It was Feb. 26 when police went before a judge and swore the information in their complaint for the search warrant was accurate. It was signed by an assistant state’s attorney at 2:37 p.m. Hours later, officers broke down Sharon’s door – the wrong door – looking for someone the family said they don’t know.
And for the first time, CBS 2 obtained
police search warrant data after nearly two years of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. While it offers a glimpse at how often Chicago Police officers execute search warrants overall, it also reveals a disturbing pattern about which neighborhoods are targeted the most. In addition, it shows how police failed to make arrests, or recover guns or drugs, in thousands of cases.
What happened to the Lyons is emblematic of more than a dozen innocent families, and more than two dozen children, whose homes CBS 2 found were wrongly raided by the Chicago Police.
Each instance follows a similar pattern of allegations: guns pointed at families and often at children, destruction of personal property with a lack of follow-up, and black or Latino families being on the other end of the door.
Since 2018, CBS 2 sought records that would show the frequency of wrong raids. Then Superintendent Eddie Johnson claimed they track it. But by 2019, officials admitted that isn’t the case.
Our nearly two-year FOIA battle for records from police uncovered they do, however, have a database documenting every search warrant executed and the outcome. It’s the closest the public can get to understanding how the department uses search warrants as a policing tool. We obtained those records and found concerning racial disparities.
According CBS 2’s analysis of the data, police executed 6,855 search warrants from 2016 to 2019. For this analysis, CBS 2 only included records that indicated a search warrant was served at a residence.
Although police redacted the full addresses, CBS 2 was able to map the warrants by blocks. This revealed Chicago Police disproportionately execute search warrants in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods. We learned many of the wrong raids we uncovered happened in these same communities.
In contrast, we found neighborhoods with majority white populations, had the least search warrants executed. CBS 2’s mapping analysis found no search warrants served in communities like Edison Park, Printers Row, Wrigleyville, Museum Campus and Magnificent Mile, among others, in the timeframe reviewed. These communities have white populations of 50 percent or more, census data shows.
CBS 2’s analysis of police data also found the neighborhoods with the most search warrants, like the Back of the Yards, were also those that had the most “negative” results. A negative raid is one where police did not make an arrest, nor did they recover any drugs, guns or other property. The data shows 1 in 10 search warrants, or 679 total, were negative.
Because many of the wrong raids CBS 2 uncovered ended in a negative outcome, we wanted to know how often police actually find what they’re looking for when conducting a search warrant.
About 72 percent of all warrants sought drugs – a total of 4,921. Of those, records show drugs were confiscated in only 221 cases. That’s less than 5 percent.
The data also shows police were seeking guns in 1,445 out of the 6,558 search warrants. That’s 21 percent. Of those, guns were recovered in 669 cases, or just over 46 percent of the time.
In 43 percent of search warrants, or nearly 3,000, police did not make an arrest.