HOW MANY RAIDS MISFIRED?

Perhaps Denver Police Chief Tom Sanchez believes the trouble has blown over
- - that all the nagging questions have been answered. Perhaps that is why he
jetted off to Hawaii to attend a convention just one day after an officer
in his department had been charged with felony perjury.

But the questions haven't all been answered, and trouble lingers. Indeed,
the unanswered questions go to the heart of public confidence in the
department - and specifically to its policy regarding no-knock raids.

This matter has nothing to do with the now-official explanation for the
fatal raid on a house in northeast Denver that killed Ismael Mena. That
raid was a tragic mistake, Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas
has convincingly established, although one possibly triggered by the
deception of a single officer.

Meanwhile, Thomas has effectively refuted the more lurid charges against
the department - including that officers conspired to stage evidence
suggesting Mena had fired at them. Mena's most vehement supporters are way
off the mark, in our view, in demanding that members of the SWAT team be
charged with crimes as well.

Yet knowing how the raid at 3738 High Street went down on Sept. 29 of last
year is not the same thing as having all necessary questions answered. To
appreciate why, consider how close this raid came to being buried and
forgotten - never acknowledged for the outright mistake it was.

This newspaper, for example, published two initial stories regarding the
High Street raid. The first described it in bare-bones detail, including
the death of an unidentified man; the second reported that police were
trying to find the victim's kin. It was nearly two months later that News4
broke a story that thrust the raid back into the public spotlight - where
this time it stayed. Yet even then, the department contended it wasn't sure
whether the raid had hit the wrong house and had no idea whether there were
problems with the warrant.

In fact, of course, police had to know very quickly they'd hit the wrong
house. Among the many questions that the public deserves to have answered
is this: What would police have done with that knowledge in the absence of
the storm of controversy that eventually erupted around the case?

Would the behavior of Officer Joseph Bini or anyone else ever have been
scrutinized?

Would the department ever have confirmed the death of an innocent man --
even internally?

How is a botched no-knock raid recorded internally, anyway? Is there a
record kept of such incidents? If so, how are they defined? And how often
does one occur? We don't mean how often someone innocent dies, of course,
but how often police go to the wrong place whatever happens. Is the answer
once a month, a year, every 10 years? Does anyone know? If police officials
don't know, why not?

To be sure, Mayor Wellington Webb has appointed a committee to look into
the city's no-knock policies, consisting of Manager of Safety Butch
Montoya, District Attorney Bill Ritter and Denver County Court Presiding
Judge Robert Patterson. Good men, every one, but also a trio of insiders.
Shouldn't the committee include an outsider -- or two or three - who can
take a totally fresh look at no-knock procedures and their rationale?

We think so - especially given how close a fatal police raid apparently
came to being swept under the rug.