I spent this past week covering this horrific incident where a cop kicked a suspect he was arresting in the head AFTER the suspect had already gotten down on all fours. Turns out the guy had a pre-existing brain injury.

In today’s latest installment for the Globe, I got the much coveted interview with the victim that I had been chasing for three days. Read it here: Battered victim baffled by RCMP assault. The story has links to video if you want to see the beating for yourself as well as to the first three stories I wrote about this case.

I have to wonder, why have the cops been so slow to adjust to the advent of camera phones and social media? If you pull a truck over on a busy street, blocking a bus full of passengers so it can’t get by and are generally being noisy and disruptive, then people are going to notice what you’re doing and odds are someone will just whip out their phone and make a record that you won’t be able to easily explain away.

Where does the urge to inflict that kind of pain on someone already submitting to your will come from? That’s a lot of ugliness.

Are humans perhaps simply incapable of handling the kind of power we give to police and other law enforcement and military type of folks?