Day-to-day actions and decisions by public officials like police are always subject to scrutiny from the street or in the media. It comes with the job, it can't really be any other way, and if you're a cop, it no doubt makes some days feel pretty long and thankless.

Not all of the second-guessing is critical, however, and a couple of developments this week involving Hamilton police, working on some terrible local incidents, reveal the kind of judgment that can be reassuring to a watching community -- judgment that merits positive acknowledgment.

One admirable anecdote was the quick movement by police to order a review of why it took several hours to remove the body of a teenager who died tragically when he was pinned between a tree and a rolling SUV. The body was reportedly not moved from the scene, in front of the family's home, for about four hours after the coroner was called.

It sends the kind of message the public likes to hear, when authorities openly make a priority of looking into and learning from such circumstances, rather than circling the wagons and denying they ever happened. It's a discipline some politicians could stand a lesson on.

And give the cops -- and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats football club -- credit for making smart use of this afternoon's Ticat home game to try and crack the case of a horrifying incident. The community was sickened after a 17-year-old boy was dragged more than half a kilometre under a car, then effectively left for dead while his assailants fled into the night.

Grade 11 student Nick Perkins suffered terrible injuries in the July 3 incident in which he fell or was knocked off his bike and into the path of a silver sedan on Mount Albion Road. Two men got out of the car, robbed a second teenager at the scene and punched him in the face, breaking his nose.

They got back in the car and tore off, with Nick jammed beneath the vehicle. After about 600 metres he was left lying in a pool of blood, some of his flesh burned to the bone. Since then doctors have kept him in an induced coma much of the time, due to the excruciating pain.

Investigators are looking for something like a 2000-to-2003 silver four-door sedan that would have sustained some sort of damage to its front underside. Police continue to try to get a break on tracing the suspects, but virtually nobody saw the 3 a.m. attack and there have been few leads forthcoming.

The Ticats organization invited police to use the big-screen scoreboard today at Ivor Wynne Stadium to beam information to thousands of football fans, hopefully triggering an idea in someone's mind. It's an innovative piece of thinking the police swiftly accepted.

Any citizen with even a faint hunch or long-shot clue that might help this case owes it to Nick Perkins to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.