Trickle Down Effect

This is a story from the Associated Press. A Philadelphia TV helicopter shot video of over a dozen police officers pulling three suspects out of a vehicle and beating them. Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey tried to down play the event because of a police officer was killed on Saturday, a few days earlier. What's most appalling about this video is they had so many police officers beating on these three people that there were officers running back and forth between the three suspects trying to get in a jab, punch or kick because they couldn't get in on the beatings of the suspect closest to them. I think maybe it's the trickle down effect. No matter what the laws are, or their intent, President Bush thinks it is justifiable to torture people he designates as enemy combatants or terrorists among other things. Maybe Bush's example of abduction, abuse, and detention mentality is just trickling down throughout governmental agencies better than his tax breaks for the wealthy has.

In all fairness I do not know what crime these defendants were supposedly to have committed or to what degree the police caught them red-handed or not, but it would seem to be that the police is taking justice into their own hands by administering punishment, probably before the accused were even read their rights or arrested. I would think that the police should be fair and impartial, make arrests with only the amount of force necessary, and and let a judge sort out the evidence and make judgment as to the punishments for the crimes, not for them to run around in gangs performing vigilante like vendettas. It's when people are charged with a crime in a court of law that they are supposed to be punished, not while getting arrested.

The next American president and every American need to press forward in the future and restore the ideals of the past that has made our nation great and get away from the present mindset that the end justifies the means. The problems of abuse and torture are not just in the military, it's in most all governmental agencies. From the way police treat people, the way the military treats people, the way people who are in high positions within the government treat their employees, the people they work with, and the people they are supposed to serve, America needs to root through all the laws, procedures, officials and their records, and look into the policies of the past that has taken our once great nation and drug its reputation through the mud and to make America what it once was, a model of democracy, freedom, and fairness for the rest of the world to admire and strive for.