I was one of the protesters arrested at the Republican National Convention last summer in Philadelphia. I have a court date soon and have to decide whether, in addition to the nine days in jail I've already served, I want to risk more time in order to stick up for the people who weren't as lucky as I was — the people who were illegally arrested, beaten by police and corrections officers, charged with felonies they didn't commit or railroaded because they have a history of activism.

It hurts to know that whatever happens in future protests, demonstrators can't expect fair treatment from the press. After all, the newspapers were hardly interested in political repression by the police in Philadelphia, but devoted copious print to fashion critiques of the teenage anarchists amongst us (a small minority, I might add — and what, by the way, is the absurd point of calling them "so-called" and "would-be" anarchists?).

In Philadelphia, the cops raided an activist center before protests began and arrested 75 people, holding some for as long as two weeks in what the ACLU described as "one of the largest instances of preventive detention in modern American history." The press barely noticed.

In a warrant unsealed more than a month after the raid, it was revealed that Philly police had used state troopers to bypass a court order not to infiltrate protest groups. The stated reason for the raid was that some of the protesters had "communist and leftist sponsors" and others were sympathetic to "the former Soviet-allied World Federation of Trade Unions." The New York Times could afford only a paragraph.

Imagine that: The Philadelphia police actually had to revive the Soviet menace just to prevent us from protesting against the death penalty.

What hurts most of all is that the news media never addressed the issues at stake in Philadelphia, the issues we fought for. They hardly seem likely to do so in the future.

Examiner contributor Erik Stowers is a freelance writer in New York.

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