IS BINI THE ONLY ONE TO BLAME?

Jan. 18, 2001 - All this outrage about Joseph Bini's return to the
Denver Police Department seems misguided to me. Yes, he's the guy who
put the wrong address on a no-knock search warrant that led to the
death of Ismael Mena, but I agree with Denver Manager of Safety Ari
Zavaras and Police Chief Gerry Whitman: It wasn't solely Bini's fault.

The thing that scares me about this whole situation is that no one
else on the force or in the district attorney's office or in the
court is in trouble for the issuance of that deadly warrant.

What we've learned is that Denver police policy allowed a regular
line officer to get a no-knock warrant issued on his own authority.
Nobody in the police department, nobody in the district attorney's
office and nobody in the court had any oversight over Bini's warrant
request. If he or any other officer said that he needed a no-knock
warrant, he got one.

Imagine that you're the president of an advertising agency. One of
your artists draws a controversial image in an ad campaign for an
important client. When he's finished, he delivers the picture to the
creative director, who oversees all of the work generated by the
artists. She approves the image and sends it on to the account
executive, who signs off on it before sending it along to a vice
president, REGGIE RIVERS who in turn presents it to the client.

The client is so offended by the image that he storms out of the room
and calls later to say that he's dumping your agency altogether.

As the company president, whom do you blame? Do you call in everyone
involved, or do you just single out the lowly artist who drew the
original picture?

In an ad agency, everyone who signs off along the way would have some
responsibility, but in the Denver Police Department, that's not the
way it works. Bini's immediate supervisors apparently had no
responsibility to review his warrant application, because as far as
we know, none of them was reprimanded.

The assistant district attorney who approved this warrant apparently
had no responsibility to actually read it and evaluate it, because
that person didn't get in trouble after Mena's death.

And, of course, the judge's signature was obviously just a
rubber-stamp formality, because no one ever suggested that the judge
might have some culpability for this warrant.

We're not talking about some minor offense by a low-ranking police officer.

With a no-knock warrant, we're talking about a bunch of highly
trained, armed officers kicking in the front door of your home and
racing in, screaming at you with their trigger fingers at the ready.
If they do it right, then they're going to catch you completely by
surprise and, in that state of shock, your life hinges on your
reaction in those first few seconds.

You'd better hope that you don't have a remote control in your hand
that might look like a gun. You'd better hope that you realize it's
the police who are breaking in and that you don't pull out your gun
to protect yourself. You'd better hope that your immediate instinct
in the face of this sudden onslaught is to lie down prone and not
make any sudden movements.

Zavaras and Whitman have said that they've made dramatic changes in
the oversight and administration of no-knock warrants so there won't
be so many no-knock warrants served and to ensure that the warrants
issued are accurate.

I hope that's true.