>kelley wrote:
>
>>surely. you know, i was vegging out in front the tube and saw some report
>>about the rise in the numbers of "suicide by cop." sorry, i was vegging so
>>i have no idea what the hell i was watching, something that came on after
>>the news.... anyway, the report claimed that more and more people are
>>commiting suicide by engaging in staged confrontations with the cops in
>>order to get shot. apparently, these folks can't bear to swallow some
>>pills or blow their head off, so they get into confrontations armed with
>>knives, empty guns, toy guns, etc. some supposedly leave suicide notes
>>apologizing to the cop who had to kill them. i mean, i rilly rilly don't
>>like conspiracy theories of the media, but good god i have to believe that
>>this particular 'report' was planted by some p.r. team for some national
>>assoc of police officers in order to fight the police brutality scandals of
>>late.
>
>Nexis has 54 stories on "suicide by cop" in its newspaper database
>over the last 10 years. It's a genuine trend. Even British and
>Canadian papers have even done stories on it (as a phenemenon in the
>US). Of course factoids become trends when journalists read other
>journalists on Nexis.
>
>Doug
>
I think We Interrupt This Message, a lefty PR group in San Francisco, actually ran a pretty successful PR campaign debunking "suicide by cop" a couple years ago when it was a trend in Bay Area papers -- I think they got the SF media to stop running these bogus stories (though I'd have to do a Nexis search to be sure).
Liza