A Black woman who was handcuffed naked inside of her home in a wrongful arrest in 2019 received a multimillion-dollar settlement from the city of Chicago.
Police invaded Anjanette Young's home while looking for a male suspect who they thought lived in her home, as Blavity previously reported. However, the person they were looking for lived in the apartment next door and had been wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet.
Young appeared on CBS Mornings and spoke with co-host Gayle King about the triggering incident, CBS reports.
Young, who was awarded a $2.9 million settlement, said she would have preferred for the officers to be fired. She added that "money did not equate to justice."
"I would have been more satisfied if all 12 officers had gotten fired and I didn't receive a dime," she said. "I tell people that I didn't lose my life that night, but I lost a lot of my life that night."
"I actually thought that if I had done anything different than what I was doing, I would have died that night. They yelled, 'Put your hands up,' and that's what I did. And I stood there in fear and praying and hoping that they would not shoot me," she added.
As police officers raided her home for 40 minutes, Young said she stood in the middle of her living room in "a complete state of undress," handcuffed while in the presence of a dozen male Chicago officers.
"Watching that video is always hard because it just takes me back to that moment," Young said of the body camera footage of the incident. "And one thing that stands out the most to me as I think about this and live through this over the years is how vulnerable I was in that moment."
Young pleaded with the officers the day of the incident
The day of the incident, Young, who works as a social worker, arrived home from a work event and was in the middle of changing her clothes when the officers busted into her home. She pleaded with one of the officers to allow her to get dressed.
"The fact that I continued to ask if I could get dressed. I continued to ask them if I could call someone. What stands out to me most is that I was invisible to them because no one even responded to me saying, 'Yes, you can get dressed later,' or, 'Let us finish this,'" she said.
A third-party investigation was conducted
The Chicago Police Department and city officials initially tried to block Young from acquiring the police footage. Initially, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she didn't know what happened to Young. However, she backpedaled and admitted she was briefed about the situation in Nov. 2019.
Lightfoot enlisted a third-party investigation and the organization found "failures in oversight and accountability" by multiple city agencies. Still, they concluded the mayor nor the city purposefully conspired to withhold information about the botched raid.
The Office of Inspector General has a conflicting stance and released a report that alleged the city did work against Young as she sought to obtain the footage and that it "prioritized communications and public relations concerns over the higher mission of city government."
An oversight agency endorsed that the eight officers involved in the raid should be suspended or fired but the officers have yet to receive any disciplinary action.
Young said she intends to use the funds from her settlement to help other people and doesn't want the incident to define her legacy.
"I don't ever think that this will go away. I'm choosing to find ways to live on purpose and not allow this one incident to define me for the rest of my life," Young said.
She is now advocating for search warrant reform in Chicago and created the "Anjanette Young Ordinance." She also launched a virtual platform called "I Am Her," a safe space where other women can voice their experiences about injustices they faced with police authorities.
"I know that there are other women out here who have had similar experiences," Young said. "Maybe not with the police department, maybe in the workforce, maybe with some other government agency to say, 'I am her,' and we're not in this alone, or you're not in this alone."
