Mayor Lori Lightfoot unveiled a series of proposed changes to the city’s search warrant policies amid ongoing pressure from City Council members to implement police reforms in the wake of the wrongful raid on Anjanette Young’s home.
The measures outlined by Lightfoot stop short of stricter rules proposed by aldermen and in some cases reflect basic steps such as reviewing mistakes after the fact to find out what went wrong.
Under Lightfoot’s proposed new policies, all search warrants need to be approved by a deputy chief or higher. The current standard calls for a lieutenant’s approval. All “no-knock” warrants will be banned from use except when there’s a safety threat, which the police department previously said already was its practice. These warrants will need to be approved by a bureau chief or higher and executed by SWAT, officials said.
Cops also will be required to perform a planning session before serving a search warrant, and an independent investigation of the raid will be conducted to make sure the information used to obtain the warrant was accurate.
A female officer must be present for the search and a lieutenant or higher must be there as well, Lightfoot said.
The city also will conduct an after-action review any time the city performs a wrong raid, Lightfoot said.
The measure doesn’t go as far as a plan proposed by aldermen last month with Young’s support. That ordinance would prohibit officers from pointing guns at kids or handcuffing them, or doing so to relatives while kids are present.
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Chicago police Superintendent David Brown said Wednesday the search warrant policy will be posted as a draft on CPD’s website for the public to weigh in on it over a 15-day period before a final policy is implemented.
“It’s always the right time to do the right thing,” Brown said, noting the department had previously revised its search warrant policy in January 2020. “We should always be evolving to improve our policy’s training and accountability.”
Since December, Lightfoot’s been forced to confront the fallout from an errant February 2019 police raid at Young’s home, during which she was handcuffed naked by officers who had wrongly entered her residence. Lightfoot’s Law Department worked to keep the video under wraps before WBBM-Ch. 2 published the video last year.
Lightfoot’s administration filed an emergency order to prohibit the publication, which she later said she didn’t know about.
Lightfoot initially said she only learned about the video when CBS aired police body camera footage that showed Young repeatedly telling officers who barged into her home that they had the wrong place. But the mayor later acknowledged she had received a November 2019 email about the “pretty bad wrongful raid” that was explicit about the details.
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In other words, “ALL NO KNOCK” entries into people’s homes will be BANNED except when there is a SAFETY THREAT”
What they really mean is “ALL NO KNOCK” entries will always be “SAFETY THREATS” which will excuse the warrantless entries and the Supreme Court is leaning this way. Chicago will be the trial run. This is how a communist country works. Wake up America and you better “slap some bacon on a biscuit” pretty fast for we are burnin’ daylight now, as John Wayne would say. These communists are going to rip and tear everything you loved about America. And the SOTU address Nancy tore in half. The same will happen to the Constitution.
Might as well call them “WARN THE CROOKS WE’RE COMING warrants”.
Hey Lori, since the police have been handcuffed, with handcuffs on both wrists and handcuffs on their ankles, why don’t you just defund the police completely and have social workers and psychology majors deal with criminals? Wit crime going through the roof, you can blame the social workers and psychology majors, after the social workers and psychology majors have been shot and killed by the criminals in your city. After all Lori, the criminals are worthy of Emmy Awards, aren’t they?
Meanwhile in Mayor Groot’s Fantasy Land:
https://heyjackass.com/
Memo for Chicago voters: Vote for stupid politicians, get stupid governance.
THING IS< its Everyone who winds up suffering. NOT just those cretins who voted for her.
The really tragic story of Chicago is that all the “open minded, tolerant, loving, non racist” productive white democrats fled the city and polluted the neighboring counties with their liberal cancer. And now we have a city totally on its way toward societal collapse. Republicans were chased out of there decades ago. And yet, the democrats and their ministry of propaganda still get away with projecting all racism, crime, violence, poverty, ignorance, and unemployment onto conservatives.
That’s cause for FAR TOO long, conservatives have been WIMPS about fighting back…
Beetlejuice is on a rant, why don’t you send a warrant in the mail, letting the criminal know you’ll be conducting a search…