this indictment

(no guarantee of conviction, after all the lying to the jury has been completed)

is a sort of atonement by the new york judicial system.

but it does not bring sean bell back "to love and cherish until death do us part" - death already parted "us".

more to the point of my concerns,

this case is just one of hundreds in the united states in the last three decades, where, IMHO, the police have abused their power to stop, detain, question, arrest, or assault or kill citizens.

the infringements by our police on life and liberty,

ranging from much publicized events like shooting sean bell or beating rodney king,

to much smaller events is unacceptable.

what are some of those smaller events, which are both magnitudes more common and more widely destructive of confidence in police authority?  

•  where i live a women was stopped by a police officer and given a citation related to the political bumper sticker on her car.

• in yet another, a visiting professor in town for an international conference had his legs kicked out from under him  by a young undercover/out-of-uniform  police officer for  some unspecified reason involving the professor's demanding the cop show i.d. and not having his  passport with him when he left his hotel room to take a walk.

or that involving a 93-year old woman who was killed when drug cops raided her apartment and she opened fire, mistaking them for burglars. the cops had lied about the "need" for the raid.

and i would add to this list

the repeated police/secret service  harassment, detention, or arrest of protesters at events attended by president bush and v-p cheney, witness the u.s. capitol police arrest of cindy sheehan  at one of president bush's  state of onion addresses.

for my money, it is not enough to say, as the judges and juries too often do:

well, policemen have a tough job, give them some leeway.

tough, yes -

anyone who has observed the characteristic hardness in a police officer's face understands that.  

but having a tough job is no excuse for breaking the implied contract with non-crime-committing citizens by threatening or harming them.

no excuse for breaking the  law in other words.

police need to be trained to discriminate - i'm willing to bet the army or marines do a much better training job in this regard than do our local police.

but most curative of all,

police who abuse their power by threatening or harming relatively innocent citizens in their communities need to be held to the same standards of conduct they presumptively are holding their "arrestee" to.

now that the power of the dna review movement has soaked into the consciousness of the legal/juridical profession

perhaps another type of review can begin, conducted systematically in each state of the nation: