| Denver police cite safety concerns, tips from neighbors
for
increase in raids.
And this is
By Chuck Green
Denver Post Columnist
Dec. 1 - News4, as it is known in the modern age of "branding"
products like toilet tissue, cat food, cars and TV news, has a terrific
story on its 10 o'clock 'casts this week.
A father of nine children was shot to death by Denver SWAT officers
by mistake. It's not that they didn't shoot to kill. They came armed
and ready to fire, they crashed into the man's home under the authority
of a "no-knock" warrant, they ran into Ismael Mena's upstairs
bedroom and they gunned him down with eight bullets.
They did what they came to do. Unfortunately, they had the wrong
address. Too bad for Ismael, who was standing in his bedroom, startled
by the noise of a 2 a.m. break-in of his house and the ruckus of
men running up the stairs, and the rush of strangers into his bedroom.
He was standing there with a gun, ready to shoot the intruders.
He missed; the cops didn't. He was outnumbered, outgunned, outplanned,
outfoxed. And, in the end, he was out of breath, out of blood and
out of life. He had no where to run, no where to hide. But now that
he's dead, the cops are running, and the cops are hiding. They are
hiding behind the anonymity of an unnamed "informant"
who told them that he (or she) had bought a $20 "rock"
of crack cocaine at Mena's house.
Or, on second thought, was it at the house next door? No crack
cocaine, no illegal drugs at
all, and no sign of any illicit drug business was found in Mena's
house. An autopsy showed that
Mena had no alcohol and no illegal drugs in his system.
Channel 4 reporter Brian Maass reported that the affidavit used
to secure the "no-knock"
warrant apparently was flawed, possibly the mistake of a Denver
policeman who requested the
warrant.
Serious police-policy questions are raised by the smashdoor raid
at Mena's home. More
than 200 no-notice warrants are executed by Denver SWAT teams each
year, and many of them
are authorized by county judges acting on information supplied by
"reliable" but anonymous police informants.
Certainly there are situations that call for such drastic action.
There may be a life-and-death emergency, or evidence of a terribly
heinous crime in jeopardy. But the rumored sale of $20 crack rocks
doesn't justify a squad of heavily armed cops using a "no-knock"
warrant to rush into a citizen's house in the middle of the night.
Denver cops need to be more selective in their requests for the
unusual "no-knock" warrants, and Denver judges need to
be less casual in their approval of such requests.
Even if all the information in the affidavit is correct, and even
if the informant's story is believable, there ought to be a greater
need for "no-knock" warrants than pursuit of a drug dealer
working the $20 rock-cocaine market.
When a judge considers such an extraordinary warrant, he ought
to consider that an innocent father of eight children might be on
the other side of the door.
Chuck Green's commentaries appear Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.
His phone is 303-820-1771; his e-mail addresses is: cgreen@denverpost.com
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