The mayor won't answer

Mayor Thomas M. Menino should not have to answer for the two deaths that resulted from botched crowd control by the Boston Police Department after two major sports events last year.

Talking about what went fatally wrong after the Super Bowl and again after the American League Championship would be ''insensitive" to the victims' families, he says.

Menino should not have to explain why test scores in the Boston public schools are so low and why dropout rates are so high. Focusing on what remains broken in the schools would ignore the fact that it used to be even worse, he says.

Menino should not have to defend union contracts, which, the Boston Municipal Research Bureau says, threaten the city's financial stability. Faulting him for a lack of leadership on contract negotiations would shift blame from the real culprit, the arbitrator, who, Menino says, didn't give the city ''a fair shake."

Listening to his joint appearance with Councilor at Large Maura A. Hennigan on WBZ Radio on Friday night -- it would be hyperbole to characterize it as a debate a call-in show that featured so many scripted questions from the candidates' supporters -- one had to wonder just how the incumbent would have voters judge his 12 years leading city government.

''I'm just very hurt that you're bringing up the Snelgrove case," he said, his outrage rising at Hennigan's perfectly reasonable suggestion that police preparedness is a legitimate topic for public discussion. ''That family lives with that case every day; you have to bring it up in a political setting. That's wrong. That's extremely wrong to mention that during a debate about who is going to be mayor of Boston. That shows insensitivity to a very serious issue."

The insensitivity is Menino's, not Hennigan's. Demanding public accountability does not dishonor the private grief of the Snelgrove family, whose 21-year-old daughter, Victoria, was shot and killed by police in the mayhem that followed the Red Sox pennant win, or the Grabowski family, whose 21-year-old son, James, was struck and killed by a sport utility vehicle in rioting after the New England Patriots' Super Bowl victory.

Would we shrink from asking the Pentagon why it was so ill-prepared for the Iraqi insurgency or why our troops were so ill-equipped, out of sensitivity to the families of fallen soldiers? Aren't those losses precisely why we are compelled to demand answers?

The mayor ought to be made to explain whether his blanket exoneration of the police after the Super Bowl riots -- ''You can always second-guess," he said in the aftermath. ''I think the police did the best job they could at the time" -- contributed to the lackadaisical planning for the Red Sox championship eight months later.

It is just as reasonable to ask whether the mayor resisted negotiating with the city's unions out of his pique and exasperation with municipal workers who showed up to heckle him at his appearances. Certainly, the answer he gave Hennigan demonstrates a stubborn unwillingness to accept responsibility for the $200 million in pay increases that will be distributed over the next four years.

''I couldn't get the union to sit down to the table to come to a reasonable price for the budget, so I said, 'Let's go to an arbitrator,' " he said. ''Usually you try to get a fair shake from an arbitrator. We didn't get a fair shake." Translation: Don't blame me.

The truth is that the mayor ignored the unions for months, acting only on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, when, as Hennigan rightly pointed out the other night, ''the city's back was against the wall."

There was not an issue that the 24-year veteran of the Boston City Council put to the mayor that did not go to the heart of his leadership. In Boston, Menino runs the Police Department; he rules the schools; he negotiates municipal contracts. If he balks at being held accountable for his record on public safety, education, and fiscal management, how exactly would the mayor have the city's voters judge him?

Eileen McNamara is a Gobe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.