A team of plainclothes New York City police officers, tracking the signal of a stolen cellphone, pushed past a man who denied the officers permission to enter his home and searched it floor by floor. A sergeant forced the man to wait outside in his underwear in the rain.

“I can do anything I want,” one officer told the man.

In another case, officers armed with an arrest warrant, but not a search warrant, burst into a home of a suspect’s ex-boyfriend at 5:30 a.m., only to find an innocent woman inside with a child and grandchild. The wrong address had come from a months-old domestic incident report.

In a review of hundreds of police cases, the Civilian Complaint Review Board found scores of incidents in which police officers misapplied or misunderstood the legal standards of one of the most invasive law enforcement tactics: entering a home.

The review board, an independent oversight agency for the New York Police Department, concluded in its analysis that the frequency of such misconduct fuels the public’s mistrust of law enforcement.