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The Henry Louis Gates Fiasco
Topic Started: Jul 23 2009, 05:06 AM (658 Views)
ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
Kincaid
Jul 23 2009, 09:39 PM
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.
Cross bows are quite effective.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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Jeff
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Axtremus
Jul 23 2009, 06:51 PM
Obama screwed up on this one.
Word. Doesn't look good to comment on a personal friend like this without the evidence. Very un-presidential.

He ignores gay rights to get healthcare, and then does this.

If I screamed at a police officer for 20 minutes, I'd expect to suffer consequences.
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
I can understand him being angry and a bit belligerent at first, but if the officer continued to be calm and try to sort out the situation, which is his legitimate function, any rational person would have eventually calmed down. Especially an educated and presumably intelligent one.

Now the officer's background is coming out and he was hand picked by a black police chief to teach classes on how to avoid racial profiling.

Obie, tell me again who is the stupidest of the three of you?
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 Owe It All To John D'Oh
I just saw the police officer interviewed on CNN. He comes across as very reasonable and pretty sober.

They also spoke to Gates' lawyer, who says that, if the Cambridge police department keeps demonizing Gates, they'll bring out witnesses of similar incidents. It sounds as if they have witnesses of similar incidents involving this particular police officer (Crowley).
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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QuirtEvans
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I Owe It All To John D'Oh
By the way, they're saying that Gates can be heard on the radio traffic. I surely hope those tapes get released.
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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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
That's rather the whole point isn't it? It sounds like they have witnesses. IMO this is just a pathetic attempt to put a better face on a losing cause.
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 Owe It All To John D'Oh
Mikhailoh
Jul 24 2009, 04:07 AM
That's rather the whole point isn't it? It sounds like they have witnesses. IMO this is just a pathetic attempt to put a better face on a losing cause.
The tapes of the radio traffic, if Gates is indeed audible, should tell a lot.

I really hope those get released, so this doesn't turn into a perpetual pissing match of "he said, he said".
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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QuirtEvans
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I Owe It All To John D'Oh
Jon Stewart apparently did a hilarious segment on Obama's comment on the Daily Show, but I can't find it online.
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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QuirtEvans
Jul 24 2009, 04:11 AM
Mikhailoh
Jul 24 2009, 04:07 AM
That's rather the whole point isn't it? It sounds like they have witnesses. IMO this is just a pathetic attempt to put a better face on a losing cause.
The tapes of the radio traffic, if Gates is indeed audible, should tell a lot.

I really hope those get released, so this doesn't turn into a perpetual pissing match of "he said, he said".
I do too.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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George K
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Finally
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/07/024124.php

From a cop and a lawyer:
Quote:
 
A Minneapolis attorney writes to add a note on the matter of Harvard Professor Henry Gates. When asked to come out of his house to talk to the police in connection with the report of a possible break-in, Gates exclaimed: "Why, because I'm a black man in America?" Our correspondent suggests otherwise. He writes:
Quote:
 
I know that this Gates incident is getting plenty of play in all quarters right now, but I have yet to see the proper context set out for the police response. In a past life (both before and during law school), I was a Minneapolis cop for eight years. I left in 2002 as a Sergeant supervising a dogwatch shift (9:00 pm -7:00 am), to take my first legal job at a Minneapolis firm.

In the Gates incident, the police were not dispatched to simply "check on a couple of guys acting suspiciously around a home." They were almost certainly responding to a report of a "burglary of dwelling in progress." This is typically one of the highest-priority calls that an officer will encounter during a shift.

Let me explain, and I know this will require a huge leap of faith for certain segments of the population. The vast majority of police officers are deeply, deeply committed to protecting the public from the type of criminal that would force their way into someone else's home. When a "burglary of dwelling in progress" call comes over the radio, officers literally drop everything (yes friends, even doughnuts . . .) and risk life-and-limb driving as fast as possible to get to the scene as quickly as possible.

Cops don't do this simply out of desire to catch "bad-guys." They do it because -- due to prior experience -- they assume that the "dwelling" in issue is occupied, and they have seen first-hand the devastation left behind when an innocent family is confronted with a violent home-invasion, burglary/rape scenario, or something similar.

Sergeant Crowley responded out a desire to ensure the safety of Gates's home and its inhabitants without regard to the race of the homeowner. Period. In return, he was subjected to abusive race-baiting from a purported "scholar" that apparently didn't rise above the intellectual level of a playground taunt. Gates is, quite simply, a jerk.

As our correspondent suggests, Sergeant Crowley's report on the arrest indicates that Crowley was responding to an ECC broadcast for a possible break-in in progress at Professor Gates's address. But why did Sergeant Crowley ask Professor Gates to come out of his house and speak with him? A reserve police officer from Texas writes:
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It's done so that the officer can be more certain that the person being interviewed is not being coerced to say that everything is alright. Last year in Hewitt, Texas, we went to a hostage situation. Lady would not come out of the house but kept telling us all was OK. After a couple of hours, we said if she came to the door to tell us all was OK, we would pack up and leave. She came to the door, we pulled her out, and found the hostage taker hiding in a closet with a hunting knife. Another renter had called this in, by the way.

On other occasions on domestic disturbance calls, the wife tells us she's OK and wants to stay home. We ask her to step out of the house to talk, she gets outside and asks us not to force her to go back in.

All we want to do is make sure the person being interviewed is in a safe place to tell us whether he or she really is OK or not.

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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
That 'stupidly' remark is looking more like that 'four fingers pointing back at you' all the time.
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 Owe It All To John D'Oh
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In law enforcement, there are few situations that are clear cut, and disorderly conduct is one of the fuzziest. As Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. now knows all too well, the misdemeanor charge can be used to corral people who are simply uncooperative or rude. State statutes are designed to help police officers maintain authority, and they are so broadly worded that divining what constitutes disorderly conduct is left up to the discretion of individual officers. "It's probably the most abused statute in America," says Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a good chunk of disorderly conduct charges end up being dropped, as happened in the case against Gates, who was arrested on his porch July 16 after yelling at the officer who responded to a report of a possible break-in at the Harvard scholar's home in Cambridge, Mass. Gates, who is black, accused Sgt. James Crowley, who is white, of being a racist and also cast aspersions about the cop's "mama". "Mr. Gates was given plenty of opportunities to stop what he was doing. He didn't. He acted very irrational. He controlled the outcome of that event," Crowley told WBZ Radio in Boston on Thursday.

Talking trash by itself isn't a punishable offense — unless, it seems, you draw a crowd while doing it, which is part of the allegation against Gates. That's why in the wake of the Gates incident, cops are holding firm on the need for lots of latitude in issuing disorderly conduct charges. President Barack Obama, who said earlier this week that Cambridge police had "acted stupidly," called Crowley Friday to make nice, though he stopped short of issuing the apology that Massachusetts police unions sought and maintained that he still thought "there was an overreaction."

"Disorderly conduct is a fluid concept," says Tom Nolan, a criminal justice professor at Boston University who spent 27 years in uniform at the Boston Police Department. "Unlike a lot of other crimes, this really calls for the use of discretion in a way that armed robbery or more serious felony crime doesn't. The less serious a crime, the more officer discretion you use," he says, adding "discretion is judgment that we hope is based on wisdom, experience and training."

Disorderly conduct has its roots in the mid-19th century, when police officers needed a way to quell street brawls that erupted frequently between recent immigrants and already established residents, often regarding labor issues. Crowds would gather and cops needed to restore order in public places. According to the Cambridge police report, Gates exhibited "loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place" that "caused citizens passing by this location to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed."

The issue of whether or not Gates — first in his home and later on his front porch — was in a public place has sparked plenty of debate, including in the blogosphere. Crowley's account of the incident included the detail that "at least seven" passers-by had stopped to rubberneck. Sam Goldberg, author of Boston Criminal Lawyer Blog, thinks the report includes that detail in order to bolster the case that this altercation was playing out publicly. "It's as if he was saying, 'Look, he was really causing a disturbance,'" says Goldberg, a criminal defense attorney at the Cambridge-based firm of Altman & Altman.

Jon Shane, who spent 17 years as a police officer in hardscrabble Newark, N.J., said that had he been the cop called to Gates' house, he would have left Gates and his huffy comments alone once he was sure Gates was the homeowner. He admits he may well have been offended by the professor's alleged bluster, but that's just part of the job, so much so that there's a term in police vernacular devoted to situations like this: contempt of cop.

"In contempt of court, you get loud and abusive in a courtroom, and it's against the law," says Shane, now a professor of criminal justice at John Jay who specializes in police policy and practice. "With contempt of cop, you get loud and nasty and show scorn for a law enforcement officer, but a police officer can't go out and lock you up for disorderly conduct because you were disrespectful toward them." The First Amendment allows you to say pretty much anything to the police. "You could tell them to go f--k themselves," says Shane, "and that's fine."

Like Shane, there are plenty of cops and ex-cops who think Gates' behavior didn't warrant the disorderly conduct charge, and there are those, like Nolan, who feel it did.

"Police pride themselves on resolving issues, and 99% of the time it occurs without arrests happening," says Nolan. "You are not going to win any accolades bringing in anyone for a street disturbance. It's a waste of time because in order to bring this situation to a conclusion, you've got hours of paperwork ahead of you."

"You do it because you have no other tool at your disposal," he says of disorderly conduct. "There really isn't any other choice."


http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1912777,00.html?xid=rss-topstories-cnnpartner
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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