TIME TO SLAM DOOR SHUT ON SOME RAIDS

News 4, as it is known in the modern age of "branding" products like toilet
tissue, cat food, cars and TV news, has a terrific story on its 10 o'clock
'casts this week. A father of nine children was shot to death by Denver
SWAT officers by mistake.

It's not that they didn't shoot to kill. They came armed and ready to fire,
they crashed into the man's home under the authority of a "no-knock"
warrant, they ran into Ismael Mena's upstairs bedroom and they gunned him
down with eight bullets.

They did what they came to do.

Unfortunately, they had the wrong address.

Too bad for Ismael, who was standing in his bedroom, startled by the noise
of a 2 a.m. break-in of his house and the ruckus of men running up the
stairs, and the rush of strangers into his bedroom. He was standing there
with a gun, ready to shoot the intruders. He missed; the cops didn't.

He was outnumbered, outgunned, outplanned, outfoxed. And, in the end, he
was out of breath, out of blood and out of life.

He had no where to run, no where to hide.

But now that he's dead, the cops are running, and the cops are hiding. They
are hiding behind the anonymity of an unnamed "informant" who told them
that he (or she) had bought a $20 "rock" of crack cocaine at Mena's house.

Or, on second thought, was it at the house next door?

No crack cocaine, no illegal drugs at all, and no sign of any illicit drug
business was found in Mena's house. An autopsy showed that Mena had no
alcohol and no illegal drugs in his system.

Channel 4 reporter Brian Maass reported that the affidavit used to secure
the "no-knock" warrant apparently was flawed, possibly the mistake of a
Denver policeman who requested the warrant.

Serious police-policy questions are raised by the smashdoor raid at Mena's
home. More than 200 no-notice warrants are executed by Denver SWAT teams
each year, and many of them are authorized by county judges acting on
information supplied by "reliable" but anonymous police informants.

Certainly there are situations that call for such drastic action. There may
be a life-and-death emergency, or evidence of a terribly heinous crime in
jeopardy.

But the rumored sale of $20 crack rocks doesn't justify a squad of heavily
armed cops using a "no-knock" warrant to rush into a citizen's house in the
middle of the night.

Denver cops need to be more selective in their requests for the unusual
"no-knock" warrants, and Denver judges need to be less casual in their
approval of such requests.

Even if all the information in the affidavit is correct, and even if the
informant's story is believable, there ought to be a greater need for
"no-knock" warrants than pursuit of a drug dealer working the $20
crack-cocaine market.

When a judge considers such an extraordinary warrant, he ought to consider
that an innocent father of eight children might be on the other side of the
door.