Police Pig Dog
A skating magazine has decided to withdraw an advertisement in which a teenager is aiming a gun at the head of a police officer. The Szczecin-based skateboarder clothing manufacturer Stoprocent has been using controversy to promote its Guru Gomez collection – the ad shows a policeman kneeling before a teenage boy who is holding a gun pointed at the man. The caption reads: “On your knees, pig!” The ad first appeared in the January issue of Info Magazine Skateboard. Initially, one of the two owners of the magazine and co-creator of the ad Łukasz Kosy explained that the ad was meant to be a joke. “Young boys dislike policemen and security guards,” he said.
After publishing its first article on the controversy, Gazeta Wyborcza received a letter signed by over 30 representatives of the skateboarding community (skateboarders, editors of magazines and online portals, organisers of events and contests, shop owners and equipment manufacturers) which read (excerpt): “Neither the idea behind the advertisement nor Lukasz Kosy’s statement has anything to do with the origins of or the values skateboarding holds dear. We refuse to accept an ad that depicts and promotes violence. The skateboard unites people and does not cause rifts among them”. A similar letter was later written by representatives of the Czech skateboarding scene, whose authors “had difficulty understanding the ad and were hoping it was a one-off incident”. The editor of Info Magazine Skateboard has stated that the ad will not appear in future editions in spite of the fact that it will mean the loss of a few thousand zloty. The district attorney’s office in Toruń is currently looking into the issue in order to determine whether the law has been broken. The Warsaw police headquarters have issued a statement saying that the ad does in fact violate the law by “either publically encouraging a crime or publically condoning it”.
Gazeta Wyborcza
