Your Turn: Riot Cop Fantasies

A few months back, I mentioned I was hoping to turn Saturday over to you. We’d source the pictures, then step away. After an intense week, including our look at the framing of the Philippine typhoon (take note, we’ve got more coming), our visual scholar series on the JFK assassination, and then, the WH photo press brush off, yeah, we’re ready for a weekend.

In the meantime, we do have a set of pictures with captions for you. And a few questions, including: how odd is it that these two pics, one from Bulgaria, the other from Italy, surfaced within the same week? and more significantly, what are we to make of them? Don’t they just make you feel safer? And what’s with the gender business? (Note: Buzzfeed’s headline accompanying “Riot Kiss 2″ reads: “The Story Behind This Powerful Photo Of A Police Officer And A Student Protester.” But, all the post delivers, only slightly helpful, is a description.)

Photo 1, by the way, was one of the more widely circulated photos this week.

(photo 1: Marco Bertorello—AFP/Getty Images via TIME Pictures of the Week. caption: Nov. 16, 2013. A demonstrator kisses a riot police officer during a protest in Susa, Italy against the high-speed train (TAV in Italian) line between Lyon and Turin.photo 2: Stefan Stefanov /Via imgur.com via BuzzFeed.)