Professor Skip Gates arrested in front of his own home; claims racism from Cambridge police

Great Debates
1

One of my students sent me this link:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1911737,00.html?artId=1911737?contType=article?chn=us

He asked a few questions about it… not sure if I want to make this a Great Debate, so I’m posting his questions and my responses here IMHO…

Ironically, I was talking to a student about my experience interviewing Dr. Gates for my dissertation right before I saw the story on CNN.com.

I actually know where Gates lives. It’s a very posh street right off of Mt. Auburn St., about a mile from the school of ed. I have a few prof friends who live near there. Very quiet, 100% crime free, and the sort of place I imagine people leave their doors unlocked.

So yeah, like you, I’m nonplussed about the complaint to police. Seems to me anybody able to observe Gates at his door would notice him - either they know him personally, or they should recognize him. Secondly, Gates has a degenerative hip condition and he walks with a cane. I can see him struggling to open a door, so that’s explainable. I don’t think it’s clear who called the police. It could have been some random busybody who doesn’t even live there - it’s highly unlikely that a neighbor anywhere near him wouldn’t know Gates.

It’s pretty surprising that a semi-literate Cantabrigian wouldn’t recognize Gates. If an officer came on the scene, I would think he’d recognize Gates… just like I would think they would recognize Cornel West or Larry Summers. Gates has been at Harvard for about 20 years now, he’s on TV quite a bit.

[Cambridge accent]Irregardless…[/Ca]

Sure, it might have been SOP for the officer to ask for ID. But honestly, I can see where Gates is coming from. Suppose he had a long, tiring day, his hip was hurting, and all he wanted to do was get in the house, pop a Tylenol, and take a nap on the couch. You’re minding your own business, in the place you’ve lived for years, and a cop asks you for ID… that would potentially piss me off. You didn’t just move in, it’s not 1950. This is the sort of indignity people of color often deal with - being mistaken for waitstaff/janitors, having people call the police on you, being assumed to be a criminal. And no matter what steps you take, how well educated and cultured you are, it can happen to you at any time. It’s unlikely (in my mind) that Larry Summers (to analogize an equally famous Harvard prof) would deal with this stuff. Of course we don’t know, but we do know that if he did, race wouldn’t be an underlying issue in the interaction.

What I think Gates was pissed off or annoyed about was the fact that someone could pick up a phone and ruin his day. I think I mentioned Chester Pierce’s theory of racial microaggressions in class before - small indignities that are not at the level of being called the “n-word” or having a cross burned in your lawn, but the stuff like being assumed to be a criminal. Case in point - I talked to a prof one time about being in his office in Harvard Yard late one night, and getting the whole security brush-down from a police officer as he was locking his office to leave. He mentioned this in passing to a White colleague, who mentioned that he’d been in his office after hours many times late, and had never been approached by any police officers. He’s older and looks like a Harvard prof, while the Black professor is younger and has dreadlocks. Dealing with stuff like that, that is not clearly identifiably “RACISM!” can make one hypersensitive and second-guess even innocuous interactions that perhaps touch on other societal issues (class, gender, nationality, etc.). Not knowing the interaction completely from either perspective I can’t really assess who’s in the wrong - the officer, Dr. Gates, or both of them to an extent. But boy, do I know that feeling of disappointment, the pitting of your stomach when you know, no matter how far you’ve come - being from rural West Virginia, finding your way to Yale and Cambridge, being a world-famous author and scholar in your field, founding the preeminent Black Studies department in the nation, if not the world, having your own show on PBS and hobnobbing with Oprah, Chris Rock, and high profile celebrities - and someone can call the cops when you’re trying to open your front door and place you on the same level as a petty criminal.

Is it because you’re Black? I don’t know but I would wager that’s where his anger comes from.

You know, that would have been a great idea. HUPD has a substation nearby and likely could have been there in seconds. It would have been a better decision that to arrest him! But if the officer didn’t know who he was and he didn’t identify himself, he wouldn’t necessarily make the connection to call HUPD…

Just my $.02. Messed up. I can imagine when the officer heard “racist” the situation escalated 1000%. But again, I don’t necessarily feel like identifying myself when opening the door to my own freakin’ house, in which I’ve lived for 10+ years…

2

Reminds me of the time when one of my husband’s colleagues was stopped by the police while driving his pickup truck. Willie works a side job cutting grass, and has a trailer full of lawn mowers, weed eaters, etc. The officer seemed to think that Willie had stolen this stuff. The stupid thing is, Willie works for the same city the officer did - he’s the guy who installs traffic signs… Seems like the officer would have known and recognized him.

3

Reading the account of the arrest, I’m struggling to understand how the police officer could possibly have allowed the situation to escalate to where it did. According to the account, Gates was already in his home when the cop arrived.

4

RickJay, I read it as he was at the door when he was confronted. If he got in the house and they were giving him shit, that’s racist!

5

I dunno, I live in a well-to-do neighborhood (I rent) and couldn’t pick my neighbors out of a lineup if I had to. (The one that I could moved away.) Then again, I don’t call the cops on anyone entering a door through a reasonably normal-looking means, including needing to struggle with a key.

That being said, I can see where he’s coming from - a few years back my husband was mowing our lawn, and was stopped by a bypasser, asking him in very simple English if he could mow their lawn afterwards. I think either the fact that he was mowing (few people around here actually mow their own lawns) or that he has a non-pale skin tone (Italian descent, works outside) led them to assume that he was a member of a lawn crew and possibly not fluent in English. Our neighbor across the street and over one house also criticized him once for kissing his “girlfriend” - we’d met on our front walk when he was delivering our house’s own mail, and I gave him a kiss. He informed the nosy old man that he happens to be the guy’s neighbor as well as postman, and that was his house and wife.

6

My coworker’s son-in-law, who happens to be black, was working for the local Trane air conditioning installer doing after-hours house calls to make some extra money before his first child was born.

The dispatcher got a call from a couple who were out of town, whose housesitter had called them to say the air was out. So, off he went, and started inspecting the condenser, which was next to the house and accessible from the front yard. Lights were all off, so he put on a floodlight.

Next thing he knows, there’s a cop standing behind him with gun drawn.

Turns out the owners hadn’t told the housesitter about the repair call, so she saw a black guy outside with tools- in a pretty clearly marked uniform, and with a giant floodlight- and assumed he was a prowler.

7

Let me get this straight:

A man is trying to pry open a door to his own house.

The police are called.

The man then refuses to identify himself to the police and calls them racists.

The man is arrested.

The man claims it is a racist act.

This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I have read in a long time.

If the professor would have said, ‘I lost my keys. Here is my I.D.’. It would have been over. Instead of showing a little restraint Gates goes off on a rant about how the cops are racists when the cops* showed up to protect his property*.

I’m sorry but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that if you pry open the door to your own house and a cop shows up, the cop ain’t gonna know it is your house unless you provide some ID. Heck, I had a similar incident when I had to climb in a window at a previous apartment. A cop saw me climbing in the window, came and knocked on my door. I spoke with him for about 5 minutes, showed my I.D. and lease and he was gone.

Slee

8

He did identify himself. He showed his Harvard ID and the Harvard police were called. At this point, there was *no reason for the officer to call Harvard police or to do anything other than say “Sorry, Professor Gates, have a nice day” and take his leave. It was the officer who chose to escalate the incident further.

Note that Gates was not arrested inside the house, presumably because there was no warrant, and it would take a much higher level of loudness and commotion to justify an arrest for disorderly conduct or anything similar while inside a house. Instead the police officer tells Gates that he’ll talk to him on the porch and then, once he’s outside, arrests him, essentially, for being too boisterous in a “public” place.

Read the police report. It should be slanted in the officer’s favor, it instead makes him look like a reactionary idiot – and he’s the one who wrote it.

9

You mean those rumours I’ve been hearing about postmen are not true/ HTe ones where they have a girlfriend in every street? :smiley:

10

The linked article is very sketchy. These may help flesh out the incident:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/harvard.html[http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/harvard.html](http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/harvard.html)

The person who called the police is identified by name, but no info is given about her (e.g., whether or not she is a neighbor). She says she saw two men apparently trying to force the door open (the other was Gates’ driver). It sounds reasonable to me for her to suspect something fishy.

Having received a tip of a possible crime being committed, I think the officer would have negligent not to investigate. However, he could have communicated his concerns (“No sir, not because you’re black, but because we received a report of two men forcing entry.”)

Gates may well be justified in his feelings, but it doesn’t strike me a wise for him to have been indignant, uncooperative, and accusatory. Just as he wants the benefit of the doubt, not being automatically suspect because he’s black, he might show the same benefit to the officer and not automatically suspect racism. Seems to me he could have put two and two together – he knew he had been pushing on the door, the officer said there was a suspected break-in – and seen how the misperception could arise. It’s easy to speculate that he was more invested in getting on a racism high horse than in being reasonable about the situation.

I would think that seeing Gates’ ID should settle it for the cop. Maybe Gates’ was being loud and unruly, but it seems a bit much to arrest someone for ranting on his own front porch. It’s easy to speculate that the cop was more invested in his “contempt of cop” high horse than in being reasonable about the situation.

Maybe it was national “everybody jump to conclusions, take offense, and do the wrong thing” day.

As far as recognizing Gates, that is not something I would expect. There are plenty of neighborhoods where people don’t know their neighbors. There are plenty of people who don’t watch the type of TV shows that Gates appears on. Just because something is achingly familiar to some people doesn’t mean it’s familiar to all people.

We’ll probably never know if racism by the cop, conscious or subconscious, was a factor here. It’s plausible either way (i.e., racist vs. non-racist).

11

Where’d you see that? What I read indicates the officer was leaving but Gates followed him onto the porch so as to continue ranting at him.

12

The thing that I found interesting was that Gates allowed himself to be herded outside; out of the ‘protection’ of his home. I think his status as an intellectual dulled his ‘brother-sense’. As I read the report, i kept screaming to him, don’t let him get you to the front the door or you’re going to the slam.

That act convinced me that the Officer wasn’t interested in de-fusing the situation, but to teach Gates a lesson. Gates asked several times for the Officer’s ID. The Officer claimed that because of the ‘acoustics’, he couldn’t hear Gates and they needed to go outside. (The acoustics of that big ol’ fancy house) If the Officer was interested in keeping the peace, he could’ve written down his ID and exited. He didn’t.

In his report, the Officer even noted Gates disabilitiy, with little, “I don’t believe this guy” quotes, when Gates requested his cane, while the Officer was cuffing him.

Could Gates have handled this better? Absolutely, but I think that people don’t realize that after a lifetime of a thousand cuts, one gets tired of putting on band-aids and being accused once again of not belonging, especially in one’s own home, that must have been the final cut for Gates in his lifetime of bleeding and he over-reacted. He had also just returned from a long trip and was just plain tired and cranky.

However, he was not the person with the color of authority there, the Officer was and once he established Gates identity, it was his responsibility to withdraw; especially once he realized Gates was losing it, because of his perception right or wrong that he was being singled-out.

Did the Officer deserve to be chewed out, no; but that’s part of the job sometimes. The other part of the job is to serve the community and what service was accomplished by arresting a 60 old man on his front porch because he yelled at you?

13

Another factor may have been the policeman’s initial… I don’t know how to call it, attitude, the way to present himself.

I didn’t understand the expression “in your face” until the day I got home and found my landlady barely on the good side of a heart attack. She was completely freaked out; her neighbor and best friend had been trying to calm her down for more than half an hour. The cause? Two FBI machitos who’d gone there as part of a routine background check on a previous boarder and treated her like she was suspicious of harboring a meth lab, getting real close to her so she kept stepping back, etc. Repeat: they were there to ask “do you know this guy? Did he do any drugs? Did he do anything suspicious?” - but they made this 62 year old, 4’10" citizen with a list of health problems longer than Pau Gassol feel like they were about to ship her quadroon ass back to Jamaica.

14

Gates Lawyer Speaks

15

Apparently the old guy across the street thought so! The funny thing was, at the time I walked off to the store and half-chuckled to myself about what “kissing the postman” on the front walk might look like to someone. :smack:

I take my previous comment back - I couldn’t ID the old dude in a lineup, but I could “in context” next to his house. He’s always outside working on his lawn, including (I am not kidding) hand-trimming the lawn edges with small shears and - apparently - a scissors. Maybe he spends all that time out there so he can be the neighborhood snoop.

16

On the one hand…the police dropped by here and asked my husband for id when he forgot his keys and climbed in through a route he was familiar with from his youth. He has lived here since he was a young boy, but all the neighbors have not and neither have all the people who, say, ride by in cars or on bikes who might have called it in. My husband gave them his id of course, and said he was happy somebody noticed.

What I do not understand is that from the beginning this officer was convinved that Gates lived there, he did not at any time really think Gates was an intruder. He says so in his report. I have a hard time figuring out why, since this was the case, he escalated by calling in other police and so on. If it was not racism I would surely like to know what it was.

Gates did not win any Boy Scout medals with his own behavior, but that’s not yet illegal in the US (even in Cambridge).

17

Well, it’ll give him some new material for his next lecture, right?

18

I’m not an attorney, but I would think as a general rule of thumb, when you’re spinning your version of events, don’t make your client appear so saintly that the description of events completely flies in the face of logic. I don’t know whether either or both sides were in the wrong, but I’m positive there’s more to it than what appears in that account.

Unless, of course, Prof. Gates is a victim of the biggest racist frame-up conspiracy since O.J.

19

Based on the officer’s report, Gates was properly arrested for disorderly conduct. Based on Gate’s report, the officer is a racist pig. Oh well.

20

Interesting how the lawyer never once mentioned race.