Boston cop releases his own pictures of Bomber manhunt
A Boston cop, angered by the Rolling Stone cover of Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, unwittingly adds to the romanticizing of terrorists.
Boston cop, Sean Murphy, a photographer and sargeant in the Massachusetts State Police was pissed off by Rolling Stone's controversial cover image of Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. So he released a bunch of photos he took of the manhunt for the bomber to Boston Magazine. Murphy:
I believe that the image that was portrayed by Rolling Stone magazine was an insult to any person who has every worn a uniform of any color or any police organization or military branch, and the family members who have ever lost a loved one serving in the line of duty. The truth is that glamorizing the face of terror is not just insulting to the family members of those killed in the line of duty, it also could be an incentive to those who may be unstable to do something to get their face on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
Check out the link and the pictures Murphy released. I don't think they have the effect he intended. As The Guaridan's Jonathan Jones descripes the pictures -- "...in one image a bloodied Tsarnaev holds up a hand in a gesture of surrender. The red pin point of a sharpshooter's laser sight rests eerily on his forehead..." -- the pictures actually do more to "glamorize" Tsarnaev than anything Rolling Stone did:
If anyone in the world is misguided enough to find what Tsarnaev stands accused of in any way heroic, or exciting, or remotely justifiable, Murphy's photographs are far more likely than the Rolling Stone cover to feed their fantasies. As he flops weakly against the boat the blood-spattered youth looks like he is auditioning for a Passion play: he looks like Jesus struggling to Golgotha. An entire history of Catholic images of righteous suffering can be read into Murphy's photographs. No wonder they were supposed to be kept under wraps – they do not help at all to deromanticise Tsarnaev.
And Jones didn't even talk about how law enforcement is portrayed in these pictures: mostly faceless and uniformed, like stills of the anonymous government baddies portrayed in movie thrillers