Five of the Chicago police officers who served a warrant on Anjanette Young’s home in 2019 earned time-and-a-half for the botched raid. Only two of the officers noted in their overtime requests that the extra duty was for serving a warrant; the other three used a generic category code.
Last week, Young filed a lawsuit against the city and the twelve male officers who burst through her door at 7pm on February 21, 2019 and handcuffed her while she was naked. The police were searching for a man who lived next door, but a confidential informant’s tip, which they failed to verify, sent them to her home in error that evening.
Via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the Weekly obtained overtime records for 2019 from the Chicago Police Department and checked the officers named in Young’s lawsuit against the data.
Five of those officers—Alain Aporongao, Gabriel Cruz, Bryan Mordan, Michael Orta, and Nikola Saric—submitted requests for overtime they worked during the hours of 6:30pm and 10:30pm on February 21, 2019. An 11th District lieutenant, Nari Haro, authorized the requests the following day.
“The more we learn about the raid, the worse it gets for CPD,” said Keenan Saulter, the attorney representing Young. “It’s a further abuse of the trust the public places in CPD, and to know some of the officers were getting overtime adds insult to the injury Ms. Young continues to suffer.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot initially claimed she only became aware of the raid after CBS-Channel 2 aired bodycam video of it in December 2020, but after emails from November 2019 surfaced, she admitted learning of it earlier. Young’s lawsuit accuses the Chicago Police Department, the Mayor’s Office, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), and the city’s Law Department of conspiring “to cover-up these grotesque human rights violations” by delaying her FOIA request for the bodycam footage and attempting to prevent CBS-2 from airing it.
COPA, the Office of the Inspector General, and a former federal judge are conducting independent investigations of the raid and the city’s response to it. CPD eventually made bodycam footage from the raid public via an index of videos on a department website.
In the spreadsheet the Weekly obtained, authorized overtime is listed for each officer by date. The data includes information about what time of day the overtime duty was performed, how many hours the officer worked, the district or area they worked in, duty category codes, and occasional notes detailing what they did. “Extension of Tour” is a category code; other commonly used codes are for duties such as court appearances, voluntarily working on days off, and special events. There is also a section for “Special Event” notes.
In all of the data from 2019, any time a warrant is mentioned in the notes, the overtime category listed is either “Special Event” (sixty-five percent of the time), “Extension of Tour” (twenty-two percent), “Other” (six percent), “Voluntary Regular Day Off” (six percent), or “Call Back” (one percent).
Officers Aporongao and Saric—whose overtime requests for the evening of the raid were for duty until 1am the following morning, unlike the other three officers—categorized the overtime as a “06 – Special Event.” In the notes section, they both used the code “011-001 11th District Warrants.”
The other officers who requested overtime for the raid on Young’s home all used the “Extension of Tour” category, and did not include any additional information in the notes that would have made it clear they were serving a warrant.
The discrepancy suggests that CPD has not been regularly tracking how much time-and-a-half has been for serving warrants. There are over 100,000 similarly ambiguous “Extension of Tour” entries in the 2019 data, accounting for a quarter of all the overtime requests approved that year. The Office of the Inspector General’s 2017 report on CPD overtime controls flagged the prevalence of overtime entries with blank or generic reason codes as problematic.
A department spokesperson confirmed that “Extension of Tour” is one of the category codes used to detail the reason for overtime, and added that the CPD tracks all overtime to ensure it is being used appropriately.
The data also includes the names of supervising officers who authorized and approved the overtime requests. Lieutenant Haro is listed as both the authorizing and approving officer on all five requests stemming from the raid on Young’s home. Haro authorized and approved the overtime on February 22, 2019, the day after the raid.
The spokesperson said that at the time of the raid, the same supervisor both approved and authorized overtime requests. In an attempt to strengthen departmental oversight, Superintendent David Brown ordered all overtime to be approved by supervisors ranked deputy chief or above shortly after he took control of the department in April 2020.
Aporongao was one of the department’s highest overtime-earners in 2019. According to records the city publishes on Chicago Data Portal, he took home $41,330 in overtime that year, more than that earned by ninety-five percent of officers.
The other officers who collected overtime for the Young raid were among the department’s highest third of such earners in 2019: Cruz earned $33,302 in overtime; Mordan, $19,308; Orta, $17,964; and Saric, $14,559.
This reporting was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism
Jim Daley is the Weekly’s politics editor. He last wrote a Q&A about COVID-19 vaccines.