BLAMING THE VICTIM

Ah. It's so clear now. Ismael Mena was a murderer, a Mexican fugitive, a man
who hung out at the crack house next door and engaged in who knows what kind
of nefarious dealings.

That's why he didn't put the gun down when the SWAT team ordered. That's why
he's dead. He thought police were coming for him and he decided to shoot it
out.

OK, OK, so the police stormed the wrong house. That's what you call divine
justice. Just look at Mena in newspaper photos. He has guilt written all
over his face, those eyes looking everywhere but ahead, the mustache parked
above a mouthful of bad teeth. It's a good thing the city only paid his
widow and nine kids $400,000. It's a good thing officer Joe Bini, the guy
who gave the SWAT team the warrant with the wrong address, got to keep his
job.

I know. The timing is a little suspect, but that's the way news breaks. Bini
went back to work Tuesday amid uproar from people who still can't believe he
wasn't fired. On Wednesday, it's all over the news, how Mena killed a member
of a family whose 16-year-old son impregnated his 16-year-old daughter. The
news also rehashed the old story that Mena was arrested in the neighboring
crack house with a gun just two weeks before he was killed. He was jailed
overnight for illegal possession of a weapon. That Mena was bad news from
the start.

You see where this is taking us, don't you? To the familiar, hard land where
the victim is blamed for the crime. To a place where the person responsible
for that victim's wrongful death - and in this case that responsibility
begins with Bini - can say to reporters: "This explains why this guy refused
to put down a gun and fired on the cops three times. There were other people
in the house who did as police requested."

Translation: This guy was dirty and he was stupid and he got what he
deserved. Remember Bini? He's the man who tearfully apologized to everyone
in court except the Mena family.

Take the step Bini and others want you to take. It's easy. A little hiccup
of the mind, a little hardening of the heart and bam, you've moved from
"poor man" to "he deserved it."

And be honest, it's a lot easier for some people when talking about a
Mexican, an "illegal," a "criminal," a man people loved back home, but who
no one here would miss.

In Mena's old neighborhood, people are disgusted with the police, with the
media. Every person there has thought, "it could have been me. They could
have stormed my house. They could have killed me."

This is a neighborhood where people laugh in your face if you insist the
police don't conduct racial profiling. I don't know why Mena was carrying a
gun, a neighbor tells me, but look around, and you see barred windows and
doors, an abandoned building, a boarded-up crack house. In 1999, the year
Mena was killed, this was ranked the 13th most crime-ridden of Denver's 72
neighborhoods.

"If Mena had killed an officer, he would be in jail," says neighbor Maria
Trujillo, furious. "But they killed Mena and the officer who is responsible
is back at work and now they have to find a way to make themselves look
good, to clean themselves."

Mena killed a man. We don't know the circumstances. What we do know is the
Mexican police didn't make any effort to arrest him. We do know Mena wasn't
afraid to visit his family in Mexico because he did it often. We also know
this: If the SWAT team had burst into the wrong house and killed our
governor or a prominent businessman or a professional athlete, Joe Bini and
a lot of others would not be working for the Denver Police Department today.

If the victim had been "important," no one would be trying to justify the
killing by digging up something from the past. Mena was a nobody here. He
was a poor Mexican night-shift worker supporting a family he left behind, a
wife and kids many would welcome here only if they worked hard and worked
cheap.

There is a subtext here Bini and others would have you believe: Something
like this could never happen to you because you are not "that kind of
person," you don't live in "that kind of neighborhood."

They want you to believe as they do, that Mena's own actions led to his
death. Not their mistake. Not the unwarranted, illegal, unforgivable
storming of a man's home by police.