An ordinance proposed by the Chicago City Council would prohibit Chicago police from conducting overnight residential search warrants – one among a list of other reforms.
The proposal, called the “Anjanette Young Ordinance,” named after a Black female social worker who was the unfortunate victim of a wrongful raid in 2019, would bar officers from conducting no-knock search warrant, as well as “knock and announce” warrants that do not provide enough time for residents to answer the door.
The proposed ordinance accuses Chicago Police Department members of regularly displaying “reckless disregard” for Chicagoans civil and human rights and contains numerous reforms.
Fox News summarized the law, which states that officers must provide at least 30 seconds for residents to respond, and maintains that search warrants must be conducted between the hours of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.
The ordinance also contains regulations regarding officers’ search behaviors to minimize the risk of personal harm or damage to residents’ property, stipulating the use of tactics that are “the least intrusive to people’s home, property and person and least harmful to people’s physical and emotional health.” It also requires that the superintendent – or an appropriate designee –must approve each plan prior to execution.
The law also mandates the presence of at least one female officer during the search, and requires officers to inform dispatchers about the presence of children. They would also be banned from pointing firearms at or restraining children.
The proposal comes after Chicago City Council’s Black female aldermen felt that the version proposed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police Superintendent David Brown did not go far enough in reforming search warrant procedures.
Ald. Chris Taliaferro, a former police officer and chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, agreed to a hearing of the proposal, but said that there would have to be a compromise between the two versions.
“I can’t take the fullness of either one of them and say that they’re perfect. There has to be a compromise.”
Taliaferro did not specify details about flaws in the ordinance, but spoke generally about the dangers of conducting search warrants by police.
“If you’re executing a search warrant to obtain an illegal product — whether it’s guns, drugs or whatever — sometimes in the execution of an arrest warrant, folks will defend themselves. Folks will shoot at police,” he said.
Co-sponsor of the bill Ald. Maria Hadden told the Chicago Sun Times that she respects Taliaferro’s opinions and looks forward to the hearing, but is confident in her version of the ordinance. She believes it is stronger in “17 different ways” than the reforms outlined by Lightfoot and Brown.
