No, it's not what you're thinking.

The cops were black, too.

Unfortunately, blue too often is the only color that matters when police go too far. That's not to say racism is never a factor in such episodes. But it doesn't have to be.

The incident I referred to happened at my high school when I was a 15-year-old sophomore. I was one of the audio-visual-aids geeks helping to operate the lights backstage during a talent show. These were big events that included not just student performers but other singers and musicians who used the annual showcase to draw audiences to local nightclubs and events where they also might be performing.

Everyone was having a good time, enjoying Aretha Franklin and James Brown wannabes, when a young man I recognized as either a student or former student came into the auditorium with a shotgun. I would like to say it was a first for someone inside my school to have a gun, but it wasn't. I had seen armed men at basketball games and had to duck for cover at a football game when shots rang out.

But one of the differences between what was happening in my high school and neighborhood back then and what occurs in some of the roughest in Philadelphia today is the firepower used to settle disputes. Treatable wounds in the 1960s are fatal now because the guns used to create them are so powerful. In fact, back then a knife was the more likely weapon to be used among teenagers. But I digress.

So, this guy comes into the auditorium with a shotgun. I don't know whether his beef was gang-related or unrequited love, but it didn't take long before two cops also arrived. The officers must have been parked nearby. They didn't waste time trying to calm the guy down. They confronted him, quickly got the weapon out of his hands, handcuffed him, threw him to the floor, and beat him silly with their nightsticks. I don't recall seeing any blood. They mainly whipped his butt.

I don't recall anyone begging the officers to stop. We were relieved no one was shot. We understood the cops doing the beating were sending a message: Don't try this, or you'll get the same thing. Only later did it register with me that in a city infamous for white cops' brutalizing blacks, I had witnessed black cops exhibiting the same behavior.

This was interesting to me because one of the first black men to join the Birmingham police force after it became integrated in the 1960s had been a neighbor of mine in the housing project where I grew up. Frank Horn and the other first black cops were under tremendous pressure to prove they were blue first, that they had the mentality to do the job in the black neighborhoods where they still had friends and family.

I think about this blue mentality whenever I hear or read about police officers who use excessive force. I thought about it a couple of weeks ago when three New York cops were acquitted in the shooting of an unarmed man on his wedding day. Two friends of Sean Bell's were wounded in the volley of 50 shots fired by undercover officers in 2006. More than 200 people protesting the officers' acquittal, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, were arrested Wednesday on disorderly-conduct charges.

Of course, I thought about this blue bond when I saw the pictures on TV of Philadelphia police beating suspects in a triple shooting Monday night. Offered as a factor, not an excuse, by Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey was the officers' state of mind following the murder of police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski two days earlier. I know he's right, but Philadelphia has also seen cases of police abuse when no fellow officer had been shot.

Other cities have seen such behavior, too. And not just in the United States. In Calgary, they're still talking about the case of Koney Okpoti, the man called Canada's version of Rodney King, who last November was beaten by police and dragged by his handcuffs. King's name will forever be associated with police brutality; it's been 17 years since Los Angeles officers were captured on videotape beating King after a traffic stop. And we still haven't learned to "all get along."

Many people, some who are upfront about it and others who keep it to themselves, think police officers have every right to beat suspects. In most cases, they believe, often correctly, the suspect has committed some crime. They say a criminal doesn't deserve to be treated with respect. But what about treating even criminals humanely? Once a suspect has been subdued and disarmed, must he then be whipped, kicked, pummeled? In such a frenzy, innocent people can be hurt, killed.

Police officers have a tough job, and they're only human. They're going to get angry, get frustrated, feel the loss of a comrade. That's expected. But what's also expected is that if one officer succumbs to his feelings and begins to express them in the treatment of a suspect, his fellow officers will pull him back. When that doesn't happen, when every officer vents his frustrations on a helpless man lying handcuffed on the ground, even if that man has committed a crime, then all you have is a mob, not police officers. And a mob can't be expected to protect the public.