Police goons again

US police officers have been recorded on film by a TV helicopter crew dragging two suspected gumnmen from a car and repeatedly kicking and beating them. The video, shot by WTXF-TV, shows three police cars stopping a car on a city street yesterday, two days after a city officer responding to a bank robbery was fatally shot. The tape shows about a dozen officers gathering around the vehicle and pulling three men out. About a half-dozen officers hold two of the men on the ground. Both are kicked repeatedly, while one is seen being punched; one also appears to be struck with a baton. The third man is also subdued.

"On the surface it certainly does not look good in terms of the amount of force that was used," Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said. "But we don't want to rush to judgment." The officers were responding to a report of a shooting nearby, police said. Ramsey said Philadelphia officers have been on edge since last Saturday, when Officer Stephen Liczbinski was fatally shot with an assault rifle after a robbery in the city's Port Richmond section. One of the robbery suspects was fatally shot by police, another was arrested on Sunday and a third remains on the run.

"We want to look at the video. And I think it's important to remember that these individuals had been observed involved at a triple shooting at the time," Ramsey said. "There is also a lot of heightened emotions since Sgt. Liczbinski was murdered on the streets just Saturday." Liczbinski was the third officer slain on duty in the city in the last two years.

A relative of one of the suspects in the video, Dwayne Dyches, called a lawyer afterward. Lawyer D. Scott Perrine said his client suffered a welt on his head the size of a baseball and that one of his legs was seriously injured. Perrine said he now also represents the other two men in the car, Brian Hall and Pete Hopkins, but he did not know the extent of their injuries. The lawyer said he did not know what preceded the traffic stop in the city's Hunting Park neighbourhood, but that the video shows an unjustified police beating.

"It clearly shows a lack of any reasonable investigation before these police yank these individuals out of the car and take turns delivering blows," Perrine said. "This is a time for a thorough investigation to see what it is that happened here. The question is 'Did they have probable cause?"' Perrine said that police told him all three men would be charged with aggravated assault.

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