WHY KEEP PUBLIC IN THE DARK?

So now we know that Denver officials hung their own police SWAT unit out to
dry. The mayor and city attorney have known for a year that Ismael Mena had
killed a man in Mexico and came to the United States to avoid possible
charges. They knew he'd been arrested two weeks before his death on a
concealed weapons charge inside the very crack house that the SWAT team had
thought it was entering the fateful night that officers went to the wrong
address.

Denver officials knew, in other words, why Mena might well have confronted
a posse of police in an otherwise improbable shootout that resulted in his
own death. And yet they said nothing -- until last week.

For an entire year, they failed to mention these facts -- even when critics
ran riot with lurid accusations about what the SWAT unit had done. Mena
hadn't shot three times at officers, Mena's most vocal supporters said, or
so much as brandished a weapon. Why, he hadn't even owned a gun. A
marauding band of paramilitary thugs with badges had simply kicked their
way into the wrong house and executed an innocent man in cold blood.

Police "committed an act of murder and a cover-up" is how one protester
described what happened in a published report. And she was positively
restrained compared to the delirious musings of retired FBI agent Jim
Kearney. According to Kearney, Mena's killing was a "premeditated
first-degree murder" that police tried to hide by planting a gun on him.

In fact, the shooting was not an assassination. It was a tragic mistake.
And that would have been a good deal clearer had all the facts been known a
year ago.

Make no mistake: Nothing has lessened the city's responsibility for Mena's
death. The shooting was the city's fault, not his. Officials had a duty to
reach a settlement with the family, as they did. They should have done
more, in fact. They should have fired Officer Joseph Bini, who lied on an
affidavit requesting a no-knock warrant, but predictably gave him a wrist
slap instead.

The point is not that Mena's checkered past alters the moral calculus of
his shooting. It doesn't. But it does bolster the credibility of the story
told by officers at the scene and supported by Jefferson County District
Attorney Dave Thomas in his investigation of the shooting. It strips Mena
of his halo and presents him as the sort of flawed and perhaps fearful
individual likely to make a fatal miscalculation in picking up a gun.

And yet the mayor and city attorney sat on this information despite its
obvious relevance to the debate over the SWAT team's behavior.

Was the mayor deliberately undermining his own department? Almost certainly
not, since he did the same thing in an entirely different context just
three weeks ago. He approved a $1.2 million settlement for a young burglar
shot by police, and then assured a meeting of city council members that
"there's a lot more to the case than was stated publicly" -- a lot more, he
seemed to be hinting, to undermine the officer's tale.

Meanwhile, of course, the public debates guilt and innocence in ignorance,
just as in the Mena case -- even though the loudest voices in that tragedy
turned out to have been wrong.