Anjanette Young Is My Chicagoan Of Year Amid Turmoil Of 2020

CHICAGO — Anjanette Young is my 2020 Chicagoan of the Year.

The African American social worker couldn't have known during the botched police raid of her home in February 2019 that the video of her — naked, handcuffed and afraid as Chicago cops pointed pistols at her — would inspire a mayoral mandate for police transparency that even the murder of Black teenager Laquan McDonald never did.

But that's what happened Thursday.

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And it's all because Young had courage to insist that everyone bear witness to the events on that terrifying winter night that City Hall lawyers desperately tried to keep secret the Chicago Way.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she only saw the video because a source — whom city lawyers alleged in court papers was associated with Young — leaked it to CBS 2 investigator Dave Savini.

Young's passionate lawyer, Keenan Saulter, perfectly pontificated what the city that failed his client must do: "Shine the bright light of the public on what the police are doing."

But make no mistake, Young is the heroine of an unexpected moment in Chicago police reform history during a most tumultuous year of civil unrest.

It was watching images of Young, handcuffed naked and pleading with police — 43 times — to believe her when she said they raided the wrong residence, that Lightfoot, also a Black woman, saw herself.

"Bearing witness to what Miss Young experienced was extraordinarily disturbing and traumatic … for me as a Black woman, and knowing that could be me — no ifs, ands or buts about it," Lightfoot said.

"I've had a lot of conversations about it, particularly my Black female friends. We all feel exactly the same. We feel outraged. We feel like her dignity and our dignity was denied. That she was humiliated. She was emblematic, unfortunately, of too many wrongs that have been visited upon too many Black women and women of color not just in our city."

"But in Chicago," our city's first Black woman mayor said, "I have an obligation to make that wrong right." Her voice cracked with emotion: "It's been painful, painful and upsetting."

A day earlier, Young courageously told reporters what her fight against City Hall was all about.

“I want accountability,” she said, a familiar plea echoed in front of news cameras by too many victims of police mistakes and misconduct — or the family members left behind.

Words perfect for news headlines, and easily dismissed by politicians in power.

For years, I've reported about innocent people like Young who have been victims of police misconduct, who didn't take a bullet or a beating but suffered nonetheless.

In 2014, while investigating on allegations of cops who made up stories, filed false reports or told lies to cover up a variety of less-than-lethal misdeeds — throwing a bag of dog excrement on a neighbor's front porch, planting drugs and aggressively flirting with twin sisters at a Walgreens — I regularly encountered a familiar roadblock.

Police department lawyers habitually refused to release police reports and videos by making overly broad claims that records were exempt from the disclosure requirements of the Freedom of Information Act due to either "ongoing investigations" or lingering administrative police misconduct probes that often took years to complete and rarely led to officers getting punished.

Even when victims and their lawyers request police evidence, public records requests got denied just the same.

That policy — as it applies to requests made by victims — ended Thursday, Mayor Lightfoot promised in the name of Anjanette Young.

“Anytime a person who’s a victim requests information about an incident that happened to them, our government’s obligation is to respond in a fulsome, transparent and immediate way,” Lightfoot said.

Alone, that kind of transparency — the best disinfectant for public corruption of any form — would be a police reform game changer. In Chicago, cops expect city lawyers to keep video evidence under wraps in the case of misconduct allegations.

But Lightfoot didn't stop there. The mayor took on another city policy that she helped draft in 2016 that I've criticized for years, and again this week, for focusing too narrowly on accusations of violent acts of police misconduct.

MORE ON PATCH: Too Many Secrets Allow Chicago's Misdeeds To Keep Festering

She promised to revise city rules on releasing body camera video within 90 days that only applies to the most violent of police misconduct offenses — deaths in custody and police-involved shootings — to include a speedier release of video, including those of incidents that don't result in bloodshed.

"This situation with Miss Young lets us know we need to think broader about that policy," Lightfoot said, pledging changes and even to lobby Illinois lawmakers for amendments to state law so more body camera videos are available for public view.

None of it happens if Young would have just felt lucky to be alive after surviving that February 2019 police raid eerily similar to the tragedy in March that befell Breonna Taylor, whom police shot and killed in Louisville, Kentucky.

In a year plagued by tragedy and turmoil, Anjanette Young emerged as an unexpected hero.

Say her name.

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