NO-KNOCK NIGHTMARE
Fam still in shock after granny’s home trashed in failed Qns. drug raid
Tijuana Brown says she still can’t sleep through the night as she and her family try to get over the shock of a no-knock battering-ram raid by NYPD cops who didn’t find the drugs they were convinced her nephew was dealing.
The incident, which happened last month and came to light at a recent City Council hearing, comes amid a growing national and local call to limit or eliminate no-knock warrants and raids, in which police don’t identify themselves until they’ve busted down the door.
The criticism has intensified since Breonna Taylor was shot dead by police in her Kentucky home during a botched no-knock raid a year ago.
After busting down Brown’s front door in Jamaica, Queens, just before 6 a.m. on March 5, police focused on their target, Brown’s nephew Andre Brown, tearing through his bedroom and cutting a hole in the wall.
“I’m still very shaken,” Tijuana Brown said. “I don’t sleep through the night after this.”
The breach of their home was captured on Brown’s Ring doorbell video.
A uniformed cop takes down the door with three strikes of a battering ram. He rushes into the home, followed by at least seven other officers, shouting, “Police! Search warrant!” More cops stand gathered on the sidewalk.
Along with the nephew and his girlfriend, Tijuana Brown was home with her 10-year-old son, 1-month-old granddaughter and two other family members when cops burst in with no warning.
She is employed by the Social Security Administration and is working from home during the pandemic.
Cops found only enough marijuana for two or three joints. Andre Brown was arrested for possession, but the Queens district attorney’s office dismissed the case before he even saw a judge.
“When they were leaving, I heard one officer say, ‘Well this was a bust,’ ” Tijuana Brown said. “They said they were sorry for the inconvenience. Inconvenience? An inconvenience is when your train is running late, not when they’re busting down the door to your house and turning the place upside down.”
An NYPD spokesman told the Daily News there were “numerous complaints from the community about drug sales at the location.” Tijuana and Andre Brown said police claimed an informant told them the nephew was selling drugs out of the home.
The NYPD spokesman declined to answer questions about accusations by Brown, 53, that cops refused to show her a warrant, disconnected a camera inside her home and kept their badges covered so she could not identify them.
Ideally, such raids are conducted after the informant has bought drugs at the location and appeared before a judge signing the warrant. The NYPD wouldn’t discuss what steps were taken in this case.
Andre Brown, 36, served eight
years for robbery and is on parole, he readily admits — but he says he is not involved with drugs. He thinks the “informant” might be a mystery man who showed up at the home more than two weeks before the raid.
“He said he wanted to buy and he said he was friends with Sandra,” the nephew recalled. “I don’t know any Sandra and I kept asking him, ‘Who are you? I don’t know you. Buy? Buy what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”
Eventually, he said, he told the guy to get lost.
“I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he said.
His aunt spent nearly $1,000 to replace the front door.
After feeling she was treated like a criminal when she sought police paperwork about the incident in hopes of getting reimbursed, she turned to the office of City Councilwoman Adrienne Adams (D-Queens), chairwoman of the Public Safety Committee.
At a committee hearing last month, Adams told NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea such incidents validate perceptions that the department’s vow to improve relations with communities of color is just more empty talk.
“How am I supposed to convince them when they see day after day instances where they are still treated the same?” Adams said to Shea. “They are still being disrespected. They are still being dishonored. It seems like their lives are not valued.”
Shea said he wasn’t aware of the incident, but said he believes that the NYPD is better than most police departments that also use no-knock warrants.
He also said any talk about banning such a tactic should include the NYPD and a discussion about the potential threat to officer safety.
Adams later told The News
“this could have been another Breonna Taylor” and that noknock warrants deserve closer scrutiny.
Late last year, state Sens. James Sanders (D-Queens) and Brian Benjamin, (D-Manhattan), along with Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell (D-Manhattan), introduced a bill that would limit noknock raids to the most serious cases — such as those involving suspected killers or terrorists.
The proposed legislation would prohibit such raids in drug cases.
Joel Berger, an outspoken civil rights attorney, said no-knock raids too often turn up little or no drugs.
“It’s one more reason why there’s such distrust of the police,” he said.
“They only do it in the projects or in minority neighborhoods.”
The NYPD could not say how many no-knock warrants it executes each year, noting it doesn’t maintain those statistics.