Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot admitted Thursday she was previously notified about a botched February 2019 police raid, despite saying Wednesday that she was “blindsided” by a report on the raid, in which a team of male Chicago Police officers stormed the wrong house and handcuffed an innocent naked woman.
Lightfoot admitted on Thursday that her staff had told her about the raid back in November 2019, when media first reported on it. She insisted that she hadn’t watched the video and didn’t recall the staff’s briefing about the case, according to Chicago’s WBBM-TV, the first TV station that aired the video.
“Again, I don’t have any specific recollection of it,” Lightfoot told CBS Chicago. “It was in November [2019] when I was probably focused on budget issues and getting our budget passed through the City Council, but it was flagged for me.”
The woman who was mistakenly arrested, Anjanette Young, and the local TV station managed to obtain a copy of the police video this week, and it was aired on Tuesday. The Law Department of the city filed an emergency motion in federal court hours before the program, intending to keep WBBM-TV from airing the video of the raid.
The video showed a team of all-male cops broke through Young’s door and arrested her while she stood naked in her living room. In the video Young, 50, a licensed social worker, told the cops at least 40 times that they got the wrong house.
According to WBBM-TV, Young acquired the police video as part of a lawsuit against the police department. Both Young and WBBM-TV had previously been denied by the department access to the video via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Lightfoot on Wednesday apologized to Young after the video aired. On Thursday, she said that she had ordered a review of Young’s FOIA request to find out why it’s been denied.
