worked against Young in her attempt to secure the tape, according to the Office of Inspector General, which claims the city “prioritized communications and public relations considerations over the higher objective of city government.”
Although an oversight organization recommended that the eight policemen engaged in the raid be suspended or fired, no disciplinary action has been taken against them.
Young stated that she plans to utilize the money from her settlement to benefit others and that the incident would not define her legacy.
“I don’t ever think that this will go away. I’m choosing to find ways to live on purpose and not allow this one incident to define me for the rest of my life,” Young said.
She is now fighting for search warrant reform in Chicago and has introduced the “Anjanette Young Ordinance,” as well as a virtual platform called “I Am Her,” a safe forum for other women to share their stories of police brutality.
“I know that there are other women out here who have had similar experiences,” Young said. “Maybe not with the police department, maybe in the workforce, maybe with some other government agency to say, ‘I am her,’ and we’re not in this alone, or you’re not in this alone.”
