Excessive Force

The mother of a man shot to death by police last February at the end of a stolen-car chase in North Philadelphia filed a wrongful-death lawsuit Thursday against six city police officers. The Common Pleas Court lawsuit by Carolyn Moses, mother of Jamil Moses, was announced at the Center City law offices of Paul J. Hetznecker. Hetznecker called for an independent probe of the Feb. 8, 2011, encounter in which Moses, 24, was shot to death after police boxed in the car in which he was a passenger at 23d Street and Susquehanna Avenue.

LONDON - British Prime Minister David Cameron urged Bahrain's king Monday to quickly implement changes recommended in a scathing report into human-rights abuses during the Arab nation's uprising. A special commission, authorized by Bahrain's Sunni rulers, last month outlined the harsh treatment of antigovernment protesters as state security forces tried to put down the largest of the uprisings to hit the Persian Gulf. Its 500-page report documented the use of torture, excessive force, and fast-track trials by the government.

MANAMA, Bahrain - With Bahrain's king watching, the chief investigator asked to investigate his government's crackdown gave a blow-by-blow reckoning Wednesday of torture, excessive force, and fast-track justice in attempts to crush the largest Arab Spring uprising in the Gulf. Investigator Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni also said there was no evidence of Iranian links to Bahrain's Shiite-led protests. That was a clear rebuke to Gulf leaders, who accuse Tehran of playing a role in the 10-month-old showdown in the Western-allied kingdom.

CAIRO - A former high-ranking security official testified Thursday that forces loyal to Hosni Mubarak were ordered to use excessive force to crush protests in the early days of a revolution that would later topple the president. The police general's testimony said the order came from then-Interior Minister Habib Adli, an accusation that suggests the highest levels of the Mubarak government plotted the crackdown that killed more than 800 people between Jan. 25 and Feb. 11. It was unclear whether Adli called for firing live ammunition.

The city will pay $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit filed in the death of a man shot by police responding to New Year's Eve gunfire. Bryan Jones, 20, was picking up his teenage nephew from a friend's house when gunfire erupted nearby. The pair were trying to escape down a rear alley when Jones was shot. Officer Steven Szczepkowski said he fired after seeing one person with a gun and a second, Jones, reaching for his waistband. The family sued the city. A federal judge refused to throw out the lawsuit, ruling in February that a jury could find that the officer used excessive force and acted with willful misconduct.

LOS ANGELES - The New Orleans Police Department has engaged in a wide-ranging pattern of misconduct including the excessive use of force and unconstitutional arrests, the Justice Department announced Thursday. In a lacerating report that followed an investigation requested by local officials, the Justice Department found the department had failed to adequately protect the city. There have been complaints about the department for years, but the difficulties reached a crescendo when unarmed people were shot amid the tumult of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Albert Lane III was off his medication. Suffering from a mental illness, he didn't answer when his brother called his name. He lay on his bed, holding a knife. "He was just staring at the wall," said his brother, Derrick, 35. "He wasn't acting threateningly. " At some point Tuesday, their mother, Cheri, called Camden police because her son had been "acting threateningly with a weapon," the Camden County Prosecutor's Office said. Albert Lane, 33, was fatally shot at least eight times in his home Tuesday as he approached police in a threatening manner with the knife, authorities said.

A LITTLE girl, in pink from head to toe, got a free ride on her daddy's lap as a nurse pushed his wheelchair into the lobby of a Camden hospital one recent, rainy night. James Black's kids have learned to cope with their father being in the hospital for the last three weeks. They found the bright side to his wheelchair and no longer cry or gawk at his bite and scratch marks on his body or his severely swollen head, the deep scar on his scalp and the helmet he has to wear to protect it. But Black, 39, is afraid that his 3-year-old daughter, 6-year-old son, and his wife, Michelle, will never forget, and never fully cope with what happened to him during an altercation with a Lindenwold police officer and his K-9 German shepherd on Oct. 7. "I feel like I'm being punished," said Black, his leg and hands trembling as his kids played on the carpet in a waiting room at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center.

One mild summer evening, Emil Van-Otoo was standing on the front porch of his uncle's house in West Philadelphia, waiting for the man to answer the door, when a police cruiser pulled up. The two patrol officers were conducting a routine traffic stop, their target a 24-year-old male neighbor who had apparently blown past a stop sign. But over the next few minutes, Van-Otoo would become their primary focus, going from bystander to central player in what he contends was an act of police brutality.

MICHAEL Vick spent two years in prison for using excessive force, electrocuting and killing dogs. People were outraged (and rightfully so). But hundreds of human beings have been killed by excessive use of force via Tasering electrocution by police. What's wrong with the old-fashioned method of taking a suspect to the ground and handcuffing them? Don't want to break a nail? It's time we started treating our fellow citizens as well as we would like our dogs to be treated. Patrick King, Drexel Hill Lennon, plus 30 Happy 70th, John!