Of course, if that's what the police always got, we'd hardly need police. We wouldn't need for them to be so heavily armed. And we wouldn't be considering, again, whether the use of the electro-shock weapon called the Taser is really an improvement over the old-fashioned choice of clubs or guns.

Whether a man called Alvin Itula is dead because of multiple jolts allegedly received from Salt Lake City Police Tasers Friday night, or due to some other cause, is something we won't know for a while. But we need to know that, and a whole lot more, before we can be comfortable that police used appropriate means to corral an apparently hostile but hardly notorious suspect who, it turns out, didn't really have an outstanding warrant on him after all.

And we need to be comfortable that appropriate means are the norm in this city. Otherwise, we risk turning arrests that should have been routine into violent affairs that threaten the lives of suspects, officers and innocent bystanders.

That's why the American Civil Liberties Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and even the FBI are more than a little curious about the incident, and why a serious independent investigation is indeed warranted.

The fact that police weren't supposed to have arrested Itula after all just adds to the tragedy. So does the fact that Itula, who knew he wasn't a wanted man, apparently put up a fight rather than simply cooperate and spend his time in the back of the squad car imagining how he'd spend the proceeds of his wrongful-arrest lawsuit.

An independent investigation could help resolve natural concerns over whether Itula was a victim of excessive force, whether his Samoan ethnicity was a factor, whether he had plausible reason to believe that he wouldn't be treated fairly if he assented to his arrest and whether Mayor Rocky Anderson should reconsider his decision to allow use of Tasers in situations short of those justifying lethal force.

These are answers that will protect both the police and the next wrongly arrested person, a person who might be you.