From the ArcaMax Publishing, Clarence Page Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/clarencepage/s-586589-921799
I disagree with President Obama.
I don't think the Cambridge, Mass., police officer who arrested
Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., for "disorderly conduct" in his
own home acted "stupidly." Sgt. James M. Crowley's use of legal force
was excessive, in my view, yet well tailored to fit Gates' real
offense in the police sergeant's eyes: "Contempt of cop."
As just about everyone on the planet knows by now, Sgt. Crowley
visited Gates in his home to find out if he really lived there. A
female passerby had seen Gates and another man forcing open the stuck
front door of his own home and summoned police for a possible
burglary. The sergeant says the scholar repeatedly accused him of
racism and made derogatory remarks about his mother, to wit: "Yeah,
I'll speak to your mama when we get outside." Not nice.
But Gates and his lawyer dispute Crowley's account, calling it
exaggerated and partly fabricated. After Gates was released and the
charges were dropped, President Obama rekindled the controversy by
saying Cambridge police "acted stupidly," during the encounter. Obama
later backpedaled a bit. He called the sergeant "an outstanding police
officer," yet maintained that "it would have been better if cooler
heads had prevailed." Indeed, it would. But that's not easy when two
versions of pride come into conflict.
Obama knows Gates as I do, as a jolly 58-year-old scholar and
multimedia star who walks with a cane. If he was "loud and
tumultuous," as Crowley claims -- and that Gates disputes -- I would
not excuse such behavior. Nevertheless, I would argue that he hardly
poses a physical threat as long as he does not swing his cane at you.
Yet it is not hard for me to believe he might lose at least a little
of his cool after arriving home tired and jetlagged from a trip to
China, only to find a police officer checking him out to see if he
really lived in that nice neighborhood.
So does Paul Butler, a black George Washington University law
professor and former Washington, D.C., prosecutor who has seen other
minor misunderstandings explode into a blamestorm, especially when
they involve possible prejudgment by race.
"The police were right to investigate the call," he said. The former
prosecutor in me says the police have to ask who you are and what you
are doing. It is an unpleasant aspect of urban policing. ... But I can
certainly understand how in your own home you reach a tipping point
and you feel as though you have had enough -- and I understand how it
would make a black man 'loud and tumultuous.' "
Or as the late Lu Palmer, a black political journalist-activist I used
to cover in Chicago, used to say, some situations are "enough to make
a Negro turn black!" Even the biracial and normally reserved Obama
seemed to be speaking from that black cultural memory as he
perhaps-too-quickly attached "racial profiling" to this incident
before he knew all the facts.
Like Obama, Butler is a Harvard Law School graduate and, like Gates,
he has been arrested for a crime that, in his case, he did not commit.
In his clever and remarkably even-handed book, "Let's Get Free: A
Hip-Hop Theory of Justice," Butler recounts his experiences with
admirable evenhanded toward racial profilers and the profiled. It is
understandable to take race into account sometimes, he allows, but it
should never be the sole reason why you suspect someone.
Yet he does not call Gates-gate a classic case of racial profiling. In
the world of civilian-police relations, says Butler, it was more of a
classic "Who's the Man?" contest. Racial or not, he told me, the
incident stopped being good policing and became a Who's-the-Man
episode after Gates handed over his ID. As Crowley prepared to leave,
according to his own arrest report, which has been posted on
thesmokinggun.com, Gates kept yelling at him.
That's the point when the officer should turn around and leave,"
Butler said. "You know the man is going to be yelling at you, but you
leave." Maybe so, but, according to Crowley, Gate was yelling at him
in front of his fellow police officers. In long-standing
police-civilian etiquette, that's "contempt of cop." You disrespect
the police officer, the officer has ways of showing you that he has a
longer billy club.
In that sense, Crowley and the other officers probably never expected
Gates' arrest to hold up and it didn't. Now people across the country,
including me, are arguing about what happened as if we were there in
Gates' house and can read the minds of everyone involved. Based on our
own experiences, it is easy to feel as if we were, even when we only
fool ourselves.
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14207.