The widely publicized beating of an unarmed University of Maryland student by members of the Prince George's, Md. County Police Department following a Maryland-Duke basketball game likely didn't surprise anyone who's followed that particular suburban Washington police force over the years.
For the PG County police have earned a reputation for administering beatings to unarmed and innocent citizens and sometimes even shooting them to death.
The practices by the county's police department were deemed so illegal that the Bush Administration's Justice Department sued the county and won
court-approved oversight of the police department. Justice Department supervision clearly didn't solve all the problems in that force.
There've been so many brutality cases against the department that John J. McKenna, the 21-year old student who the police said had attacked them as well as police horses, charges proved false by a video, had no trouble finding a lawyer with abundant experience in such cases. Attorney Terrell N. Roberts III was
profiled by the Washington Post in 2003.
The modus operandi in the McKenna beating follows a common pattern. A cop or cops beat a victim, then charge him with assaulting them only to have prosecutors drop the charges when a video emerges or the evidence fails to fit the "facts" alleged by the police.
Just days after the McKenna beating, in fact, the county settled a police brutality case for $125,000 in which a man was pepper sprayed and assaulted by police for no apparent reason.
NPR