BRUTALITY OVERSIGHT IS FAILING

Dec. 27 - Few of us will ever experience police brutality. Many of us
will cruise through life with little more than a few traffic tickets.

But, like the Supreme Court, we know brutality when we see it. And we
saw it on Channel 7 last August when Denver police pistol-whipped and
kicked two drug-dealing suspects after they had surrendered at the end
of a chase through rush-hour traffic.

The suspects clearly were criminals - if not for carrying and trying
to sell drugs to federal agents, at least for eluding police.

TV cameras aboard the Channel 7 helicopter captured dramatic videotape
of the suspects trying to lose their pursuers in uniform. When the
suspects drove into a dead-end alley, everybody was trapped - the cops
had trapped the bad guys, and Channel 7's cameras had trapped the good
guys.

Some of the seven policemen on the tape clearly had violated police
procedures, and to some who reviewed the evidence, the cops also had
clearly violated the law.

When the suspects' car was cornered, police immediately rushed it -
even believing the suspects might be armed and desperate. That
violates every tenet of police training.

Then, while the suspects were subdued and handcuffed by well-trained
policemen, one was whacked over the head by a renegade cop using his
gun as a hammer, for no reason.

It's all right there, on the TV videotape, for all of us to
see.

But some of us are blind, apparently. We can't see what clearly is in
front of us, because we are watching through blue-colored glasses.

We can't see an assailant in a blue uniform.

Whenever police-abuse charges are filed in metro Denver, a
prosecutor's first instinct is to look for a way out - he wants to
assign the case to an "outside prosecutor" for an unbiased judgment.

Denver DA Bill Ritter looks to Arapahoe County DA Jim Peters, who
looks to Jefferson County DA Dave Thomas, who looks to Adams County DA
Bob Grant, who looks to Boulder County DA Alex Hunter. Or the other
way around, depending on the day.

In corporate fraud cases, prosecutors call it a "Daisy Chain." And it
stinks.

Even though the DAs try mightily to defend their "independent" review
of each other's hot-potato cases, the public no longer can believe
them.

It's time for Colorado to adopt a truly independent
independent-counsel system, using respected lawyers and retired judges
-- on a one-time basis - to review police-brutality complaints,
removing any suspicion of what appears to be a system of
you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-yours.

The DAs may think it works fine - and it probably does, for them - but
the public is losing confidence in it.

And if the public doesn't believe it's working, it isn't
working.

Nobody who objectively watched the TV videotape of last August's
arrest can honestly say they believe that is proper police conduct in
America.

But the DAs like what they saw - a system that provides them immunity
for passing the buck on punishing bad cops.