The police officers in the Street Narcotics Enforcement Units could be called the grunts in New York’s antidrug efforts. Untrained in undercover work, they are limited to making arrests after they witness a drug deal, often observed from afar through binoculars. No drug dealer is too small time, and they arrest customers, too. They take vans with them to suspected drug locations, hoping to fill them with prisoners.
One man who was in their sights on Feb. 2 was Ramarley Graham, 18, of the Wakefield section of the Bronx. Something about how he moved his hands near his waist led the officers to suspect he might be armed, according to the Police Department’s account of the events that transpired. And when Mr. Graham slipped away, the officers in the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit of the 47th Precinct did not let it go — or wait for backup.
They trailed him as he returned to his building, the door locking behind him. After a delay, the officers got inside and kicked their way into Mr. Graham’s apartment. In the bathroom, one officer fatally shot Mr. Graham in the chest. He was apparently unarmed, and a bag of marijuana was in the toilet bowl next to him.
The Bronx district attorney and the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau are investigating the shooting, but in interviews, more than a half-dozen police officials — from detectives to commanders — picked apart the decisions made that day by the members of the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, known as S.N.E.U., and raised troubling questions about their actions.
Most prominent, the police officials questioned the team’s aggressiveness and its decision to pursue Mr. Graham on its own. Why, as they milled outside the locked front door to his building, did the officers go in after him without waiting for a specialized team trained to take down doors and clear rooms?
They also questioned why the unit’s officers used a narrow tactical radio frequency to alert their colleagues in the van that Mr. Graham might be armed, rather than issue a warning on a more heavily trafficked channel that would have drawn other police units to the scene.
A detective with experience in narcotics work suggested that the better approach would have been to use “caution and slow things down.”
“We’re not chasing after Pablo Escobar here,” said the detective, who, along with others interviewed, spoke anonymously because he had not been authorized to speak to the news media.
Officials in the district attorney’s office, who are considering whether to seek criminal charges against the officer for the fatal shooting, were struck from the start by what they felt were the inexperience and the limited training that the unit’s officers had, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the early stages of the investigation.
The Police Department has acknowledged that the officer who shot Mr. Graham, Richard Haste, had never received the classroom instruction required of officers in the street narcotics unit. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has stripped Officer Haste, 30, who joined the department in 2008, and his sergeant, Scott Morris, of their guns and badges and has placed them on modified duty.
Not everyone is critical of the unit’s tactics preceding the shooting.
Vincent Andrasko, a retired detective who as a Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit officer in the 1990s often worked the same intersection where the police first spotted Mr. Graham, said the team’s decision to pursue Mr. Graham indoors on its own was sound. He cited the longstanding culture of the department.
“You deal with your own business,” Mr. Andrasko said. “If it’s your collar, you go after him.”
Mr. Andrasko, who now runs a security firm in Arizona, added, “I would have done the same thing.”
After the shooting, Mr. Kelly ordered a review of the Street Narcotics Enforcement Units, which for much of the past two decades have been making thousands of arrests each year with little attention or controversy.
As street-corner drug deals have declined in some areas of the city, many of the 76 police precincts have disbanded their Street Narcotics Enforcement Units; there are only 36 left. Sergeant Morris had been leading the unit in the 47th Precinct for at least two years, one person familiar with the team said. The team had one complaint in each of the past two years brought to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent agency that investigates accusations of police misconduct, according to the board. Last year, the review board received just shy of 6,000 complaints.
For young officers, the units are considered a stepping stone along the path to a detective’s shield.
But because the units’ officers are not trained investigators, they lack authorization for undercover work and are prohibited from buying drugs in so-called buy and bust operations. Instead they focus on visible sidewalk transactions. A report by an independent commission that investigated police corruption in the early 1990s stated that the units were even prohibited from entering buildings to make arrests, although no such rule could be independently found.
On the afternoon of Feb. 2, the unit’s observation team set up opposite a bodega near White Plains Road and East 228th Street in the Bronx, Mr. Kelly said. Mr. Graham and two friends emerged from the store and walked north. The observation team, which was in a car and following him, radioed to other members of the narcotics unit nearby its suspicion that Mr. Graham might be armed.
The next transmission presented the suspicion as a certainty. Between the bodega and his home, at 749 East 229th Street, Mr. Graham made one other stop, at a house nearby. Mr. Kelly said the observation team radioed other members of the unit that the butt of a gun was visible in Mr. Graham’s waistband as he emerged from the house.
The commissioner said that both communications about a gun went out over a tactical frequency, which was most likely monitored only by the narcotics enforcement team, rather than over a wider frequency, which would have summoned other officers to the scene.
Several officers said it was common to communicate over the wider frequency when armed suspects were involved.
“With the adrenaline pumping, were they cognizant that they were on a tactical channel and not on division- or citywide?” asked the detective with narcotics experience, adding that for an alert about a suspect “with a gun,” it was typical to put out that information over a wider frequency.
But the officers also said that there was no hard-and-fast rule, and that the narcotics team might have wanted to communicate over a narrower frequency to retain the element of surprise over Mr. Graham.
“There’s nothing etched in stone,” said Noel Leader, a retired sergeant and co-founder of the police group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. But Mr. Leader questioned whether officers stayed on the narrower frequency because they were not positive Mr. Graham was armed and did not want to summon other officers for a false alarm.
One person familiar with the narcotics team’s account of what happened said: “It’s one of those gray areas — do you send it out over division if you think he has a gun, or only if you know he has a gun? You’re yanking guys away from jobs left and right.”
In an interview, a detective questioned how the officers could be close enough to make out the butt of a gun clearly, but far away enough that “they couldn’t catch him.”
Officers from the unit’s van jumped out and tried to stop Mr. Graham, according to Mr. Kelly. A surveillance video from Mr. Graham’s building shows him sauntering up to the front door. He looks over his shoulder before entering, and as the door closes behind him, officers in police windbreakers come running. One officer repeatedly kicks the door, the video shows, but could not break in.
A lawyer for the Graham family, Jeffrey Emdin, said Mr. Graham had not been fleeing the police, but had returned home to drop off his keys with his grandmother and change his clothes before heading back out to meet a group of women.
The officers were eventually let in by a tenant, according to Mr. Kelly. Officer Haste and others went to the second floor and kicked open the door to Mr. Graham’s apartment.
Officers can enter homes without a warrant under limited circumstances, like when they are in hot pursuit of a suspect.
In interviews, legal experts offered diverging opinions about whether a state of hot pursuit still existed after the officers waited outside Mr. Graham’s building, initially unable to get inside.
“Once the door is shut and he tries to kick the door and fails, that’s when your hot pursuit really ended,” said Robert E. Brown, a former police captain and a criminal defense lawyer.
Several current and retired officers had different opinions about whether the officers’ decision to enter the home was correct. One option, some said, would have been to seek assistance from a specialized police unit, like the Emergency Service Unit, whose members are trained to clear homes of armed people barricaded inside.
Mr. Leader, the retired sergeant, said, “If you think he has a weapon, call for emergency services, call for the big boys, call for backup.”
But Edward Mullins, the president of the police sergeants’ union, said he doubted it was “feasible to sit back and say, ‘We should call E.S.U.’ ”
“The game’s on at this point,” said Mr. Mullins, adding that it might be unfair to second-guess “the actions that an officer had a split second to make.”
But the decision to enter Mr. Graham’s home was not, at least initially, a matter of concern to investigators. On the day of the shooting, Sergeant Morris was questioned in a formal departmental interview and the decision to enter the building received little attention, one person familiar with the investigation said.