Technically, nobody won, since the lawsuit never went to trial, but the 19 plaintiffs will each pocket about $10,000 after court costs. It's a sort of rough justice, but justice nevertheless for a police action that might have started with good intentions but went very wrong.

When 75 heavily armed officers barged into the Panaderia La Diana in 1997, they were acting on a tip from a trusted informant. They expected to find heroin and cocaine, but all they discovered were two 24-pill packages of the painkiller Darvon and two bottles of penicillin.

In the process, Gomez said, they hit him in the face, knocking him to the floor, and brandished a gun at his 6-year-old son. A secretary said an officer dragged her to the floor by her hair. About 80 people were handcuffed - roughly, according to the plaintiffs - and forced to lie down for up to three hours.

The lawsuit contended the police had used commando methods because Gomez and most of his employees and clientele are Latino. The department denied there was any discrimination or wrongdoing and defended its methods as appropriate to the situation they expected to find - drug traffickers doing business in public.

The police officers' actions are defensible, up to a point. But faulty information cannot excuse what happened or explain the overly aggressive tactics. The raid frightened away potential customers, hurting Gomez' business, and forced him to defend himself against charges that were eventually dismissed. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Gomez had dreams of building a Mexican-style shopping center on the corner of 400 South and Redwood Road. After the raid, he considered returning to Mexico. Instead, he did the right thing, filing a lawsuit in 1999.

The court dismissed the plaintiffs' claim of racial discrimination. There is no way to know if the raid would have been handled differently if the business had been owned and frequented by non-Latinos.

The questions of whether police held people handcuffed in the store longer than necessary and whether the officers' actions during the raid were reasonable have not been resolved and now never will be.

In 1997 the city and police department lost credibility, and have been working to regain it under a new police chief and mayor.

The loss of more than a quarter of a million dollars should help ensure they don't forget the lessons of Panaderia La Diana.