There’s a documentary on the 1999 SWAT killing of Denver immigrant Ismael Mena debuting at a Denver film festival this weekend.

The Mena killing followed the sad pattern we’ve seen in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and several dozen smaller cities all over the country. A high-profile SWAT death, followed by intense media coverage, followed by police hunkering down and refusing to talk to the press. Subsequent media investigations then find that no-knock and forced-entry raids are common, are commonly mistaken, frequently turn up little or no evidence, and are often commenced based on warrants with little more than boilerplate language, which are then signed by complacent judges.

Permit me the indulgence of quoting from my own paper:

The public scrutiny that followed the botched no-knock raid in Denver that killed immigrant Ismael Mena in 2000, for example, enabled Denver’s Rocky Mountain News to get access to warrants and court records for all of the no-knock raids performed in the city in 1999. The paper’s findings were alarming: Of 146 no-knock raids conducted in the city that year, only 49 produced charges of any kind. And of those, just two resulted in prison time for the targets of the raids. In comparison, the paper noted that while 21 percent of the city’s felony defendants on average are sent to prison, just 4 percent of its no-knock defendants were. One former prosecutor said of the results, “When you have that violent intrusion on people’s homes with so little results, you have to ask why.” The Rocky Mountain News continued:

Almost all of the 1999 no-knock cases were targeted at people suspected of being drug dealers. . . . Often the tips went unsubstantiated, and little in the way of narcotics was recovered. The problem doesn’t stem only from the work of inexperienced street cops, which city officials have maintained. Even veteran narcotics detectives sometimes seek no-knock warrants based on the word of an informant and without conducting undercover buys to verify the tips.

Also…

The Denver Post investigation into the Ismael Mena shooting found that no-knock warrants on narcotics cases in Denver were rubber-stamped by the city’s judges in a way that amounted to the kind of blanket approach prohibited by Richards. “Along with an officer’s anonymous source, nearly all no-knock warrant requests over the past seven months— most of whichinvolved narcotics cases— were approved merely on police assertions that a regular search could be dangerous for them or that the drugs they were seeking could be destroyed,” the paper wrote. “That violates the spirit of a
1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires specific allegations behind every no-knockrequest.

And…

In 1998, after complaints about the increase in forced-entry drug raids, Colorado state senator Jim Congrove (R), a retired undercover narcotics detective, introduced legislation that would have puttighter regulations on the deployment of SWAT teams, the issuance of no-knock warrants, and the use of no-knock raids. The bill was rejected, due in large part to lobbying from the District Attorneys Association. The next year a Denver SWAT team would shoot and kill 45-year-old Ismael Mena in a mistaken raid.

And…

A 2000 Denver Post investigation found that judges exercise almost no discretion at all when it comes to issuing no-knock warrants. The Postfound that Denver judges had denied just five of 163 no-knock applications over a 12-month period (local defense attorneys were surprised to learn there were even five). “No-knock search warrants appear to be approved so routinely that some Denver judges have issued them even though police asked only for a regular warrant,” the Post wrote. “In fact, more than one of every 10 no-knock warrants issued over the past seven months was transformed from a regular warrant with just a judge’s signature.” Among the
paper’s other findings:

• In 8 of 10 raids, police assertions in affidavits that weapons would be present turned out to be wrong.

• Just 7 of the 163 affidavits for no-knock warrants offered specific allegations that a suspect had actually been seen with a gun, evidence that’s essential to procuring a no-knock warrant. Even here, police found weapons in just two of the seven searches.

• About one-third of the no-knock warrants were never reviewed by a district attorney before going to a judge, a violation of the police department’s stated policy. Many of the prosecutor reviews that did take place took place over the telephone.

• Nearly all of the warrants were for narcotics and were granted solely on the tip of an anonymous informant and an officer’s assertion (minus any corroborating evidence) that weapons would be found at the scene or that the suspect was likely to dispose of evidence.

Judge Robert Patterson, the presiding judge for Denver’s criminal court system provided an astonishing defense. “We are not the fact gatherers,” he said. “It’s pretty formulaic how it’s done. If you sign your name 100 times, you can look away and signing the wrong place. We read a lot of documents. We may, just like anyone else, sign something and realize later that it’s the wrong place or the wrong thing. Is it wrong not to be paying attention? No. It’s just that we’re doing things over and over again.”

And that, friends, is how you set the stage for an innocent man’s death. I hope the film is good, and that it gets some exposure.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 4:09 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Informants, Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.