Episode Seven: Dirty Information

In New York narcotics officers raided Alberta Spruill s home shattering her door and detonating a flash grenade Spruill a -year-old city worker went into cardiac arrest and died two hours later The raid was based on faulty intel from a discredited informant and the suspect they were searching for was already in custody Spruill s death came amid a surge in New York City Police Department raids which had skyrocketed from in the mid- s to over by the time she was killed nearly all no-knock Despite repeated warnings that these reckless raids would end in tragedy scarce listened This episode of Collateral Damage hosted by Radley Balko explores how Spruill s death catalyzed the political rise of Eric Adams a young Black NYPD officer who would later become mayor It also examines how promises of transformation briskly faded and the NYPD returned to business as usual Transcript Radley Balko On an early spring morning in Harlem -year-old Alberta Spruill was getting ready for work She had worked for the City of New York for nearly three decades And at the time she worked in the personnel office of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services Joel Berger Alberta Spruill was a Black woman a perfectly innocent person with no criminal record of any kind Radley Balko As Spruill went through her morning routine a heavily armed band of police officers lined up outside her apartment Seconds later they took down her door with a battering ram Derek Sells The police on May at a little past a m broke into Ms Spruill s apartment They knocked the door off its hinges They threw in a stun grenade which is a percussion grenade so that it makes a loud flash and a bang C Virginia Fields I could only imagine how frightening terrifying to be in a situation with your door being knocked down and a grenade being thrown into your space Derek Sells When the police went in instead of finding particular drug den what they located was a neat tidy apartment of a older woman who lived alone By the time they realized their mistake Ms Spruill was in pain She could not catch her breath She was frightened The police then got EMS to come to the scene She was taken to the hospital And minutes later she was pronounced dead from cardiac arrest Radley Balko The New York Police Department had raided the wrong apartment The cops were acting on a tip from an informant who had previously been discredited And they were using a warrant for a suspect who had already been arrested They also deployed a flash-bang grenade a device designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone nearby The police had literally scared Alberta Spruill to death Joel Berger This was the biggest news story in the city at the time It shocked everybody Eric Adams All of us must be outraged of an innocent -year-old woman who was inside her home all of a sudden being disturbed in such a violent fashion Cynthia Howell We want justice Of program we want justice We re gonna do whatever it takes to get justice for her murder Because who s next It s gonna be your neighbor or whoever s neighbor Radley Balko A week later Ousmane Zongo a West African immigrant was also killed by New York City police Protests erupted around the city Seventeen years before the police killing of Breonna Taylor brought no-knock raids into the national spotlight New York City residents were demanding an end to the practice Spruill s death should have been a wake-up call It should have been a warning Joel Berger Spruill was really a watershed It should have been a wake-up call It should have been a warning And instead it was responded to with just the the bulk perfunctory promises that we all knew perfectly well were not going to be kept over the years Kimberl Crenshaw SayHerName Black Women s Stories of Police Violence and Population Silence event Humming Alberta Spruill Say her name Alberta Spruill Say her name Alberta Spruill Say her name Alberta Spruill Humming Radley Balko Alberta Spruill went to church frequently She had a son and six siblings She was a unique person with her own life her own interests her own family But her death and the angry general backlash to it and the unkept promises for revision from inhabitants leaders were all too familiar You could easily swap in the names of numerous other Black women killed in the war on drugs not just Breonna Taylor but also Kathryn Johnston who we covered in our first episode There s also Annie Rae Dixon shot and killed in a raid by a Texas police officer who had mistakenly fired his gun Tarika Wilson was killed by an officer in Lima Ohio while holding her -year-old son The couple Lillian Weiss and Lloyd Smalley died from smoke inhalation after Minneapolis police mistakenly raided their home and deployed a flash-bang grenade Lynette Gayle Jackson Geraldine Townsend Laquisha Turner the names go on and on C Virginia Fields My reaction to the tragic death of Breonna Taylor was one Here we go again What has really changed in all of these years even though we re talking different states different region of the country Here we go again Radley Balko From The Intercept this is Collateral Damage I m Radley Balko I m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than years The so-called war on drugs began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction but the war part of that metaphor expeditiously became all too literal When the drug war ramped up in the s and s it brought helicopters tanks and SWAT teams to U S neighborhoods It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections All wars have collateral damage the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs we became more willing to accept certain collateral damage in the drug war In this modern war on drugs which dates back more than years to the Nixon administration the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn t just tolerated it s inevitable Collateral Damage Podcast Collateral Damage This is Episode Dirty Information The NYPD s Shock Tactics and the death of Alberta Spruill C Virginia Fields I guess I heard about it along with everyone else on the news analysis And it was very very disturbing the circumstances around it Where this what -year-old woman was already dressed to go to work and had been working in her position with the city for over particular years And by all indications a very very solid church-going person Radley Balko When C Virginia Fields identified out about the death of Alberta Spruill she knew the scene of the circumstance well C Virginia Fields And I knew countless people in that building being in the political office that I held And I often would go there for various meetings and political stuff Radley Balko At the time Fields was Manhattan borough president essentially the equivalent to being the mayor of Manhattan C Virginia Fields We instantly connected with various of the people we knew in the building the president of the association and particular other tenants just to get a better sense from them And we also was in contact with the police commissioner Ray Kelly to find out from the police side what had happened Radley Balko And what happened in that apartment according to inhabitants authorities wasn t quite matching up with the information that was trickling out Cynthia Howell They sugar-coated it to the press They didn t want nobody to know Radley Balko Spruill s niece Cynthia Howell fleetly became a spokesperson for the family Cynthia Howell She had a glass table in her apartment When they threw the bomb in either it landed there and shards of glass struck her or either when they went in they threw her down That s the only way we can see fit where she got that broke arm and those gashes in her legs And we got the pictures to prove it As well as the autopsy record So she died brutally Christian Covington If you read the analysis it doesn t even make sense Radley Balko That s attorney Christian Covington who helped facilitate a neighborhood meeting in Harlem about police brutality a sparse months after Spruill was killed Christian Covington If you read the review they make it seem like the police came in they threw a stun grenade they picked up Ms Spruill called the EMTs and EMTs came and everything was fine And the police department patted her on the back and announced Have a nice day Radley Balko One detail that sets Alberta Spruill s death apart from numerous others is that the police acknowledged that they had made a mistake According to functionaries the police apologized to Spruill right away in her apartment before she went into cardiac arrest The police commissioner also publicly apologized Cynthia Howell It s little consolation that they did take responsibility for it because it should ve never happened They did respectfully apologize in the news Mayor Bloomberg attended the funeral Michael Bloomberg On behalf of million people of the city of New York to you Alberta s family I want to express our heartfelt condolences Radley Balko That s Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaking at Spruill s funeral at the time Michael Bloomberg applause I want to assure all of you that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly who s here with me and I are doing a thorough review of what took place that morning And we ll institute better practices for everyone that will ensure that Alberta will not have died in vain applause Nowadays we must look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that at least in this incident existing practices failed Our laws and procedures failed the inhabitants As mayor I failed to protect someone I was chose to work with We all failed humanity An innocent human being was taken from us and our actions caused it Radley Balko Mayor Bloomberg promised to improve how police operated in the city to put policies in place to prevent a death like Spruill s from ever happening again Joel Berger This was in their first year and a half where they wished to show that they were different from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani The overall atmosphere of it was This was horrible We re not going to let this happen again We re going to change Radley Balko The dilemma is that Alberta s Spruill s death could have been prevented The bad policies shortcuts and mistakes that caused police to barrel into the wrong apartment Narcotics officers had been operating this way for a long time in New York In fact under previous Mayor Rudy Giuliani the th Precinct in Harlem was notorious for operating like gangs emerging down doors without search warrants and stealing money and drugs There were ample warnings that unless things changed someone was going to be killed No one listened or at least no one in city regime who had the power to do anything about it Joel Berger You would call it a comedy of errors except it wasn t a comedy since someone died Radley Balko Joel Berger is a longtime New York civil rights lawyer He s been working on police misconduct issues since the s Joel Berger They had the wrong apartment The informant had given them the wrong place In fact the guy they were looking for was truly in custody by the time of the raid They went in with a percussion device which was designed to strike fear into the residents And the poor woman died of a heart attack Radley Balko In the first limited months after Spruill s death inhabitants debate focused on two issues the use of confidential informants and the practice of serving no-knock raids to serve drug warrants The path that led police to Alberta Spruill s apartment door that morning had begun months earlier when police were making a routine street arrest for drugs Derek Sells There was an individual whose name has never been revealed but who was arrested on a minor trespassing offense Radley Balko Attorney Derek Sells was part of the association representing Spruill s family Here he testifies to the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence in Derek Sells He was stopped by police questioned he was frisked and they revealed a small amount of narcotics on him He was charged arrested with criminal trespass and possession of several narcotics And he was given an opportunity to get a reduced sentence and a favorable plea if he would solely provide information about higher-level drug dealing that was going on Radley Balko We should note here that this specific detail isn t in the police review but offering deals like this to low-level offenders was and still is common practice Of class it s risky too Police are relying on people emerging the very laws they re trying to enforce whether they re drug sellers looking to knock off competition people in custody looking to cut a deal on their own charges or drug users willing to do or say almost anything for money to feed their addiction Derek Sells And so having missed six appointments without explanation he was deemed unreliable and he was decertified as a police informant The police in the th Precinct however did not put this information into the system that would alert other police precincts that this individual was no longer certified confidential informant because he was deemed unreliable So he instead went to another Manhattan-based precinct the th Precinct where they accepted him with open arms Radley Balko Sells explained the human rights commission that the informant in Spruill s episode had been decertified after failing to show up for scheduled meetings but the NYPD document says his previous handlers explained the th Precinct that he was credible Derek Sells This information that he gave was that there was an individual named Melvin Boswell who was heavily armed and was a drug dealer someone who was dealing drugs out of apartment F at West rd Street Radley Balko The police now had a name and address from an informant At this point they should have done more assessing to corroborate this information They had Spruill s name as the occupant of Apartment F and could have done specific research into who she was They did not They could have done surveillance but later explained that the building was just too busy to watch the apartment without raising suspicion The next step then was to obtain the warrant Related Episode Five What Fourth Amendment Getting a warrant to forcibly enter a private residence should be a arduous process Getting a warrant to break in without first knocking and announcing should be even tougher Judges are supposed to scrutinize these warrant applications to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of people suspected of crimes But as Joel Berger says that process is too often just a rubber stamp Joel Berger When the police go to get a warrant they submit an affidavit to a judge Usually they go before the judge and the judge asks questions quite often very perfunctory questions Occasionally the informant is brought before the judge although not invariably Sometimes the police just by hearsay say Oh he s a good informant We ve used him and he s been helpful in the past They don t provide any proof of that and they re not questioned for any proof of that Sometimes in lawsuits I ve been able to get discovery about the actual reliability or supposed reliability of the informant And often the discovery will show that he s wrong like half the time a third of the time Radley Balko In this event the informant claimed that the suspect Boswell who lived upstairs dealt drugs out of Spruill s apartment Here s Spruill s niece Cynthia Howell again Cynthia Howell They just went on a word of a drug addict informant And the informant just commented it s that apartment Radley Balko This was the police s second mistake bad information But as attorney Christian Covington points out it s also one that should have been easy to correct Christian Covington They like to make the issues seem that it was all due to this confidential informant given the wrong information but that s not the issue The issue was that they re supposed to substantiate the information and investigate the information and they didn t do anything They just got the warrant and went in there and knocked down the door The issue was that they re supposed to substantiate the information and investigate the information and they didn t do anything Radley Balko If police had done basic surveillance of the apartment or just demanded around they would have realized the apartment they were about to raid was the home of a church-going -year-old woman who had worked for the city for decades Here s Police Commissioner Ray Kelly testifying before the city s Committee on Residents Safety about a month after the raid Raymond Kelly Even after getting the warrant there should have been a lot more observation of the location see what trafficking was going on Radley Balko If the cops had done that basic observation they also would have noticed something central in the days before the raid Their target Melvin Boswell hadn t been coming or going from his own apartment The reason why is almost comically unbelievable Here s attorney Derek Sells Derek Sells Had they done another simple check on Melvin Boswell they had checked their own records they would have learned that Melvin Boswell was in prison Radley Balko Boswell had been arrested four days earlier by a different group of NYPD cops at a different precinct After the break the raid that killed Alberta Spruill Break Radley Balko The morning of the raid a squad of law enforcement officers gathered to discuss how it would all go down City Councilmember Phil Reed would later grill Police Commissioner Kelly on this critical moment what happened next and what should have happened Philip Reed Who knew who should have known that this Boswell country character had already been incarcerated Was there anybody at this tactical meeting that had that information and that wasn t shared Raymond Kelly Yes Philip Reed Who was that Raymond Kelly Precinct personnel knew that Philip Reed So they were at the tactical meeting before they broke down the woman s door They knew that Boswell had already been arrested and they didn t tell anybody Raymond Kelly They didn t communicate that to the emergency arrangement personnel that s correct Philip Reed At the tactical meeting just moments before they went in Raymond Kelly That s correct Philip Reed So they knew the person they were looking for was in jail but they didn t tell anybody Raymond Kelly That s right Radley Balko In affair you missed that exchange Someone at the raid planning meeting knew that the targeted drug dealer was already in jail but didn t tell the rest of the gang And without this crucial information the police just went full steam ahead That brings us to the second major population debate Spruill s death sparked the use of no-knock raids to serve drug warrants Derek Sells Majority of searches are required to be done with what s called a knock and announce which means that armed with a legal search warrant police go to a home and they knock on the door and they announce their purpose In order to get a no-knock warrant the police and prosecutors are required to show the additional proof that not only was there probable cause but also that the individual whose place that they desired to search presented a danger Radley Balko The no-knock raid pops up in several episodes of this podcast series because it s a staple of the war on drugs It s also a tidy encapsulation of how the drug war prioritizes arresting and convicting suspected drug dealers over the rights and safety of the people police are supposed to be serving and people who are disproportionately low-income and Black or Latino The no-knock raid encapsulates how the drug war prioritizes arresting suspected drug dealers over the rights and safety of the people police are supposed to be serving Joel Berger Supposedly the excuse is that in the affair of drugs they can be easily disposed of Which is kind of absorbing because if it s such a small quantity of drugs that they could be easily flushed down the toilet why do they really need to use officers to begin with If it s a major drug house the culprits are not going to be able to flush everything down the toilet So that knocks out the need for no-knock except in the the majority extreme circumstances Radley Balko No-knock raids are supposed to be rare They re supposed to be reserved for only the bulk dangerous offenders But under questioning by City Councilmember Frank Vallone Commissioner Kelly conceded that no-knocks were the norm much as they were in the rest of the country Raymond Kelly This is the total up to April For through the total number of warrants are warrants Frank Vallone Out of those search warrants how several were no-knock I would say the vast majority are no-knock Raymond Kelly I would say the vast majority are no-knock Majority of the warrants are aimed at narcotics The vast majority of the warrants are targeted at seizing narcotics And as a general rule narcotics can be destroyed or disposed of at least that s our belief if you knock on the door and give notice of your appearance so they re endorsed for what we call a no-knock entry Radley Balko When the police raided Alberta Spruill s apartment they had problems prying open her door They ultimately forced their way in with a battering ram But they also feared that the time they had lost put them at danger So they set off a flash grenade In scenario you don t know what those sound like here s a police demo APD SWAT officer You guys give me a countdown from three and on one I ll throw it OK Children Yes APD SWAT officer Everybody plug your ears Ready Go ahead Children Three two one Explosive sound Radley Balko Councilmember Gifford Miller questioned Kelly about flash-bang grenades Gifford Miller What are the factors that causes the Department to decide to use them at all and in what circumstances And what are the factors that cause people to want to use them in particular circumstances Raymond Kelly The purpose of it is to shock someone There is usually a determination made that there are weapons at the scene that there s a possibility of those weapons used against police officers So it s a loud noise it s a flash It certainly is shocking in nature and the belief is that it would stop someone from using a weapon or act as a diversion Let s say you required someone to go to another location in the house You might do that in the back of a house and then hit the front door something like that in a coordinated fashion But there has been an increased use and I think there was a belief on the part of officers that it protects them Gifford Miller Have you done any analysis of that Is there an analysis of the use of these devices that suggests that in these kinds of raids there are less shootings or less injuries on the part of officers or less injuries on the part of people who are raiding Or have you done any kind of analysis that suggest their actual effectiveness Raymond Kelly We haven t Radley Balko In the federal regime criminally indicted a Georgia-based flash-bang grenade manufacturer The suit alleged that the company s grenades were prematurely detonating One such development had badly injured several FBI agents who all experienced hearing loss That indictment was eventually dropped But even when they work correctly police routinely blindly toss these devices into private homes By design flash-bang grenades instill terror and shock in accused who have often yet to even be charged with a crime But they can also do quite a bit more damage than that And of class the grenade itself can t distinguish defendants from innocent bystanders These devices have caused dozens of injuries and several deaths over the years During a raid in Georgia police threw a flash-bang that blew a hole in the chest of a -year-old boy And of program there are demographic patterns as to who gets targeted the greater part Joel Berger It s almost invariably poor people people of color frequently people of the housing projects Radley Balko Currently not a single state or Washington D C track no-knock raids The the greater part fresh content available comes from a ACLU survey of police departments around the country That survey unveiled that percent of individuals targeted by no-knock raids were Black Black people make up about percent of the U S population Joel Berger One of the excuses even though it isn t perpetually articulated is We want to scare these people into making sure they don t have anything more to do with the guy we re looking for So it is very much a form of social control just as stop-and-frisk was a form of social control Saying OK maybe you don t have guns on you but if you re friends with anybody in a gang you better keep away from them It is very much a form of social control just as stop-and-frisk was a form of social control They are designed to strike fear into the hearts of low-income people in neighborhoods where there s a lot of drug traffic or guns And as a conclusion they frequently wind up harming police neighborhood relations much more than they contribute to any solving of crimes Radley Balko Spruill s fate was determined by the race and profile of the people around her and by police conceptions of who is and isn t a criminal Derek Sells When the police went into Ms Spruill s apartment what they supposed was that they were going to confront an African American stereotypical drug-dealing gunslinging male and that s what they went prepared to do And so when Ms Spruill happened to be there she was treated as if she was part of his crew And she was thrown to the ground she was violently handcuffed even before they could figure out what really was going on And so yes even though the ultimate victim in this circumstance was a -year-old African American woman the target was a stereotypical individual who the police assumed was a Black male gunslinging drug dealer Radley Balko Police claimed they identified Spruill on her bedroom floor Even when no one is physically injured the trauma from a violent police raid can do lasting psychological damage Joel Berger All of the casualties almost all suffer from various form of PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder They tell me every time they hear you know a little bit of noise outside their door they re afraid the cops are coming back It could just be a neighbor throwing out the garbage but they don t know that They are extremely frightened They re frightened every time they hear sirens Selected of them say they re frightened every time they see a police officer on the street Radley Balko In Black brown and low-income neighborhoods across the United States this fear of police this alienation has been set in place after decades of overzealous violent actions by law enforcement About a decade before Spruill s death for example police in Boston mistakenly raided the home of the Rev Accelyne Williams also based on a bad tip from an informant Like Spruill the trauma of that raid sent Williams into cardiac arrest which proved fatal His death also sparked protests and demands for adjustment New York City in was no different C Virginia Fields The region response in learning about Ms Spruill s death was again How countless more times do we have to go through this and no changes that are occurring Radley Balko After Spruill s death both the city and society groups held citizens meetings about the police department s tactics C Virginia Fields We had people I think from almost presumably every borough maybe not Staten Island who came and talked about experiences they either had had or knew about this no-knock initiative Mr Rodrigues About o clock in the morning six cops break my door I was sleeping when I heard the noise They hit the door three times and the door fell down They grabbed me up and from my shirt one gong on my head one gong on my chest Bonnie Paley I was almost killed by the New York City Police The residents housing precinct Police Institution number in Throggs Neck came after me at in the morning Twenty-five cops targeted me and targeted my then- -year-old daughter Mary Barti They stormed into the house forced us to lay on the floor hands out My husband who s sitting here my daughter and her little daughter years old on the floor in the living room Radley Balko These stories shocked a lot of people But for the people who lived in these communities and who had been paying attention they weren t surprising The local media had been reporting on similar botched raids for more than a decade Journalists had been covering the failure of judges to properly scrutinize search warrants They had covered the use of unreliable informants and the resulting terror inflicted on innocent people and their families Members of the city s Civilian Complaint Review Board or CCRB had expressed frustration that they lacked the authority to do much about any of this The CCRB investigates complaints that New Yorkers file against police officers and while it can recommend discipline when it finds wrongdoing the final decision rests with the NYPD commissioner Here s William Aquino a CCRB investigator from to William Aquino In multiple cases other investigators and I were ordered to exonerate officers who had not done sufficient study and went into innocent people s homes Radley Balko Narcotics search warrants surged in New York City during the s In NYPD executed about warrants That figure doubled by The majority of these were for no-knock raids And civilian complaints about searches on the wrong apartment or wrong address climbed alongside this rise in raids In June of Commissioner Kelly announced out of search warrants executed that year just five had been on the wrong address But Kelly couldn t say for sure because the NYPD just didn t track how often it got the wrong address This was common enough however that the agency had made maintenance workers available around the clock to fix the doors that police had mistakenly torn down The largest part chilling warning came from Norman Siegel an attorney and former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union who had filed a lawsuit on behalf of people had been wrongly raided We must do a better job of no-knock search warrants he mentioned in a press conference Otherwise someone might wind up dead as a product of how we implement this procedure That was less than a year before the raid on Alberta Spruill Spruill s death even inspired several criticism of the NYPD from members of its own force Here s a clip from a Democracy Now interview with a young Black officer who would later go into politics Democracy Now theme music Amy Goodman A court had granted the police a no-knock warrant It turns out the police raided the wrong apartment We re joined right now by Lt Eric Adams He s founder and president of Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care Welcome to Democracy Now Eric Adams Thank you very much for having me this morning Amy Goodman There s been a lot of activity this weekend after what happened on Friday Can you describe what you know at this point Eric Adams Well all things are still at the moment under study and the police department has been very reluctant in turning over detail of findings of what happened What we do know is that it appears as though the wrong apartment was targeted Radley Balko Almost years later former Lt Eric Adams would become mayor of New York City At the time Spruill s death provided a platform for his advocacy group and raised his inhabitants profile Joel Berger A young Eric Adams trying to make a name for himself as head of Blacks in Law Enforcement being highly critical of the police department s behavior which now goes on in the modern day continuously under his mayoralty Radley Balko Here s Adams speaking to the City Council s Committee on Masses Safety Eric Adams If I could just hurriedly go through why this Spruill matter should not be identified as an isolated issue Back in March the Queens Narcotics Unit entered a home of a Ms Flornell out in Rockaway The police commissioner responded to Rockaway he met with the NAACP he had a meeting with them and he stated it was a tragedy He would do all he can to ensure it does not happen again he will have a comprehensive assessment No summary was done The tragedies continue October of that same year Mr Rogers and his wife a retired police officer and retired captain same thing Police entered their homes Mr Rogers had his gun drawn He was about to get into a fire-fight with the police officers until he saw they were cops He hid his gun He was handcuffed His wife had heart trouble she had to go to the hospital for several days He spoke with the police commissioner the police commissioner stated it was a tragedy he was going to do all he could so that it doesn t happen again and a review would be done Nothing was done Radley Balko Spruill s death did inspire particular reforms at least in the short term Kelly ordered that flash grenades could only be used with a sign-off from a high-ranking NYPD official The city required more corroboration of tips from informants better documentation of their reliability and better communication between precincts There were also promises for better training and to create a database to track warrants how they were served and what the police discovered And Berger says that at least for a time the procedures around when and how to conduct searches and raids did really start to shift Joel Berger For a meager years they were a little more careful because of all the negative publicity surrounding Spruill I mean of module the percussion device was part of what scared her to death and they haven t used that very much since Radley Balko Consequently the number of overall raids dropped from more than warrants for drugs and guns per year to around But even this lower figure was still percent higher than just a decade earlier It also didn t take long for the bad habits to return Joel Berger Everything else that they promised to do checking out who really lives there checking out whether the informant is reliable checking out whether there s been any information other than from the informant that would verify what the informant is saying almost all of that has gone thoroughly by the wayside over the past years to the point where I have had numerous cases where totally innocent people had their apartments raided on no-knock warrants and the police didn t find anything at all Related A New York Police Officer Was Caught on Camera Apparently Planting Marijuana in a Car for the Second Time And nonetheless they defended that Oh well you know we had information and the city s law department fights the cases tooth and nail and in the end you usually have to settle for less than it s worth and worse yet the cops are never punished Radley Balko Around the country accountability is constantly the major sticking point in efforts to rein in police misconduct New York City after Spruill was no exception Members of the Civilian Complaint Review Board had tried for years to warn city authorities about the out-of-control drug raids William Aquino Unfortunately Alberta Spruill is just the latest victim of a pattern of recklessness with search warrants and bench warrants that the NYPD and the Civilian Complaint Review Board have known about and tacitly encouraged for years Radley Balko Former review board investigator William Aquino explained the committee on society safety that when he had discovered wrongdoing he was often pressured or forced to alter his official findings William Aquino For example a Brooklyn situation where narcotics informant s only description of the premises was that it was the door to the right of the stairs When I went there I exposed two doors on the right yet the officer completely guessed and sent ESU in with a grenade anyway In circumstances remarkably similar to Ms Spruill s incident an older woman was handcuffed and kicked to the ground In another example a Bronx scenario in which a sergeant misrepresented a description of the house to a judge and CCRB and misled his own supervisor into thinking that he had done the standard checks of utilities records After I refused to comply with my manager s demand that I change my assessment and exonerate the officer the CCRB panel exonerated the search Radley Balko Aquino who served under mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg described how officers wouldn t do the legwork to verify the addresses of warrant requests and then would dodge accountability after the fact William Aquino Officers and their union lawyers invariably insist that everything is legal once a cop is holding a warrant as if questionable information magically becomes gospel once you sell a too-trusting judge on it To them once a judge signs off or issues a bench warrant the police are absolved of all responsibility even if they know that their information is genuinely thinner than the paper the warrant is printed on End of story To them once a judge signs off or issues a bench warrant the police are absolved of all responsibility Radley Balko In other words even if the police lied to get a warrant once that warrant was signed by a judge it became legal This made holding the police or individual officers accountable virtually impossible Ultimately efforts to empower the board to scrutinize NYPD narcotics procedures and the investigations that led to these warrants proved futile Joel Berger There have been deaths and there re gonna be more deaths Radley Balko Berger continues to represent casualties of police abuse but he says that even when he wins on paper it s just part of an endless cycle Police terrorize innocent people the city pays out a settlement and then nothing changes And then it all happens again Joel Berger There are no consequences for the police officers who do these things I mean I bring lawsuits I get compensation for the casualties Not only are the lawsuits ineffectual but the city deliberately slows them down and fights tooth and nail against even getting selected compensation for people Related NYPD Cops Sued for Misconduct Cost City Millions in Settlements Then Get Promotions The city spends millions of dollars a year settling these cases or paying out judgments This all comes out of the taxpayer s money and nothing is done to the officers Or at preponderance even in the the majority extreme cases all that s likely to happen is the officer gets a slap on the wrist Maybe days vacation time is taken away from him sometimes not even that So the lawsuits are unfortunately ineffective in bringing about genuine change That is one of the most of frustrating things in what I ve been doing for a living having to explain that to people I have had cases where when I hand over the settlement check to the client the client breaks down in tears saying it s not enough It s just not good enough It ll never really be enough Radley Balko The city of New York eventually paid Alberta Spruill s family million But the raids continued Cynthia Howell You know they ll hand out a settlement a settlement a settlement That doesn t settle the fact that if you don t change your policing policies those settlements don t mean nothing Radley Balko Spruill s niece Cynthia Howell often mentioned that hers was the rare family to receive an apology from the mayor Mayor Michael Bloomberg also named a daily bus run after Spruill It s the a m bus on the M line It s the bus Spruill was preparing to take to her city job on the morning she was killed as she had every day for years But that symbolic gesture hardly seems sufficient Joel Berger The NYPD is an incredibly powerful agency and it exercises its power vociferously It gives into a more even more vociferous union which gets altogether too much attention City Hall even under better mayors than the one we have now has been afraid to go up against the NYPD Even the City Council has been reluctant to really clamp down The state legislature has been reluctant to clamp down and only did so a little bit in the wake of George Floyd only to the extent of making police disciplinary records more accessible The city comptroller s office continues to settle cases all the time without requiring that anything be done to the police officer The DAs keep records on officers who they believe are not credible but does not prosecute them for lying in specific cases There are so multiple different agencies that all contribute to this C Virginia Fields I believe in society police relationships I am not one to talk about defunding the police To me that s not the answer but I do know that I expect and demand police to come into communities and be respectful to not mistreat people Radley Balko C Virginia Fields isn t in governing body anymore She says the failure of Spruill s death to bring real change left her discouraged about the possibility of fixing the system C Virginia Fields Unfortunately we don t even hear about change or we don t talk about change until an event comes up Then we all get very busy we ve got to do something and that lasts for a short period of time There is not the intentional purposeful continuation of working on these issues to follow them through at the level the top where we need to be making the changes Radley Balko In Alberta Spruill joined the long and ever-growing list of innocent people killed in drug raids Each of those deaths added new voices to the movement for revision In the years after her aunt s death Cynthia Howell helped determined a group called Families United Justice along with the uncle of Oscar Grant the man shot and killed by a police officer while lying face-down in an Oakland subway station Cynthia Howell What we are caring about is accountability We are caring about justice And none of these families not even my own has received the justice Say Her Name song by Janelle Monae plays Alberta Spruill say her name Alberta Spruill say her name Alberta Spruill say her name Cynthia Howell A fight ain t a fight unless you fight and we have no choice but to fight We have been thrust into this by circumstances Collateral Damage Podcast Collateral Damage Radley Balko Next time on Collateral Damage Bills Aylesworth They cooked up a scheme a story that he was growing marijuana on the property Richard Dewitt Captain Dewitt here I m on a search warrant with the Hidden Hills crew on this marijuana eradication thing Bills Aylesworth And raided his house Dan Alban They were just looking for an excuse to invade his ranch search everything and find various basis for the seizure Radley Balko Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept It was announced and written by me Radley Balko Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer who also served as producer and editor Laura Flynn is our showrunner Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal We had editing advocacy from Maryam Saleh Truc Nguyen mixed our show Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan Art direction by Fei Liu Illustrations by Tara Anand Copy editing by Nara Shin Social and video media by Chelsey B Coombs Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance Thank you to the WNYC archive for audio from Alberta Spruill s funeral utility and from the Harlem Interfaith Group on Police Brutality We also want to thank the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States for audio from the Hearing on the scenario of Alberta Spruill This series was made accomplishable by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund If you want to send us a message email us at podcasts theintercept com To continue to follow my work and reporting check out my newsletter The Watch at radleybalko substack com Thank you for listening The post Episode Seven Dirty Information appeared first on The Intercept