To the editors:
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Anyone who can get a hold of a copy of the Amnesty International Report 1991 should turn to pages 242-243, under the entry “United States of America.” There, AI’s now infamous report that “police officers from the Area 2 police station in Chicago, Illinois, had systematically tortured or otherwise ill-treated more than 20 people suspected of killing police officers between 1972 and 1984” (p. 242) appears for all the world to see. (Yes, all the world–with the exception of Chicagoans, that is, whose local media would rather not bother their audiences with such trifles, preferring to focus instead on the story of cannibalism in Milwaukee, about which nothing can now be done to mitigate the horror, thereby meeting the media’s Number One criterion of newsworthiness, which says that people ought to be kept in whichever depoliticized frame of mind is most conducive for buying whatever goods the media’s sponsors happen to be hawking on that particular day.
The lessons are clear.
Want to bet the next time the issue of police brutality raises its ugly but quite real head (just ask the people condemned to the Projects), very much the same pattern will be repeated?
