Episode Seven: Dirty Information

In 2004, New York narcotics officers raided Alberta Spruill’s home, shattering her door and detonating a flash grenade. Spruill, a 57-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 1,400 in the mid-’90s to over 5,000 by the time she was killed, nearly all no-knock.

Despite repeated warnings that these reckless raids would end in tragedy, few 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 reform quickly faded, and the NYPD returned to business as usual.

Transcript

Radley Balko: On an early spring morning in Harlem, 57-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 team 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 16, 2003, at a little past 6 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 some drug den, what they found 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 20 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 57-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 course 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 most perfunctory promises that we all knew perfectly well were not going to be kept over the years.

Kimberlé Crenshaw (#SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public 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 public backlash to it, and the unkept promises for reform from public officials 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 1-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 20 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 quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, 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 some collateral damage in the drug war. In this modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 7, 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 report. And it was very, very disturbing, the circumstances around it. Where this, what, 57, 59-year-old woman was already dressed to go to work and had been working in her position with the city for over some 29 years. And by all indications, a very, very solid church-going person.

Radley Balko: When C. Virginia Fields found out about the death of Alberta Spruill, she knew the scene of the incident well.

C. Virginia Fields: And I knew many 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 immediately connected with some of the people we knew in the building, the president of the association and some 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 public officials, 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, quickly 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 report. So she died brutally.

Christian Covington: If you read the report, it doesn’t even make sense.

Radley Balko: That’s attorney Christian Covington, who helped facilitate a community meeting in Harlem about police brutality a few months after Spruill was killed.

Christian Covington: If you read the report, 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 said, “Have a nice day.”

Radley Balko: One detail that sets Alberta Spruill’s death apart from many others is that the police acknowledged that they had made a mistake. According to authorities, 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 8 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]

Today, we must look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that at least in this case, existing practices failed. Our laws and procedures failed the public. 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 wanted 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 problem 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 30th Precinct in Harlem was notorious for “operating like gangs”: breaking 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 government 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 1990s.

Joel Berger: They had the wrong apartment. The informant had given them the wrong place. In fact, the guy they were looking for was actually 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 few months after Spruill’s death, public 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 team representing Spruill’s family. Here, he testifies to the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence in 2021.

Derek Sells: He was stopped by police, questioned, he was frisked, and they found a small amount of narcotics on him. He was charged, arrested with criminal trespass and possession of some narcotics. And he was given an opportunity to get a reduced sentence and a favorable plea — if he would simply 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 report, but offering deals like this to low-level offenders was, and still is, common practice. Of course, it’s risky too.

Police are relying on people breaking 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 28th 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 25th Precinct, where they accepted him with open arms.

Radley Balko: Sells told the human rights commission that the informant in Spruill’s case had been decertified after failing to show up for scheduled meetings, but the NYPD report says his previous handlers told the 29th 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 6F at 310 West 143rd Street.

Radley Balko: The police now had a name and address from an informant. At this point, they should have done more investigating to corroborate this information. They had Spruill’s name as the occupant of Apartment 6F, and could have done some 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.

Getting a warrant to forcibly enter a private residence should be a difficult 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 always. 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 asked 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 case, 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 said 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 asked around, they would have realized the apartment they were about to raid was the home of a church-going 57-year-old woman who had worked for the city for decades.

Here’s Police Commissioner Ray Kelly testifying before the city’s Committee on Public 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 important 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 team 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 service 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 case 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 team. And without this crucial information, the police just went full steam ahead.

That brings us to the second major public debate Spruill’s death sparked: the use of no-knock raids to serve drug warrants.

Derek Sells: Most 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 wanted 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 case of drugs, they can be easily disposed of. Which is kind of interesting 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 20 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 most extreme circumstances.

Radley Balko: No-knock raids are supposed to be rare. They’re supposed to be reserved for only the most 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 30. For 2001 through 2003, the total number of warrants are 12,950 warrants.

Frank Vallone: Out of those search warrants, how many were no-knock?

“I would say the vast majority are no-knock.”

Raymond Kelly: I would say the vast majority are no-knock. Most 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 finally forced their way in with a battering ram. But they also feared that the time they had lost put them at risk. So they set off a flash grenade.

In case 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 wanted 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 2008, the federal government criminally indicted a Georgia-based flash-bang grenade manufacturer. The suit alleged that the company’s grenades were prematurely detonating. One such incident 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 suspects 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 course, the grenade itself can’t distinguish suspects from innocent bystanders.

These devices have caused dozens of injuries and several deaths over the years. During a 2014 raid in Georgia, police threw a flash-bang that blew a hole in the chest of a 2-year-old boy. And of course, there are demographic patterns as to who gets targeted most.

Joel Berger: It’s almost always poor people, people of color, frequently people of the housing projects.

Radley Balko: Today, not a single state or Washington, D.C., track no-knock raids. The most recent data available comes from a 2014 ACLU survey of police departments around the country. That survey found that 42 percent of suspects targeted by no-knock raids were Black. Black people make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population.

Joel Berger: One of the excuses, even though it isn’t always 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 result, they frequently wind up harming police community 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 believed 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 case was a 57-year-old African American woman, the target was a stereotypical individual who the police believed was a Black male gunslinging drug dealer.

Radley Balko: Police claimed they found 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 victims almost all suffer from some 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. Some 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 reform. New York City in 2003 was no different.

C. Virginia Fields: The community response in learning about Ms. Spruill’s death was again: How many 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 community groups held public meetings about the police department’s tactics.

C. Virginia Fields: We had people, I think, from almost probably every borough, maybe not Staten Island, who came and talked about experiences they either had had or knew about this no-knock policy.

Mr. Rodrigues: About 3 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 public housing precinct, [Police Service] number 8 in Throggs Neck, came after me at 9:30 in the morning. Twenty-five cops targeted me and targeted my then-19-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, 2 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 1998 to 2002.

William Aquino: In multiple cases, other investigators and I were ordered to exonerate officers who had not done sufficient investigation and went into innocent people’s homes.

Radley Balko: Narcotics search warrants surged in New York City during the 1990s. In 1994, NYPD executed about 1,400 warrants. That figure doubled by 1997. 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 2003, Commissioner Kelly said out of 2,000 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 most 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 said in a press conference. “Otherwise, someone might wind up dead as a result of how we implement this procedure.”

That was less than a year before the raid on Alberta Spruill.

Spruill’s death even inspired some 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 100 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 currently under investigation, 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 20 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 public profile.

Joel Berger: A young Eric Adams trying to make a name for himself as head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, being highly critical of the police department’s behavior — which now goes on today, continuously under his mayoralty.

Radley Balko: Here’s Adams speaking to the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety.

Eric Adams: If I could just quickly go through why this Spruill incident should not be identified as an isolated issue. Back in March 2002, 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 report. No report was done. The tragedies continue.

October 15 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 report would be done. Nothing was done.

Radley Balko: Spruill’s death did inspire some 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 found. And Berger says that, at least for a time, the procedures around when and how to conduct searches and raids did actually start to shift.

Joel Berger: For a few years, they were a little more careful because of all the negative publicity surrounding Spruill. I mean, of course, 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 5,000 warrants for drugs and guns per year to around 3,500. But even this lower figure was still 150 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 completely by the wayside over the past 20 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.

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 always 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 officials 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 told the committee on public safety that when he had discovered wrongdoing, he was often pressured or forced to alter his official findings.

William Aquino: For example, a Brooklyn case 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 found two doors on the right, yet the officer simply guessed and sent ESU in with a grenade anyway. In circumstances remarkably similar to Ms. Spruill’s case, an older woman was handcuffed and kicked to the ground.

In another example, a Bronx case, 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 report 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 actually 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 policy, 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 victims 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 victims. Not only are the lawsuits ineffectual, but the city deliberately slows them down and fights tooth and nail against even getting some compensation for people.

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 most, even in the most extreme cases, all that’s likely to happen is the officer gets a slap on the wrist. Maybe 10 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 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 $1.6 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 6:52 a.m. bus on the M1 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 29 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 many different agencies that all contribute to this.

C. Virginia Fields: I believe in community 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 government 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 incident 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 2003, 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 reform.

In the years after her aunt’s death, Cynthia Howell helped found a group called Families United 4 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.

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 some basis for the seizure.

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept.

It was reported 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 support 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 service 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 case of Alberta Spruill.”

This series was made possible 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.

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