There was a time not so long ago when police brutality, or alleged police brutality, was a big issue in New York. Remember the front-page stories, the anger, the protests, over Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant tortured in a police station in 1997? Remember Amadou Diallo, the innocent African immigrant shot in front of his home in the Bronx with 41 bullets in 1999?

On Friday, Craig Yokemick, a former New York City police officer, pleaded guilty to two felony violations of federal civil rights laws. According to a brief item that moved Monday on the Associated Press wire, Yokemick in 1998 killed a fleeing drug suspect by throwing a police radio at him that hit the suspect’s head. In 2002, he punched a Westchester County teacher and threw him to the ground, according to the AP account of the charges.

The federal civil rights prosecution came after a failure by county prosecutors to gain an indictment. Part of keeping citizens safe and the reputation of the NYPD strong is weeding out the bad cops in the bunch. Yokemick had a record of problems well before the 1998 incident, and New Yorkers are safer because he is off the force.

But the remarkable thing in this particular case is that Friday’s guilty plea took place with hardly a mention in the city’s press, and with nary a peep of passion from the city’s most outspoken agitators on these kinds of issues. It’s a tribute to the skill with which Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, have handled both policing and race relations in the city.

And it is a tribute as well to the professionalism of the vast majority of the city’s police officers. New Yorkers increasingly sense that the rare officers like Yokemick are the exceptions to a pattern that all of us in the city can be proud of.