Two more botched drug raids in New York (be sure to watch the video). This is the city that is supposed to have changed its ways since the death of Alberta Spruill:

Two Bronx families said the NYPD mistakenly raided their apartments Monday morning. But the department is defending its actions.

Flexton Young said he, his wife, and their four children were asleep when police broke down the door of their apartment on the fourth floor of 974 Anderson Ave.

“They ripped through my front door, they tore off my closet door, ripped both of my kids’ rooms to pieces,” Young said. “It brought me to tears, and I just didn’t want my kids to get hurt.”

Young said police made a “big mistake” believing they’d find illegal drugs and guns in his apartment.

The raid, around six Monday morning, left the family’s apartment a shambles. Belongings were pulled off shelves and out of drawers, and tossed on the floor. Officers upended a sofa and slashed out the lining, and also dumped out box after box of dry goods in the kitchen.

Upstairs, a similar raid was made on the apartment of the Pastrana family. Police turned several rooms upside down and pepper-sprayed the family dog. Family members said one officer punched a hole in a wall, grabbed an egg beater, and started to poke around inside the wall, looking for hidden drugs and guns.

Nothing was found in the Pastrana apartment, and no one was arrested.

Downstairs, Flexton Young said police gave him a summons for marijuana possession after discovering half a joint in an ashtray.

Note the “new professionalism” on display:

“I had one officer tell me that he was sorry this happened, and everybody else just looked at me and walked away,” Young said.

A spokesman for the NYPD said police had good information they would find drugs and guns in the apartments, and the raid was justified.

If you think terrorizing two families over half a joint is an appropriate use of police tactics, then I suppose the NYPD spokesman is right.

The article ends with a sentence that’s both interesting and misleading:

According to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, more than 300 allegations of improper searches of homes and businesses have been investigated and ruled on this year. Less than five-percent of the complaints were found to be “substantiated.”

This is interesting in that it means the CCRB has confirmed 15 cases of improper drug raids in New York City alone. To my knowledge, these are the first two to have received any coverage in the media. More evidence that the raid map, alarming as it is, doesn’t even begin to tell the entire story.

But it’s likely quite a bit worse than that. As I explained in Overkill, the CCRB’s jurisdiction only extends to the actions of police officers at the scene, after they’ve served the warrant. It has no power to look into the circumstances leading up to the raid. I’ve talked to the CCRB’s spokesman several times. He has confirmed to me that this is still the case today. If a botched raid took place because of a bad tip from an informant, or because someone wrote the the wrong address on the search warrant, the CCRB is powerless to do anything about it, and won’t investigate.

Which means that the CCRB’s failure to “substantiate” claims of improper searches in those 285+ other cases in no way means that the people making the complaints were wrong, or that a “wrong door” raid didn’t take place. In fact, in most wrong door raids, the problem occurs well before the police actually force entry.

Perhaps some small percentage of those 300+ complaints are people intentionally filing a false claim of a botched search. But I have a hard time believing a large number of people would go to the trouble.

I have an op-ed pending on New York City’s use of SWAT teams, but the truth is, after promising the public after the death of Spruill that they would drastically reform the way they use SWAT teams and paramilitary police tactics, city officials have since reneged on most of those promises.

And so the mistaken raids and terrorizing of innocent people continues.