Walter Pagel was no criminal.

"When our criminals have more rights than our sworn officers, this society's going to hell in a hand basket."

Politicians like Melanie Bloechl may be spewing the same rhetoric in your communities. It's close to election time, and they hope the appeal to law and order will allow them to coast to easy victories.

The "criminal" the mayor is referring to is the late Walter F. Pagel, a man who barricaded himself in his home and held police at bay during a six-hour stand-off in August 1998. He was eventually taken into custody after SWAT members fired 135 non-lethal rounds at Pagel, who was crouched underneath his basement stairs with a knife tied to his wrist threatening to kill the officers.

But Walter Pagel was no criminal.

He was a paranoid schizophrenic off his medication at the time of the incident. His case set off a long, and still developing, trail of events that has the Oshkosh community reflecting on its attitudes about police, the criminal justice system, and the mentally ill.

And our 25,000-circulation newspaper finds itself in the center of a controversy about news coverage and editorials about the case.

The injuries Pagel suffered while being taken into custody left him in a vegetative state for the remaining 18 months of his life. His death in January sparked a coroner's inquest trial. (That process in Wisconsin renders an advisory verdict that is supposed to give prosecutors a sense of the magnitude and criminality associated with the case.)

A six-member jury stunned the community in February when it found six Oshkosh police officers criminally negligent in Pagel's death -- which led to the mayor's comments in a news story. A special prosecutor currently reviewing homicide charges against the officers.

Shortly after the standoff in 1998, the North-western published an editorial asking questions that probably popped into your head:

* Why did police fire so many rounds?

* Did they really need to enter the home and remove Pagel?

* Is "non-lethal" force -- consisting rubber, plastic, and wooden bullets -- a contradiction in terms if the bullets tore flesh from Pagel's skin, broke his arms, badly bruised most of his body, and left him in a coma?

Three months later, after an internal investigation cleared the officers involved in the standoff, we renewed our editorial call for the Oshkosh Police Department to order an outside, independent review of the case. We sought not to condemn the officers or the department but to find out what we could learn from the incident.

Little happened until Pagel died in a nursing home in January

The Northwestern came increasingly under fire from police supporters for editorials supporting the inquest into his death and calling on our District Attorney to appoint a special prosecutor to review the case following the inquest verdict.

As time progressed, it became more apparent that attitudes about the mentally ill was at the heart of the case. Three things drove home the point about attitudes regarding the mentally ill:

* First, came Mayor Bloechl's comments.

We received more than 200 letters on the case -- many as part of a form-letter campaign sponsored by police supporters across the state. Yet the strongest letters came from local mental health advocates demanding the mayor apologize for her remarks equating mental illness with criminal behavior. Several families with mentally ill relatives had the courage to write to the newspaper expressing their outrage at the case and explaining that it is a treatable disease.

* Second, we ran a news story detailing police squad car computer messages at the time of the standoff from officers not on the scene. Not surprisingly, the messages are being used as evidence of the department's state of mind in a civil suit that is being filed on behalf of Pagel's family.

"I guess they're gassing the heck out of [Pagel] and he still won't come out," wrote one officer in a message to another.

"Is he still alive?" the second officer typed back.

"I hope not," responded the first.

* Finally, we published a news story that described the amount of training police officers receive to deal with the mentally ill. It is minimal to non-existent. Mental health advocates and a former mayor called for additional training to better respond to such cases, an obvious benefit for the entire community.

Many of the people we support and defend on our editorial pages are noble heroes, leaders whose causes transcend and, ultimately, define humanity.

Walter Pagel is not noble. He's not even sympathetic.

He was off his medication for six weeks when police were called to his home. His wife, who fled the weekend before fearing for her safety, came home to collect her belongings along with a social worker.

It's not clear if an emergency committal was ordered to spark the standoff. Police reports indicate officers thought there was an order, but a county health nurse testified at the inquest hearing that there was not.

This was not the first encounter Pagel had with police. He was known and feared for exhibiting "superhuman strength." And during the inquest trial, we learned that when he was off his medication, Pagel thought he was Jesus Christ.

Does that mean he deserved to die?

One person who signed a petition supporting the police wrote, "Next time use lethal force, thus no lawsuit."

Editorial writers should be prepared to make their cases for the mentally ill as strongly as we do for the poor, neglected, vulnerable, oppressed, and weak.

This is the stuff that matters. We must be willing to tackle complex issues where public institutions meet real people with often tragic results. We have to find ways to preserve the dignity and humanity of the Walter Pagels. We have to make the time to understand and explain to our readers how the system works and how it fails.

NCEW member James N. Fitzhenry is the editorialpage editor of the Oshkosh Northwestern in Wisconsin. His e-mail address jim. fitzhenry @thomnews.com5