The Lone Ranger rides again.

He’s at Amarillo City Hall these days, dressed as a new city councilman who has proposed massive changes in the way Amarillo’s police department does it job.

This is another sign of the change that’s arrived at Amarillo’s municipal government.

Councilman Elisha Demerson has made what I believe is a good-faith effort to improve policing in Amarillo. He wants the city to hire 23 more officers and he wants the PD to become more of a “community policing” agency, with officers connecting more personally with the neighborhoods they are sworn to protect.

It’s all good, councilman.

The mayor, Paul Harpole, makes a sound point in criticizing what Demerson is doing. He’s seeming to speak for the entire City Council. Coming forward as he has done, Demerson has taken the lead on a process that generally has been done at the senior administrative level, with recommendations coming from the police chief in coordination with his immediate supervisor, the city manager.

However, since City Manager Jarrett Atkinson’s tenure at City Hall is about to end — and was put in jeopardy almost immediately after the May election — Demerson is acting as the agent of change within the police department.

This is a slippery slope that could produce some trouble for the councilman, the cops, the city administration, the rest of the council and perhaps even the public.

We have a council/manager form of government here. Council members generally do not put their hands directly on the levers that operate the city’s massive government apparatus. That includes the police department.

I don’t have a particular problem with the proposals per se that Demerson has put forward. I do have a problem, though, any council member acting as the Lone Ranger.

Harpole has suggested that council members have told city employees to “come to a commissioner to resolve problems.”

Interesting. There once was a chain of command at City Hall. It used to work pretty well, with administrators handling those concerns within their departments, while the city manager oversaw the solutions being implemented.

Is it no longer a team effort at City Hall?

War can be a tragically imprecise endeavor.

Mistakes happen and when they do the consequences can be dire in the extreme. Such was the case when an AC-130 gunship strafed and bombed a building that turned out to be a hospital in Afghanistan run by the medical organization Doctors Without Borders.

Several patients and staff members died.

What was President Obama’s reaction? After some hesitation initially, he has apologized to Doctors Without Borders. Of course, as the New York Times reported, the president’s apology possibly could draw some of the criticism from those who have ridiculed him during his entire time in office for being an “apologist in chief.”

This time, though, there should be none of that sniping.

Hospital bombed

It’s not the first time that a commander in chief has issued an apology for actions that occur on the field of battle. The Times points out that President Bush did so in 2004 in response to treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

There once was a time, before the era of precision ordnance, that military powers didn’t feel the need to apologize for killing innocent civilians. The Allies deployed air power without such regard in Europe and over Japan during World War II. In the years since, though, we’ve come to expect much greater accuracy and an insistence that our forces take aim only at military targets.

Doctors Without Borders insists on an independent investigation into what happened in this instance. I’m OK with that, too. In its grief over the loss of life, DWB called the attack a “war crime.”

President Obama said the attack was a mistake. He has apologized on behalf of the huge military apparatus he commands.

Let’s get to the truth before leveling accusations.