I personally don't think the victim was a selfless martyr and don't think the cop was a demon, but I do think the global leaders who set them both up are criminals.
Nathan Newman, NLG>>
I agree. It's seemed to me there's a tendency after these events for "police brutality" to become THE issue and for some spokepeople to talk about the police as though they were, to a man, jack-booted thugs acting totally out of their own personal "evilness". As a tactic, I think it alienates more people than it convinces and is just the opposite face of the "spoiled brat protester" or "evil anarchist/communist protester" riff. Nothing productive happens as long as public debate stays on that plane.
Personal anecdote: I have a cousin by marriage who's on the Seatte Police Force and was part of the contingent that chased protesters out of downtown Seattle and up to Capitol Hill (residential area) during WTO. (I was also at WTO for most of the week.)
I hadn't known him well before, but at the family Christmas party I asked him about his experience. He said the police messed up, that the original mandate was limited to moving protesters out of the downtown area, but because nobody was really in charge, the police acted as a mob and just kept going. (When he found himself up on the Hill in kind of a stand-off, he and a group of others decided they had no reason to be there, and turned around.)
Family members (mainly Republican/conservative/religious) listening had been inclined to buy into the picture they'd seen on TV and repeated the standard comments about immature/violent protesters. My policeman cousin supported my contention that the damage estimates were vastly inflated (I'd actually gone into every boarded-up store I could get into to see how many had broken glass behind them), the description of the event as "the Seattle riots" was not apt, and the TV coverage overemphasized the violence that did occur while not covering at all many of the peaceful rallies and events.
He was also able to talk about some of the issues involved in a way that made sense to my conservative family and made it clear that he himself thought the activists were spot-on in a lot of ways. That discussion, I think, caused most of the people there (including me) to question their assumptions and perceptions - because of the source.
Les