The father of a Chicago police officer who was critically wounded and paralyzed in the attack that killed Officer Ella French called out Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday and said policy changes at the department gave bad guys in the city the upper hand against law enforcement.
Carlos Yanez Sr., himself a retired police officer from the city, told the Chicago-Sun Times that his son, Carlos Yanez Jr.—along with other officers—were told that they cannot draw their weapons unless the situation "warrants it," Fox32 reports.
Prosecutors say both French and Yanez Jr. had their weapons holstered when they were fire on at a traffic stop earlier this month. French was killed by a single shot to the head and Yanez, who released a video from the hospital, was struck in the brain, eye and shoulder.
"They didn’t do that when I was on the job," Yanez Sr. told the paper. "They let us be police. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t draw my weapon, have it behind my leg or behind my thigh."
Yanez Sr. told the paper that he did not want Lightfoot to visit his son in the hospital.
"She’s tied the hands of the police," he told the paper. "She wants police to fight crime with a hand tied behind their backs, and you can’t fight evil crime, brute force, with one hand tied behind their backs."
