Chicago to pay Anjanette Young nearly $3M over botched police raid

CHICAGO - The Chicago City Council on Wednesday voted to pay nearly $3 million to a woman who was handcuffed while naked by police officers during a 2019 raid of her home.

The unanimous vote to pay Anjanette Young $2.9 million was widely expected, coming two days after a council committee voted to recommend that the full council accept the settlement and after the city’s law department said Young’s attorney had agreed to the amount.

Before the vote, Alderman Maria Hadden said the council decision to pay the money was the correct way of "admitting we were wrong and that the city did something wrong."

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"We need to fix the system and fix the policies so we don’t keep making the same mistakes," she said.

Anjanette Young and supporters gather at Daley Plaza in Chicago after marching from Federal Plaza to commemorate the National Day of Protests on Oct. 22, 2021. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images / Getty Images)

With the settlement, the city avoided what Chicago Corporation Counsel Celia Meza said could have been a much larger price tag had Young’s lawsuit gone to trial. And the city’s case had serious problems, starting with the fact that the officers — as Young told them repeatedly — were at the wrong address. More recently, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability recommended the suspension or firing of eight officers involved in the February 2019 raid.

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Young, a social worker, was getting ready for bed when several officers serving a search warrant stormed into her apartment, and handcuffed her while she was naked. The city’s law department said Young was naked for 16 seconds but the covering they put on her kept falling off before she was allowed to get dressed several minutes later.