Agreed. It sounds like Gates was being a grade A douchebag, and is going to play the race card to get away with it. The police were reporting a reported break in. All Gates had to do was show some ID and the cop would have been on his merry way. Instead, he decided to make it a racial thing and got himself arrested for abusing a cop.
In the other thread they’re saying that the police report indicates he did show ID (his Harvard ID) and the officer was fully convinced almost from the beginning that Gates was who he said he was and was in his own house.
The link to the report, however, seems to be broken. I’d like to read it because what people are saying is that you’d think the report written by the officer would make the officer look good–but instead, it makes him look like he needs to take an unpaid leave for a while.
The cop’s report says Gates showed gave him his Harvard ID. Here’s a second link to a copy of the police report.
After yelling at him and calling him a racist. My point is that it is Gates that escalated and caused the incident. If this had occurred at a non-douchebag’s home the conversation goes:
Officer: “We had a report of someone breaking into this home”
NDB: “Oh, my front door was stuck, here is my ID”
Officer: “Thank you sir, have a nice night.”
Instead it’s
Officer: “We had a report of someone breaking into this home”
DB: “Why because I am a black man in America?”
You know this how?
Once he showed them his ID, they should have fucked off. The end.
Agreed. Even the most racist cop in the world wouldn’t hassle a black man that lives in a posh neighborhood because green is a much more important color than white or black.
I also wonder (assuming he hasn’t had to deal with the police before) if he misunderstood the police’s general attitude. More or less every cop I’ve ever met has had a seriously suspicious, hard-edged manner. This applies to cops in the most crime-free suburb, too. They usually have an emotional barrier and aren’t known for being polite. Furthermore, they tend to act as if you did do something wrong and they just don’t know what it is… yet. This makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Presumably, it’s because they’re always feeling a little endangered and also because it makes actual guilty people crack up.
He yelled at them for a while before showing his ID. He finally showed it, they did leave, and he followed them out, continuing to yell. RTFA.
Most people would be happy to do just about anything to cooperate with the police. But in America, we’re not required to, especially within our own homes.
If a man answers the doorbell of a residence, the logical assumption is that he lives there. You start assuming people are hiding some criminal act, and it gives you license to harrass people on nothing more than your suspicion.
Unless there had just been a report of someone breaking and entering.
I tend to think the police screwed up here, but several people have said something like the above, and I think that is definitely not where they screwed up. If someone calls reporting a breaking/entering into my house, then when the police arrive and I answer the door, they should ask me to show that I live in that house. A driver’s license should do fine. Even if I don’t have one, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.
On the other hand, if I am angry at the police for disrupting my day, and if I think they are persecuting me, they should, basically, ignore that, just get the i.d., and leave.
Unless two people have just been seen breaking into the same house.
You start assuming people might be hiding some criminal act when someone saw them breaking into a house.
Police report and reading through the lines of Gates’ lawyers statement.
He was “fucking off”, but Gates chose to follow him outside to yell some more.
They did. He followed them out of the house, still yelling at them. For some reason that little detail keeps escaping people.
How viciously unAmerican.
Screw the principals behind the First Amendment. You must respect authority or you deserve to go to jail.
I did not forget that detail, that detail is part of their failure to do what I was saying they should have done.
You’re saying they did what? “Basically ignore that and leave” as I said? No, they started to leave, but did not follow through. They turned around and arrested him because he was yelling* at them. That–his signifying his frustration–is what I was saying they should have ignored, leaving instead.
*(Awww, poow widdle powice officews getting awl yewwed at!)
They’d left the house.
What would set them off is thinking they had a bust, and then finding out their target was innocent. I got hassled by the cops all the time when I was a DFH. I used to get pulled over and get my ar searched all the time because I had long hair and lived in a right wing conservative town. The cops always used to get really annoyed when they couldn’t find anything. It would piss them off that I did not have any drugs or weapons in the car. They acted like I was ssomehow getting away with something by being innocent.
One time a cop frisked me, drunk tested me, shone the flashlight around in my car, searched my trunk, couldn’t find anything and then told me “you got lucky, asshole.” Somehow, not being a criminal was sly and sneaky in their eyes. It’slike they feel cheated.
I suspect that something like that was going on in this case. They thought they were going to get to bust a minority breaking into a rich whitey’s house, and then this guy that they already decided before they got there was a criminal turns out to be the homeowner, and richer than them and completely insubordinate to them.
When the cops couldn’t find any drugs in my car, they used to contrive equipment citations just to be able to write something. I had a cop give me a ticket for having too much snow on a windshield that had a microscopic amount of snow on it. I had a cop write me a ticket for wearing sunglasses while driving at night. I’ve had a cop write me a ticket for taking my seatbelt off to get my drivers licence (and he SAW me take my seatbelt off, he was standing at the window).
I think that may be the equivalent of what these cops were doing. They weren’t going to let this guy get away without busting him for something.
Says who, the cops?
Police reports are not cites. You can’t support the police account by citing the police account. That’s circular.
Whether intentionally or not, I think the police probably arrested Gates because he was embarrassing them in front of a crowd of people.