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........

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