what's going on in this jury of your own peers?

WHAT IF IT were your child who saw ruthless drug lords commit a murder?

Would you want him to testify?

That's what Assistant District Attorney Mark Gilson asked me this week, at the end of a stunning day in court in which one witness after another recanted earlier statements about the schoolyard slaying of Faheem Thomas-Childs.

Gilson said he was frustrated and angry - but not surprised - because it happens in homicide cases every day.

"They have to go back to the neighborhood with a big fat 'S' on their backs," he said of the reluctant witnesses.

They're afraid to be labeled snitches, Gilson said, and parents counsel their children the same way the father of the 18-year-old witness in Faheem's case did this week: Say you don't remember.

Then Gilson posed the question to me:

"What would you do if your son said he saw a murder and knew that the vicious gang in the neighborhood had done it?"

I assume Gilson was expecting the morally correct answer: I'd tell him to testify, of course.

But the truth is: I don't know what I'd do.

The larger truth is I live in a safe neighborhood that makes it unlikely I'll ever have to make that decision.

this sounds more like the premise of an awesome bruce willis movie... called mercury rising.

p.s. way to go, jackasses.