OFFICER BINI'S WRIST-SLAP

The Denver manager of safety describes the decision to keep Joseph
Bini on the city's police force almost as an act of courage.
"Politically, it would be very expedient for us to terminate Officer
Bini," Ari Zavaras says. "I have never operated that way in 35 years
and I'm not going to start making someone a scapegoat now."

Zavaras is certainly correct that terminating Bini would have saved
the Webb administration from a good deal of public criticism. Yet a
decision doesn't merit praise just because it courts controversy. So
while we respect Zavaras' resolve to do what he considers right, we
still consider the decision to be wrong. Bini shouldn't be allowed
back on the force.

The inescapable fact is that Bini signed an affidavit in which he
stated that he "observed the informant make his/her way on foot to
the location in question" - that location being a house on High
Street in which a drug deal was supposed to have occurred.

But the statement in the affidavit is false. The officer did not
observe the informant make his way to that location. Police were
nearby when the informant was supposed to have purchased drugs, but
they relied on him to give them the address - and there was a fatal
miscommunication. An innocent man died after a SWAT team crashed into
the wrong house.

Would that man be alive today if the affidavit had admitted that no
officer actually observed the informant at 3738 High St.? Would a
judge still have issued a no-knock warrant for that address? We don't
know, but the point is that the standard for a no-knock raid is
supposed to be rigorous, involving the next-best thing to absolute
certainty on the part of police. Yet police in this case adopted a
casual attitude toward the evidence and then concealed the resulting
uncertainty from a judge.

What does Zavaras mean when he says a three-month suspension for Bini
is enough because the department "has to step up and accept its share
of what happened"? Is he suggesting it was the norm for officers to
sign statements presented to a judge that they knew stretched the
truth?

Actually, Zavaras went beyond saying the punishment is fair. He said
it is severe - "way off the charts for similar situations." If so,
the charts need revision. In the civilian world, false testimony that
resulted in an innocent man's death is the sort of thing that could
land the culprit in prison.

Of course, neither Zavaras nor Chief Gerald Whitman bear
responsibility for the lax no-knock standards of the past, and they
are to be commended for tightening up procedures for such raids. We
just hope Bini's punishment isn't a sign of the sort of discipline to
come in future cases.

One more thing: Ever since the shooting of Ismael Mena, Denver
officials have occasionally resorted to blaming the victim for his
own death. We thought this line of argument had been shelved, but
John Wyckoff of the Denver Police Protective Association revived it
again this week.

"This is a tragedy for the Mena family and the police department,"
Wyckoff said, "but Mr. Mena would still be alive today if he didn't
have a gun and if he had not fired it."

Thanks for reminding us why the public should be relieved that Denver
police reduced their number of no-knock raids from 129 in 1999 to 42
in 2000. If Wyckoff's view is at all common in the force, perhaps the
only safe number of no-knock raids is zero.