Often. But just how often is tough to say.

What’s struck me while researching my paper on no-knock raids is just how damned many of these things go wrong. Soon as I start researching one, I find about a half dozen more. The number of completely innocent people who’ve been killed in these things is in the dozens. The number of cops killed at “wrong door” raids that I’ve found is around ten. But the total number of “wrong door” raids is impossible to estimate. The vast majority go unreported, both because police, prosecutors, and judges don’t keep track their own mistakes, and because most victims of these raids are too terrified to come foreward (they also tend to be dsiproportionately poor, minority, and without representation). But what we have found is that high profile tragedies — the 2003 Alberta Spruill case in New York, for example — seem to get reporters start digging, politicians start asking questions, and people start coming forward with stories. Lots of rocks begin to get flipped over.

The Spruill case, for example, uncovered dozens of examples of botched no-knocks in New York City. The Accelyne Williams case in Boston had the same effect. As did the Alberto Sepulveda case in California. In fact, the phenomenon goes all the way back to the Donald Scott case in the early 1990s. All in all, the number of times police have broken down the doors of innocent people in full paramilitary gear is easily in the hundreds, and probably in the thousands. New York Police Chief Ray Kelly conceded in testimony to the City Council shortly after the Spruill case that NYC cops were performing about 460 drug raids per month, the vast majority of which were no-knocks. Kelly also conceded that about 10% of those raids produced no evidence and no arrests. That is, they were executed in error. Which means that at least until 2003, about 46 New Yorkers per month, or about 1.5 per day, were being wrongly subjected to police violence. Kelly also conceded that his data was incomplete, so the numbers could be higher.

And that’s just New York.

It’s also not even clear that things have changed in the Big Apple since the Spruill raid. The city did institute a database to track all warrants issued, including outcomes. But the press doesn’t have access to that database. So there’s still no transparency.

In any case, the Maye case has provoked at least one victim a wrong-door raid to relay his story, in the comments section of John Hawkins’ original post criticizing me, oddly enough. He writes:

Having been the victim, along with my 90 year old bedridden Mother, of a police home invasion, I don’t ever believe one word that the police say about such incidents after the fact. In our case, they were at the wrong address, but it didn’t stop them from attacking me by dragging me out of bed, stripping me, and then throwing me down and jumping on me breaking my back. My Mother became so afraid, she ended up in the hospital on a respirator and nearly died of her fright. When I finally got hold of the after action police report, it contained 22 outright lies and another 12 half-truths. We have filed a law suit, but it has now been 4 1/2 years and they, meaning the county and the law enforcement agency, have managed to delay court action so far so that we haven’t even gotten to the deposition stage. Fortunately, we have another witness and lots and lots of pictures and xrays of my own bruised and battered body.

I don’t know what the true facts of this case are, but I sure wouldn’t take anything the law enforcement types say as truthful … they are the biggest criminals out there and the ones we should all be most afraid of. Take it from one who knows first hand and is reminded by my constant back pain every day of what can happen to innocent, law abiding citizens at the hands of out of control, hormone enraged cops. Although I wish my attackers dead or at least in jail for life, I’m happy I didn’t have a weapon as I would never have been able to use it and the state these cops were in that morning, I know they would have shot me and my Mother. They were on a rampage and wanted to take someone, anyone, down. They didn’t want to ask questions or get any facts, they were out for blood the minute they forced their way in to my Mother’s home where we were all sleeping.

I saw another victim of a botched drug-raid recount a story in the comments to another blog post on the Maye case, but I can’t seem to relocate the blog or the post. I’ll put it up when I find it.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 9:56 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.