By Sam Charles
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — The Chicago Police Department’s bolstered training in the execution of search warrants will soon mean an increase in residential searches by CPD officers, Superintendent Larry Snelling told a federal judge Tuesday.
“Once we get all our officers trained up, we can now go back to doing some of those residential search warrants that we were doing in the past, but we will be doing them in the most professional way possible,” Snelling told U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer during a Tuesday status hearing in the city’s consent decree.
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The superintendent’s comments came after a presentation by CPD that showed a steep dropoff in residential search warrants carried out by police officers in recent years. While the number of searches has fallen, CPD officers say they recover contraband in more than 90% of warrant executions.
Pallmeyer noted CPD’s high success rate and asked, “If we’re just backing off residential searches … and as a result allowing more contraband to remain in homes, maybe more weapons, maybe more drugs, other things that are connected to criminal activity, that’s not necessarily a positive result, right?”
“The answer to your question is ‘yes,’” Snelling responded. “There are things being left on the table. We know the majority of residential search warrants ended with positive results.”
Tuesday’s hearing also focused on CPD officers’ use of Investigative Stop Receipts — “ISRs” — which are used to document when a civilian is stopped and questioned by officers. In 2023, CPD’s use of ISRs and search warrants were added to the purview of the independent monitoring team, led by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey.
Police records show the department’s reliance on residential search warrants has dropped sharply in recent years, especially since the mistaken raid on the home of Anjanette Young in 2019, shortly after the consent decree was entered.
That year, CPD officers carried out nearly 1,400 residential searches, police officials told Pallmeyer on Tuesday. In 2025, the total was 230 — a decline of more than 80%.
The decrease in residential searches has coincided with declines seen in the city’s violent crime, too. After a spike in 2020, murders and nonfatal shootings have dropped steadily in recent years.
CPD’s new suite of policies related to search warrants will go into effect in the coming summer, when violence typically peaks, officials said during a Tuesday status hearing in the city’s consent decree. A draft of the policy — which allows for “no-knock” entrances and “John Doe” informants — was made public in December 2025 after years of public debate and revisions.
Officers who most often carry out residential search warrants, usually those assigned to CPD’s Bureau of Counterterrorism or other specialized, have undergone additional training in recent months to focus on uses of force, children’ s exposure to trauma and the accuracy of sworn statements.
Since the consent decree was entered, the independent monitoring team has repeatedly urged CPD to strengthen its data collection policies, and CPD has now implemented a new digital tracking system to better analyze warrant data, suspects and outcomes.
“Unlike in the past, everything from pre-service planning through post-service documentation, it is all in this digitized system which allows us not only a larger amount of easily accessible data, but identifying any type of trends and reporting components that could come from such a sophisticated system,” Allyson Clark-Henson, CPD’s executive director of Constitutional Policing & Reform, said Tuesday.
Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal System and Policing Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, credited the coalition of community groups in the consent decree for their years of advocacy.
“This process hasn’t been easy. The change has not always been voluntary on the city’s part,” Block said. “The coalition believes that the resulting policies, while imperfect, are fairer and less discriminatory than before.”
“The proof will be in the data and the community’s lived experiences,” Block added.
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