Chicago police burst into an innocent woman’s home and arrested her while she was naked — using a warrant with the wrong information, newly obtained police body camera footage shows.
The harrowing incident happened to Anjanette Young, 50, in February 2019 — but videos of it only just emerged following a court battle between the city and CBS Chicago, which aired the damning footage Tuesday.
Nine police body cameras show the team of all-male cops using a battering ram to break through Young’s door and then arresting her while she’s standing naked in her living room.
“I’m just standing there. Terrified. Humiliated. Not even understanding why in that moment that this is happening to me,” Young told CBS Chicago.
“There were big guns,” she recalled. “Guns with lights and scopes on them. And they were yelling at me, you know, ‘Put your hands up, put your hands up.’”
The arrest happened around 7 p.m. when Young, a licensed social worker, had just wrapped up her shift at the hospital. She was changing in her bedroom when cops burst through the door screaming, “Police search warrant!,” the videos show.
Except the warrant police had contained bad information. Cops were hunting a 23-year-old man, a known felon with a gun and ammunition — and who an informant wrongly claimed lived at Young’s address.
The suspect actually lived next door and had no connection to her, according to an investigation by CBS Chicago.
In the bodycam videos, Young tells the cops 43 times that they are at the wrong home.
A still image from a police body camera shows Anjanette Young naked in her home after cops wrongfully entered.
via CBS Chicago
“My name is Anjanette Young. What is going on?!” she screams hysterically.
Young told the network that she was certain she “could have died that night.”
“Like if I would have made one wrong move, it felt like they would have shot me,” she said. “I truly believe they would have shot me.”
In the clip, one of the officers tries to cover up Young, whose hands are cuffed behind her back, with a short coat that still leaves her exposed — before another cop wraps her in a blanket.
The network said police made zero efforts to independently verify the informant’s tip, as required, before the warrant was signed off on by an assistant state’s attorney and a judge.
The suspect they actually were seeking could have easily been tracked — because he was wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet at the time.
At some point, one of the body cameras apparently shows an officer in a squad car talking about the approval of the warrant.
“It wasn’t initially approved or some crap,” one officer says.
“What does that mean?” a second replies.
“I have no idea,” the first officer says. “I mean, they told him it was approved, then I guess that person messed up on their end.”
The recordings also show a sergeant approaching the officer who allegedly obtained the warrant, telling him, “Let’s go talk outside.” That officer’s body camera was then turned off.
The sergeant issued an apology to Young and offered to fix her front door.
“I do apologize for bothering you tonight,” the sergeant said. “I assure you that the city will be in contact with you tomorrow.”
Anjanette Young
CBS Chicago and Young filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the body camera footage from that evening, but the Chicago Police Department denied both.
“I feel like they didn’t want us to have this video because they knew how bad it was,” Young said. “They knew they had done something wrong. They knew that the way they treated me was not right.”
The city, in turn, filed an emergency motion in federal court to block the network from airing the footage — which a judge denied as the report was being broadcast, CBS said.
City lawyers also asked that Young be sanctioned for allegedly violating a confidentiality order, saying that she obtained the footage as part of her lawsuit and turned it over to CBS, the Chicago Tribune said.
Young’s lawyer, Keenan Saulter, ripped officials for how they handled the situation.
He said the city “should focus a lot more on the conduct of its officers than trying to cover up the evidence of poor policing.”
The Chicago Police Department refused to answer questions from CBS on specifics from the body camera footage.