CHICAGO — The Chicago Police Board on Thursday voted to fire a police sergeant for his role in the botched 2019 raid at the home of social worker Anjanette Young.
During its monthly meeting at Chicago Police Department headquarters, the board voted 5-3 to fire Sgt. Alex Wolinski.
Acting on bad information, 13 CPD tactical officers used a no-knock warrant to enter Young’s Near West Side home on Feb. 21, 2019, in search of a man believed to have an illegal gun. Police body-camera footage of the raid showed officers handcuffed Young, who was naked when police arrived, as she repeatedly told them that they were in the wrong place.
Shortly after entering her home, one of the officers draped her with a blanket.
The video footage was first reported by CBS-2, and former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration tried in vain to stop the footage from being broadcast. Young filed a lawsuit against the city that was later settled for $2.9 million, but a proposed city ordinance that would ban CPD’s use of no-knock warrants has stalled.
Then-police Superintendent David Brown brought administrative charges against Wolinski in November 2021, recommending that he be fired. Wolinski, who joined the department in 2002, was accused of violating eight departmental rules, including inattention to duty, disobedience of an order and disrespect to or maltreatment of any person.
The city’s Office of Inspector General compiled its own 163-page report on the raid, though it’s never been released publicly. A summary of the report, released in January 2022, said that Lightfoot and others in her office made “a troubling series of unfounded statements” about the raid.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability also called for Wolinski’s firing. Meanwhile, COPA said several other officers present during the raid should face suspensions — including Officer Ella French, who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in West Englewood in August 2021 — but to date, no other officers have faced Police Board charges for the raid.
The source of the information that led to the raid, according to police records and sources, was Kenneth Miles — a man who was arrested in February 2022 after police allegedly saw him throw heroin from a car owned by Yolanda Talley, the CPD’s chief of internal affairs. Miles was found guilty last year of possession of a controlled substance and sentenced to two years in prison, court records show.
Federal court records show that Wolinski filed a libel suit against Newsweek earlier this year. That suit, which is still pending, stems from an article published in January 2022 that stated Young was “handcuffed naked for about 17 minutes” during the raid.
In a separate case, the board also voted 8-0 to suspend two officers — David Taylor and Larry Lanier — for their roles in the fatal shooting of Terrell Eason on July 3, 2018, in the 4700 block of West Fulton Street. Eason’s family later brought a federal lawsuit against the city, but a judge granted the city’s motion for summary judgment in 2021, court records show.
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