Chicago Police Assault of Anjanette Young
Fuck the Police No Knock!
| revcom.us
From a reader:
I watch the video.
Tears of rage
Fill my eyes.
50-year-old Anjanette Young.
Home alone.
Handcuffed.
Naked.
Men in uniform with guns drawn.
Batter down her door.
Roam her home.
Callous.
Blind to her humanity.
“I could have died that night,” Anjanette Young told a reporter interviewing her about the police raid on her home. She is wearing a shirt with image of Breonna Taylor on it as she explains what happened to her two years earlier when the Chicago police carried out a “no knock" warrant on her home looking for someone who it turns out lived at another address.
She has just gotten home from her job as a hospital social worker and is about to put on her sleepwear. A dozen police batter down her door. Shouting, they enter her home with guns drawn. She is naked. They handcuff her. Leave her standing there naked. She asks in confusion what is going on. Over and over again—more than 40 times—she tells the cops they have the wrong house, but they just ignore her. She is terrified.
For two years, Anjanette Young fought to get the video of this raid released. For two years the CPD covered it up. When Anjanette and her lawyer finally got the video and gave it to the local news this week, the city law department went to court to stop them.
On Wednesday, December 16, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was elected in 2019 after a campaign that centered on “police reform,” held a press conference saying she was outraged and had only just learned about the incident and just seen this video. The next night, Lightfoot held another press conference having to take this back, admitting that she had been informed about the incident last fall but claiming she had not seen the video at that time.
On Thursday, December 17, the local CBS affiliate ran a full hour on the case without commercial interruptions. The first video shows the police body camera video of the raid on Anjanette Young and includes interviews with her and her lawyer.
The second video was a half-hour documentary called [un]warranted they had made a year ago—with stories of children traumatized when police with guns drawn raided their family homes “by mistake.” When one of these children learns that a new law has been passed in his name to train the police to “de-escalate” when they discover children during these raids, the boy looks impressed but then wisely comments, “Just because there is a law it doesn't mean they will follow it.”
The reporters who did these exposures said that it took them two years to get any data on search warrants. Check out this chilling piece of data they uncovered. Between 2016 and 2019, the CPD carried out 4,921 drug-related warrants. In only 221 of these did they confiscate any drugs. So in 4700 of these cases they found nothing. No one—whether they are the actual “suspect” the police are looking for or not—should go through the hell these videos reveal.
One day after these exposures aired, another scandal surfaced. John Catanzara, the president of Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police, a virulent racist and rabid Trump supporter, is facing possible firing from the force for inflammatory social media posts. One of his posts said, “WTF its seriously time to kills these (expletives).” Another post disparaging Muslims said, “Savages they all deserve a bullet.”
On Friday night, December 18, a group of Black pastors held a press conference denouncing the raid. Some called for the police who did the raid and city attorneys involved in the cover-up to be fired.
The Chicago police are notorious for brutality, murders and cover-ups. Supposedly under a “consent decree” and “reformed” after the scandal that followed the cover-up of the murder of Laquan McDonald and the imprisonment of the cop who killed him, nothing fundamental has changed. Nor will it.
As Bob Avakian says:
The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which this system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and order that enforces all this oppression and madness. (BAsics 1:24)
Anjanette Young
CBS 2 Investigation: My Name Is Anjanette Young
[un]warranted, a CBS 2 News Documentary
“No Knock” by Gill Scott-Heron
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