THE NEWS SAYS: Well-deserved accolades for reporter Ryley

One May morning, police burst into the apartment of Jameelah El-Shabazz, mother of five. They ordered everyone on the floor, tore apart rooms and seized a harmless, drug-free powder she used in religious rituals. She had done nothing wrong. A version of that story repeats over and over again in Sarah Ryley’s wrenching, riveting — and now Pulitzer Prize-winning — examination of a little-known law enforcement tool run amok, published in the Daily News early last year, in partnership with ProPublica.

The mundane term for the process, intended as a tool to combat drug trafficking and prostitution, is “nuisance abatement.” The aching reality for so many New Yorkers was being shut out, without sufficient due process, of the places they spent years and thousands of dollars nurturing.

With superhuman persistence, Ryley and a team of researchers plunged deep into the particulars of more than 1,100 such actions from the beginning of 2013 through the middle of 2014 — and found that scores of New Yorkers were kicked out of their homes and businesses by the NYPD.

Half of those who were banned from their homes or gave up their leases were not convicted of a crime as a result of the underlying investigation. Often they never even had the benefit of a proper hearing or a lawyer.

Yet they were summarily severed from the place at the center of their lives.

In at least 74 of the cases, residents agreed to warrantless searches of their property, sometimes in perpetuity, as a condition of returning.

Monday, the series and this newspaper won the coveted Pulitzer Prize in service journalism.

Ryley and all those who labored long hours reporting and assembling the series get well-deserved accolades. As a result of sweeping reforms they prompted — ushered in by NYPD Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill and the City Council — countless people will hold onto something far more precious: their very homes.