Because in a country where people are still being murdered because of prejudice, the President of the Fucking United States of America has decided to intervene in a pissing match between a possibly racist and probably arrogant cop and a possibly asshole Harvard professor. The only reason this is getting any attention is 'cause the guy is high-profile; if it were a poor Black man, most people wouldn’t give a damn.
Well, given that realistically he won’t make personal visits to every crime victim, which is better: that he doesn’t hold the proposed meeting, or that he proceeds and takes advantage of all the attention to use it as a teaching opportunity for the nation?
How about, “He picks a crime that was actually an obvious case of racism, instead of playing into a stupid media circus involving something that might have not even been about race”? I’m saying that if the President is going to dive into this muck, he might as well pick a better case to do it.
There are really two questions here, and that seems to be missing in this debate in America.
The first question is DID Mr Gates deserve to be arrested. The second is “are black people in American arrested more,” or “Do whites get let off more.”
Let’s look at the first question.
Did Gates deserve to be arrested? I don’t know but one needs to say from the stand point of the law did he do something that put him in a position where he could be arrested?
Let’s look at it like this.
Suppose I go through a red light and the guy in front of me also went through a red light and the guy in back of me also went through this red light. But the cop stops me and gives me a ticket.
Now in that case the question is “Did I deserve a ticket.” Well yes I did, I went through a red light. I can’t argue that because the cop didn’t ticket the guy in front or the guy behind me, that I shouldn’t get the ticket. If I tried that a judge would laugh me out of court.
The point is if I commit a traffic offense it doesn’t matter how many other people the cop DOESN’T stop, the point is I still violated the law.
So that’s what you first have to look at with Mr Gates. Did he do anything to, under the law, allow himself to be arrested. If so than the arrest was valid and that part of the case is closed.
If one can be assured he DID IN FACT commit an arrestable offense it could be argued effectively he used his influence to get out of an arrest.
This of course brings up a third question, do rich or famous people receive special treatment. In this case Mr Gates definately did. Had he been a poor black man probably wouldn’t have got the charges dropped, yet no one seems to be crying “poor people are discriminated against.”
The second question is do the police exercise their “judgement” more agaisnt blacks than whites. And that seems to be the case, at least in terms of arrest records, but even then it’s not so clear.
Clearly when a black person such as OJ, Kobe Bryant, Chris Browne or any other black person with money they get “special treatment.” This doesn’t mean they don’t suffer, but let’s face it OJ was a regular black man he most likely would’ve been convicted of murder whether or not he did it.
So I feel that it also needs to be studied the economics of it. Could it not be the color of one’s skin, but rather the fact African Americans are less affluent, that leads to the higher conviction rates? Now I don’t know that, but until you look at that and eliminate the possiblity it can’t be discounted.
There are many questions here
I voted for and continue to support Obama but I think this is a synaptic misfire on his part. This is the provenance of Dr. Phil or Larry King, not the PotUS.
The last time I saw Gates interviewed he was still implying he’s considering litigation (he wouldn’t state it definitely). If he does this it could be a very bad thing for him; overreaction or not, the statute can probably be interpreted to allow for his arrest, but if Crowley countersues Gates for libel there’s a good chance he’d win.
The most prima donna “Help! Help! I’m being opressed!” comment by Gates is his statement that because of this he better understands
Forget pouring over Uniform Crime Reports and FBI case files, just watch the TV show COPS sometime; you’ll learn that poor white men and poor Hispanic/black/other men and women get arrested for smarting off to cops also. NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT RACE.
This is the police officer you accused of racism because he followed up on a report your house was being broken into (which he is required to do) and asked you to step onto your porch (which is common procedure- policemen are trained from day one to control the environment as much as possible).
Well ain’t that sweet of ya?
Cut the plain folks appeal. You got your lawyer to get you out of jail- one that you admittedly should not have been in. It does not draw attention to a damned thing other than “some cops don’t take shit”. You accused a cop of racism whose colleagues, both black and white, all say that he is not a racist and who- almost for Law & Order overkill- has taught seminars on racial bias and profiling and you did so with absolutely no evidence and for no reason and now your attempt to write an epilogue to “letter from a Birmingham jail” is just making you look pathetic and makes me wonder if your research and scholastic merits reflects this calibre of judgment.
Personally I don’t see the relevance of “are black people in America arrested more” in this particular case.
I’m a gay man; if I made an ass of myself and got into a fight for reasons having nothing to do with my orientation, the statistics for hate crimes against gays are irrelevant; I’m a gay man who got into a fight, not a guy who was attacked for being gay. With the second question not being relevant the black/white disparity really isn’t relevant either to this particular case.
You don’t think being permissive on cases like this where the victim was simply arrested without cause can contribute to much more serious and egregious cases with much less benign types of cops?
Serious abuses in New Orleans, Chicago and LA all stem from the same type of abuse. People are arrested cavalierly and once they get into the station the thuggish and twisted cops start abusing the cuffed and caged person. They are just different shades of one color.
By not giving abuse like this the appropriate criticism and attention it opens the door for much more serious abuses to go unnoticed and unchecked. Your permissiveness is infectious. IF the law is written in a way to allow Crowley to act like this then the law really ought to be changed before it gets abused in a much uglier fashion.
Seriously, Sampiro, he wrote that as a 17 or 18 year old (I assume) who started integrated school in 1955, one year after Brown. I’m sure many of us wrote things that we don’t necessarily agree with or still believe at that age.
Racial identity development theory is something I studied in school, and for a lot of Black kids, it’s like being told you’re not crazy. Take a look here, and see Stage 3 especially:
http://www.pierce.ctc.edu/tlink/development/theme_identity_and_cohort/race_stages.html
I went through all of these stages too.
So far, the release of the 911 tapes and Crowley’s radio messages don’t help his credibility much. The 911 caller never mentioned race, and her lawyer states that she never spoke to Crowley at the scene. I listened carefully to the tape of Crowley’s radio transmission, and I can hear Gates in the background, but he certainly isn’t yelling. I’m not sure what he has to apologize for.
Crowley had an opportunity to defuse the situation somewhat. When asked by a Boston reporter if he would apologize to Gates, he went on a mild rant about how an apology would not come from him. Now, I think he could have easily said that he would sit down with Gates anytime - this doesn’t put him on the hook for an apology, and it puts the fire out.
I’m still amazed that there is not greater sympathy for a guy in his own home, probably surprised and in disbelief that he’s dealing with a police officer in his own home - he did nothing wrong at all. So analogizing this situation to a traffic stop, etc. doesn’t jibe at all.
One of the problems here, it seems, is that it seems that Crowley assumed (or at least, made his assumption known to Gates) that Gates was not the lawful resident of the house.
I actually have a fairly close analogy to draw here. I was at lunch with my mom about 2 months ago when she got a call from the alarm company. I followed her home, and about 20 minutes later, we got to the house. Five police cars were parked out front. We drove into the driveway, and as we got out, an officer immediately came up to us and asked, “Ma’am, do you live here?” My mom said yes, he asked for ID, and explained in full what the officers were doing. Somebody in fact had broken in the house.
The point is, the officer, in his tone and approach, assumed (at least in my interpretation) that my mom did live there. Every discussion point made was emphasizing her safety and the security of the home. The officers were completely professional, and my mom was mostly cool but a little distraught initially. Nobody took offense, and in fact the officer many times said, “I know this is stressful for you,” as he asked questions about when she left, if the doors were locked, who was around the house, etc.
It’s all in the delivery, I think. There were a lot of assumptions that Crowley made that are evident in the discrepancies between the report and the 911 call. I think this point, subtle though it might be, is why the situation escalated to the degree it did.
The last point I’ll make, and I admit this will probably be in need of clarification, is that Gates made assumptions too. As a Black male (as I am also), he has likely had experiences being profiled before, and knows of experiences of friends, colleagues, etc. in similar situations. Is it illogical for him to suspect that perhaps this is happening to him now, too? It might be wrong, in part or in toto, but in my mind, I’d be surprised if any Black man in America having an interaction with a police officer would be seriously worried that even if he is completely innocent, there could be very negative outcomes from the encounter.
I know Professor Gates, interviewed him, and corresponded with him over e-mail, and have casually talked with the man on several occasions. I have many mentors and friends who know him quite well and speak highly of him, and I’ve never heard one person mention his temper. My friends in Afro-Am do not speak uniformly positively of all the faculty, but I’ve never heard someone speak poorly of him, both personally and in his approach to scholarship.
I have been in small gatherings with Dr. Gates, and he is self-effacing but confident, and his colleagues in the department are White, Asian, and Black. He actually was one of the few faculty members who spoke positively about Larry Summers during his tenure as president at Harvard - which made me re-evaluate my thoughts about him (Summers). Just a counter-perspective to this observation.
It’s baffling to me as well. As far as I’m concerned we can throw out the racial element entirely. That citizens are so conditioned to not even question this frightens me, is it any wonder why police seem to act as if they are above reproach?
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with” and “I’ll come on the porch to talk to ya mama” aren’t statements normally attributed to self effacement.
As for him being 17 or 18 when writing the letter about whitey judging him, it was an accusatory statement to make regardless of the age. This wasn’t the University of Alabama or Mississippi; black students had been applying to/admitted to Yale for almost 90 years when he applied. MLK and W.E.B. Dubois seem to have gotten admitted without dancing a victimization gavotte.
As for being approached in his own home, GATES HIMSELF has said that the call to 911 was completely justified and that he has no ill will at all against the caller (Whalen). The validity of a follow-up is not an issue; it was valid, and the race of the two men trying to wedge the door was not an issue on the call itself. Asking for ID- also totally valid. I have no problem admitting arresting Gates was out of line and clearly due to Crowley losing his temper, but that doesn’t mean it was racially motivated.
As for Gates not being heard screaming on the radio call, does anybody seriously think the officer said “Well, he’s calm and collected, but I’m going to arrest him anyway just for the hell of it?”
Neither would they if it were a poor white man arrested by a black cop. I guess being a celebrity black Harvard professor friend of a black President has its privileges. Gates sounds like a jerk with a chip on his shoulder.
I wonder what the atmosphere is going to be like at this little beer-fest Obama has planned. Wouldn’t you feel like a dork sitting there with the President drinking a Bud in front of the cameras because of this stupid dust-up? The cop, being apparently a normal human being, is probably dreading it, but if he tries to get out of it, people will really be calling him a racist.
I’m anticipating a drunken brawl with Obama fighting on both sides.
Crowley’s caught in a potential lie. In his official report, he states that the woman who made the call told him she had seen “what appeared to be two black males with backpacks”. But the 911 call has the woman on the phone describe the men and she never mentions that they’re black (even when prompted about race), and she denies ever telling Crowley that they were black when she met him outside the house in person (since she ID’d herself as the one who made the phone call).
Despite this, some folks still have it set in their minds that Gates was a belligerent asshole and Crowley’s an objective, fair-minded observer. Of course, all of the claims of Gates calling the officer a racist, yelling, “yo mama”-ing, are from Crowley’s report.
Now if Crowley got such essential facts wrong as ArchiveGuy and I, and others have noted since the tapes were made available, what else did he get wrong?
Doesn’t mean that every thing in the report isn’t true, but it is interesting that so many obediently believed the officer’s report and never gave any credence to Gates’ account…
Of course if any of Crowley’s remarks or his police report are shown to be false, he still probably won’t be punished in any real way. Better to just go along I suppose, right Ivorybill?
In a 2004 court case ,The Mass. court ruled you can not arrest a person for yelling at a cop. It is against his constitutional right of free speech. So the cop had to lure him outside to have an excuse to arrest him, for a trumped up disturbing the police charge.
The alternative story:
Crowley went to the house. He knocked on the door and said
Gates responds, in an even and hospitable voice, “Of course you can officer, and might I add that I applaud your work in keeping this neighborhood free of burglary?” Gates presents him with ID, whereupon Crowley responds
[QUOTE]
[Judge Chamberlain Hallervoice]I don’t like yo’r attitude. I’m takin’ you to jail.[/Judge Chamberlain Haller voice]
Now Crowley knows by this time that Gates is a Ph.D. at Harvard and the rightful occupant of the university owned house. He knows that false arrest of a tenured professor- one whose name and persona is probably at least familiar to him (and you have to be a high-up to live in that house I would imagine)- is likely to look very bad on him, especially since Gates cooperated fully, but does he care? Oh hell no, he just knows this is the one chance he has to arrest a black senior citizen with a cane and a Ph.D. . do you know how many points that is on the Cambridge Police Department scavenger hunt? One blue haired lesbian toting a boombox playing Sinatra and he’s on his way to Aruba for two weeks.
The fact that in his 20 year career he hasn’t had claims of racism lobbied against him and in fact has taught seminars on racial profiling and is vouched for by the black police chief who hired him and by the black officers who know him? Dismissible. They probably help him hide his brutality because each one knows how many drugs the others have all stolen from the evidence room because, you know, one hand washes the other and police corruption as a uniter trumps race as a divider.
Does anybody think this is closer to the truth?
You can take it to that extreme, but how about this: perhaps Crowley’s account has inconsistencies, and not every thing reported is exactly as it transpired?
Who but you keeps bringing up this racism angle? What does this exaggerated anecdote have to do with anything? The consensus seems to be that Gates probably had a hair trigger due to a lifetime of subtle racism, and his attitude might have been a result. Who’s accusing Crowley of being a steaming racist? At worst he probably made a presumption of guilt which Gates picked up on, but no one seems to be arguing that he railroaded Gates because he was a black man. He was just a pig headed asshole for it’s own sake.