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The Henry Louis Gates Fiasco
Topic Started: Jul 23 2009, 05:06 AM (659 Views)
QuirtEvans
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I Owe It All To John D'Oh
I don't recall another thread about this mess yet.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/22/james-crowley-policeman-w_n_243262.html

My take on it, after reading a bunch of stories (since it's close to local), is that they were both wrong. It seems to me that neither Gates nor the officer was willing to back down, and they both escalated it ... the officer, because he believed he was in charge and was owed deference, and Gates, because he thinks pretty highly of himself and didn't think he had to kiss anyone's ass in his own house.

I don't think Obama should have taken a position that the cops acted stupidly, in a "he said, he said" situation.

The interesting point to me is this one:

Quote:
 
Richard Weinblatt, director of the Institute for Public Safety at Central Ohio Technical College, said the police sergeant was responsible for defusing the situation once he realized Gates was the lawful occupant. It is not against the law to yell at police, especially in a home, as long as that behavior does not affect an investigation, he said.

"That is part of being a police officer in a democratic society," Weinblatt said. "The point is that the police sergeant needs to be the bigger person, take the higher road, be more professional."


Is that really part of a police officer's job? Maybe it should be, but I don't think we, as a society, select people for the police force who naturally behave that way, and I don't think that most police officers are trained to behave that way.

And, while it may not be against the law to yell at a police officer, it's generally not a particularly smart move.
It would be unwise to underestimate what large groups of ill-informed people acting together can achieve. -- John D'Oh, January 14, 2010.
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Mikhailoh
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My take as well. There are no heroes and no real villains here. Just two people who handled a situation poorly. It certainly does not merit presidential comment.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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QuantumIvory
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Mik
 
It certainly does not merit presidential comment.

Particularly when the president freely admits he doesn't know all the facts in the case and then proceeds to condemn the police department as acting "stupidly".
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. We cannot get behind consciousness." -Max Planck

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Dewey
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Particularly when the president freely admits he doesn't know all the facts in the case and then proceeds to condemn the police department as acting "stupidly".
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Phlebas
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Obama really pulled a "Dinkins" on that one. Black guy on one side, cops on the other? Must be the cops fault. "I don't know the facts, but I condemn..." - GMAFB.

My recollection of the Cambridge police, from having lived there, is they pretty much hate everyone - Harvard/MIT/Radcliffe students, academics like Gates, Cambridge granola types, feminists (in their mind, defined as any woman with the temerity to define their constitutional rights), Blacks, Portugese (which there's a large population of), Asians, etc., etc. Also, they're probably the least professional police department I've seen first hand.

That aside, if you're stupid enough to talk back to the police, you just might end up arrested. Too bad Gates never learned that.
Random FML: Today, I was fired by my boss in front of my coworkers. It would have been nice if I could have left the building before they started celebrating. FML

The founding of the bulk of the world's nation states post 1914 is based on self-defined nationalisms. The bulk of those national movements involve territory that was ethnically mixed. The foundation of many of those nation states involved population movements in the aftermath. When the only one that is repeatedly held up as unjust and unjustifiable is the Zionist project, the term anti-semitism may very well be appropriate. - P*D


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The 89th Key
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From the police report and the "yo mama!" remark......it sounds like Gates made this 10x worse on himself for not cooperating more. See more:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html

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QuirtEvans
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I surely hope there's evidence one way or the other as to whether this story is true. If true, Gates deserves a huge pile of public scorn. (Unfortunately, there's no realistic other sanction.)
It would be unwise to underestimate what large groups of ill-informed people acting together can achieve. -- John D'Oh, January 14, 2010.
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lb1
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More information that paints Gates (and Obama) blacker.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090723/ap_on_re_us/us_harvard_scholar_disorderly_50

lb
My position is simple: you jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and slung mud on an issue where none was deserved. Quirt 03/08/09
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The 89th Key
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Not looking good for Gates. I really dont see any arguments on his side. Even the photo of him being arrested shows him yelling and the arresting officer (seen on the right) holding his hand up presumably asking him to "calm down".

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Kincaid
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I tend to support the officer but, if you are in the process of leaving and it is only your presence that is causing the problem, why not just leave rather than insisting on compliance? The officer's statement looks full of CYA and, as I interview people all the time and take notes when doing so and still have a hard time recalling exact phrasing of words and sequencing of responses, I would take his report with a grain of salt.

Every police officer in America should have an audio recording device on their person that is always recording.
Kincaid - disgusted Republican Partisan since 2006.
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Horace
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It's a pretty tough sell for me to believe that it's ok to arrest someone because they're upset that they're being bothered by a cop for "breaking into" their own home. Even including a "yo mama" or two.

Anyway, if we're discussing what is, in practice, stupid or not, in no case can this be thought of as stupidity from Gates. Like he said, "you haven't heard the last of this" and "you have no idea who you're dealing with". Well, the cops dropped the charges, the case is national news and all the PC police are righteous and energized, and the president of the united states weighed in on his side. That's not stupid, that's game set match.
As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good?
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Red Rice
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Phlebas
Jul 23 2009, 07:34 AM
My recollection of the Cambridge police, from having lived there, is they pretty much hate everyone
My recollection too. They always seemed to be looking for a fight. MA State Troopers are also a mixed bag in my experience.

Cops in my part of Wisconsin seem far more professional.
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I hope the gunner of that Hun two-seater shot him clean, bullet to heart, and that his plane, on fire, fell like a meteor through the sky he loved. Since he had to end, I hope he ended so. But, oh, the waste! The loss!

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Kincaid
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Quote:
 
Anyway, if we're discussing what is, in practice, stupid or not, in no case can this be thought of as stupidity from Gates. Like he said, "you haven't heard the last of this" and "you have no idea who you're dealing with". Well, the cops dropped the charges, the case is national news and all the PC police are righteous and energized, and the president of the united states weighed in on his side. That's not stupid, that's game set match.


Good point. I don't think Gates was trying to bait him at all, but that's what happened.
Kincaid - disgusted Republican Partisan since 2006.
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QuirtEvans
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Kincaid
Jul 23 2009, 12:18 PM
I tend to support the officer but, if you are in the process of leaving and it is only your presence that is causing the problem, why not just leave rather than insisting on compliance? The officer's statement looks full of CYA and, as I interview people all the time and take notes when doing so and still have a hard time recalling exact phrasing of words and sequencing of responses, I would take his report with a grain of salt.

Every police officer in America should have an audio recording device on their person that is always recording.
Yeah, if it's a free app on the iPhone now, it can't be too hard to do.

Just download at the station at the end of each shift.
It would be unwise to underestimate what large groups of ill-informed people acting together can achieve. -- John D'Oh, January 14, 2010.
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Mikhailoh
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It sounds to me like the officer received a call, investigated, and was met with open hostility from the word go.

Sorry, but my vote goes to the officer on this one, assuming this report, which is all we have, is accurate.

Cue Jesse and Al to show up any minute.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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QuirtEvans
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I agree with that, Mik. However, it also sounds to me, like Kincaid said, that the report is a lot of butt-covering.

I'm going to guess that Gates was predisposed to think that any cop who questioned him about anything was a racist, and that the cop was predisposed to punish anyone (regardless of skin color) who disrespected him. Which gets back to my original question ... is it really the cop's job to be the bigger person and to walk away? Is that part of the police function, when there really is no evidence of wrongdoing but the guy's being a dick?

Oil. A lit match. It's never good when the two are put in close proximity.
It would be unwise to underestimate what large groups of ill-informed people acting together can achieve. -- John D'Oh, January 14, 2010.
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Mikhailoh
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True, dat.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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Free Rider
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I learned a long time ago about authority and respect. Isn't there a song about that?

I fought the Law and the Law won. Usually does.


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George K
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Finally
A couple of interesting perspectives. First of all, they picked on the wrong cop:
Quote:
 
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — The white police sergeant criticized by President Barack Obama for arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his Massachusetts home is a police academy expert on understanding racial profiling.

Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley has taught a class about racial profiling for five years at the Lowell Police Academy after being hand-picked for the job by former police Commissioner Ronny Watson, who is black, said Academy Director Thomas Fleming.
"I have nothing but the highest respect for him as a police officer. He is very professional and he is a good role model for the young recruits in the police academy," Fleming told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The course, called "Racial Profiling," teaches about different cultures that officers could encounter in their community "and how you don't want to single people out because of their ethnic background or the culture they come from," Fleming said. The academy trains cadets for cities across the region.

Obama has said the Cambridge officers "acted stupidly" in arresting Gates last week when they responded to his house after a woman reported a suspected break-in.
Crowley, 42, has maintained he did nothing wrong and has refused to apologize, as Gates has demanded.


And a very interesting perspective from the (lily white) Wall Street Journal:
Quote:
 
Pride and Prejudice
Maybe Skip Gates’s dispute with police will yield some wisdom after all.
By JAMES TARANTO

The more we think about last week’s confrontation between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Mass., policeman James Crowley, the more we think that Crowley was more in the wrong than Gates. We argued Tuesday that both men should have backed down, and we’ve heard nothing since to change that view. But Crowley was on duty as an officer of the law and thus had a professional obligation not to let his pride get the better of him.

Crowley had no business remaining on the scene once he had ascertained that Gates belonged in the house. Even by the Crowley’s account in the police report, Gates had done nothing at that point to justify arresting him. He had disrespected a policeman’s authority, which may be rude and foolish but is not a crime.

So we were pleased to hear that President Obama, in his press conference last night, said more or less the same thing we had been thinking:

Quote:
 
I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they [sic] were in their own home; and, No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.

Let’s dispense with one common criticism of the president: that he should have refrained from commenting on the subject at all. “It’s the kind of question to which a president would normally reply with something like: ‘That’s a local police matter, I don’t know the details and I know it will be worked out responsibly,’ and move along,” says National Review’s Yuval Levin. “Very odd behavior for a president.”

True, this started as a local police matter, but by the time Obama was asked about it, it had become a contentious national debate. As he is the first president who is black, Obama’s views on a subject involving race relations were bound to be of interest and to carry considerable weight. And Obama evidently did have a strong interest in the matter. According to Politico, his answer to this question was the only point in the press conference when he “came alive.” (The rest of the conference was devoted to some policy issue or other.)

On the merits, we’d say Obama got it right. He expressed sympathy with Gates’s position while expressly declining to endorse the charge that the arresting officer had racially invidious motives. When the president made a general statement about racial profiling--a statement that is certainly debatable, but he, like everyone else, is entitled to argue for his side in a debate--he was careful to note that he was speaking “separate and apart from this incident.”

Gates has now spoken out on the episode, talking at length to two exceptionally friendly interviewers: Dayo Olopade of The Root, an online magazine of which Gates is editor in chief, and Elizabeth Gates of The Daily Beast, who is Prof. Gates’s daughter. We said at the outset that we think Crowley was more wrong than Gates. It is important, however, to distinguish between the initial altercation and the subsequent public debate. In the former, Crowley was in a position of authority and thus bore a greater responsibility than Gates, who was merely a private citizen. But in pressing the matter now, it is Gates who is exercising considerable authority: the intellectual authority of a pre-eminent scholar of race in America, and the moral authority of a black man demanding equal treatment in a country with an acknowledged history of atrocious racism.

With that authority comes a responsibility to be truthful and fair, and by this standard some of Gates’s comments have fallen short--particularly his accusation that Crowley’s motives were racial. Here is how Gates described a portion of the confrontation in The Root:
Quote:
 
[Crowley] says “Can you prove that you’re a Harvard professor?” I said yes, I turned and closed the front door to the kitchen where I’d left my wallet, and I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him. And he’s sitting there looking at them.

Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me
.
In truth, Gates had no way of knowing what “narrative” was “in [Crowley’s] head.” What we can ascertain from this account is that there was a narrative in Gates’s head. Crowley might have stereotyped Gates, but Gates definitely stereotyped Crowley.

The racist-cop stereotype certainly has a basis in reality, especially the reality of decades past. Wil Haygood of the Washington Post, who is himself black and formerly lived in Cambridge, has an evocative description of how he imagines Gates experienced the episode:
Quote:
 
So here’s Gates the other day, just back from China, in his house. . . . The squad car rolls right up. . . . Gates wonders why the police are there; they explain why, a call about a possible break-in.

And then it probably starts to whoosh in Gates’s own mind, like a desert wind that must peak before leveling off. Here we go again. Heated words because Gates, in these flashing moments, is not a scholar who studied at the University of Cambridge (in England) but a suspect. Forget the Harvard and personal ID’s, he’s in that touchy nexus and zone of black skin and law enforcement. And that peculiar zone can be exposed day or night. And when it beams on, it can show that the black man is carrying a lot of historical weight--weight that Gates himself has put into scholarship and documentaries--surrounding the heaviness of race in America. It’s suddenly pent-up anger and jet-lag words flying on that wind that can’t be taken back and skin color and real estate and cold eyes and I’m not breaking any law so just leave me alone please, dammit, please. Please.

It would be unfair to judge Gates’s actions without taking account of that “historical weight.” But it would be equally unfair to assume that because Gates, conditioned by this history, experienced Crowley’s behavior as a racial humiliation, that is how Crowley intended it.

In the Beast interview, posted a day after the Root interview, Gates seems a good deal less angry, and he gives a more nuanced interpretation of Crowley’s actions and motives:
Quote:
 
I clearly was arrested as a vindictive act, an act of spite. I think Sgt. Crowley was angry that I didn’t follow his initial order--his demand--his order--to step outside my house because I was protected as long as I was in the house because he didn’t have a warrant. I think what he really wanted to do was throw me down and put handcuffs on me because he was terrified that I could be dangerous to him and that I was causing violence in my own home--though obviously he didn’t know it was my home.

If I had been white this incident never would have happened. He would have asked at the door, “Excuse me, are you okay? Because there are two black men around here try’na rob you” [laughter] and I think he also violated the rules by not giving his name and badge number, and I think he would have given that to one of my white colleagues or one of my white neighbors. So race definitely played a role. Whether he’s an individual racist? I don’t know--I don’t know him. But I think he stereotyped me.

And that’s what racial profiling is all about. I was cast by him in a narrative and he didn’t know how to get out of it, and then when I demanded--which I did--his name and badge number, I think he just got really angry.

There is a logical difficulty with Gates’s assertion that this wouldn’t have happened if he were white. The passerby who called the police reported, accurately, that she saw two black men (Gates and his limousine driver, as it turned out) trying to force their way into the house. If Gates had been white, Crowley would not have said “there are two black men,” because there would not have been two black men. The cop would have been looking for a white suspect, and Gates would still fit the bill.

On Tuesday Gates told the Boston Globe: “If [Crowley] apologizes sincerely, I am willing to forgive him. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling. . . That’s what I do for a living.” Gates is trying to be magnanimous. He doesn’t quite succeed, does he? Still, it’s not an unattractive offer. Lots of people pay big bucks for a Harvard education.

But a true scholar devotes his life to acquiring knowledge, not just imparting it. Crowley may have something to learn from Gates, but Gates may have something to learn from Crowley, too--about the challenges of police work and the vulnerabilities, both physical and psychological, that sometimes lead cops to act overzealously--even stupidly--when citizens challenge their authority.
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kluurs
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I think the one thing that I haven't seen discussed is Gates frame of mind. He had just spent 20 minutes with a stuck door. I'm a pretty calm person - but when stuff "doesn't work" - and i get frustrated, it can change my frame of mind. Anyone entering the scene after a computer destroys something I've worked on for a few hours might think I was a a little "irrational." Heck, I've gotten pretty po'd at the writer of instructions on how to assemble a gas grill.

I think Gates was probably a bit worked up from his battle with the freaking door.

Having said that, one of our radio announcers here once said, when the police show up - no matter what one's frame of mind one should iimmediately go to "yes sir, no sir" mode - which is to say - show respect - if for no other reason than to make things go a bit more smoothly.

Had Gates an ounce of sense, none of this would have happened. I think the door battle may have made him a bit ill-humored. AND maybe he too has a sense of what police are all about - profiling the officer as a facist. My father was one of those people who if the police were involved, he immediately saw red...he wasn't smart in those kinds of situations.

The officer said that Gates wasn't acting rationally. If the policeman worked the Harvard community, he should have been used to non-rationale academics - people who are a bit goofy - even if smart. I suspect Gates did get into the officer's face - and I would not be surprised if he was insulting to the officer in addition to acting like a dufus.

While I'm sometimes suspicious of police "stories" - I still suspect Gates was the cause of the problem - and not "racial profiling."

I think Obama's comments were off the mark.

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Horace
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kluurs
Jul 23 2009, 04:28 PM
I think the one thing that I haven't seen discussed is Gates frame of mind. He had just spent 20 minutes with a stuck door. I'm a pretty calm person - but when stuff "doesn't work" - and i get frustrated, it can change my frame of mind. Anyone entering the scene after a computer destroys something I've worked on for a few hours might think I was a a little "irrational." Heck, I've gotten pretty po'd at the writer of instructions on how to assemble a gas grill.

I think Gates was probably a bit worked up from his battle with the freaking door.
And that's not the half of it, he was just back from a trip overseas, which means he was on a plane for half a day or more, and jetlagged. I'd have a quick temper at that point too.
As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good?
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ivorythumper
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I am just glad that President Obama is in office to comment on what is clearly a local matter.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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Axtremus
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HOLY CARP!!!
Obama screwed up on this one.
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Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
Yes. He didn't have the excuse of jet lag or a stuck door to fall back on to explain his stupid comment.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

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Kincaid
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HOLY CARP!!!
I know I've had days where I was leaving the office and thought that if by chance someone crossed me I would get positively Medieval.
Kincaid - disgusted Republican Partisan since 2006.
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