THANKS are due in the City of Brotherly Love. And at least four apologies.

The gratitude is owed to 23 grand jurors, 14 of them black (eight white and one Hispanic, 15 female and eight male), who exonerated the police officers involved in the infamous arrest captured by a Fox 29 video last year.

You remember, the one that took place only days after the murder of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski. Where three suspects led police on a two-mile chase through North Philly. Where there was evidence they'd shot into a crowd in Feltonville.

And you remember the cries of racism and brutality, the call for heads to roll, the suspensions and, in four cases, the premature firings. That's where the apologies come in. Just as the grand jury was able to withstand a ton of political pressure, doing its job with grace and thoroughness, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey should have ignored the hysteria and waited for the report from those 23 good citizens before taking disciplinary action.

IT'S CLEAR that those officers were sacrificial lambs. And Ramsey regarded as an honorable by-the-book cop, should've hesitated before feeding the beast.

Sure, it would have taken courage in a climate in which defense attorneys were calling the police "barbaric" and comparing the incident to that involving Rodney King. But that's just part of the job.

Whenever you wade into the murky waters dividing the police and the communities they serve, it's hard to avoid the riptides. My in-box fills with messages from people relating horror stories from the Rizzo era, trying to school the naive white suburbanite on the reality of the street. Some attempt serious debate; others don't go much beyond the race card.

I don't expect this time to be any different. But on this occasion, 23 men and women refused to let innocent cops pay the price for decades-old trespasses. Think what you will about the Rizzo years (and believe it or not, there are people of all colors who remember them fondly as a time when you didn't risk your life by walking to the corner store), the mistakes of those long-ago days have no bearing on an arrest that occurred in 2008.

Sure, race plays a role in some arrests, as in so many things.

But the Fox 29 video reminded us that the camera can lie, manipulating angles and distorting actions that, when examined carefully with a cool eye and not from a helicopter, were entirely reasonable given the context. As our own editorial board wrote, to its everlasting credit, "Truth is a complicated thing. It's so complicated that we can't always be sure that our own eyes are seeing it. And this gets more complicated, not less, as we live our lives increasingly under video surveillance."

The people charged with getting at the truth this time got it exactly right. Read the grand-

jury report, and you'll see the painstaking degree to which the jurors went to separate fact from fiction, brutality from justifiable force, guilt from innocence. Those officers, including the four who were fired, were found not culpable.

And that's what sticks in the craw of the critics, including the NAACP and those who rallied at City Hall this week.

Some would say that since the three suspects were ultimately cleared in the Feltonville shootings, the arrests were unjustified.

But the police officers who detained them were not required to assess guilt or innocence.

That's the job of a jury. In the heat of the moment, a particularly painful one when one of their own had just bled to death on a Port Richmond street, those officers were obligated only to make sure they had good cause for an arrest.

Again, don't take my word for it. Don't take the word of the NAACP either, or the suspects' families, or the people who rallied at Broad and Market.

Read the report, easily accessible at http://go.philly.com/DAReport.

It deserves attention, and acclamation, if only because it proves that some people are able to transcend conventional - but wrong - thinking.

Kudos, also, to D.A. Lynne Abraham, who conducted the investigation with integrity even in the face of personal attacks from long-standing enemies. After decades in public life, she continues to get it right. (Tough cookies rarely crumble.)

And to those four sacrificial lambs improperly denied the due process that we extend to petty criminals?

No apologies, yet. But vindication is the next best thing.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer.

E-mail cflowers1961@yahoo.com.