A lawsuit against New York City and two police officers who 17 years ago staged a raid of an apartment occupied by a law-abiding family on the unsupported word of an untested informant facing drug charges may finally be headed to trial.
“It was on the basis of this criminal’s information—an informant with no track record, no proven reliability and whose information concerning drug trafficking on the premises was not even minimally corroborated—that approximately 12 members of the Housing Authority Police Department crashed through the door of plaintiff’s apartment in the middle of the night, terrified a mother and six children, held them for hours while they searched their apartment, destroying their property and threatening plaintiff mother that they would put her children in foster care if she did not tell the truth about the presence of guns in the apartment,” a unanimous panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, wrote in Delgado v. City of New York, 14684-1995.
