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Gatesgate
By Anonymous on Sun, 07/26/2009 - 4:35pm
Sure, we should treat the cops with respect and society shouldn't encourage people to be reflexively hostile to police. They have a tough job, and we should all be properly respectful of people who are doing a dangerous and necessary job for the community. But when a citizen doesn't behave well, if not illegally, as will happen in a free society, it is incumbent upon the police, the ones with the tasers and the handcuffs and the guns, to exercise discretion wisely and professionally. And when they don't, we shouldn't make excuses for them. It's far more corrosive to society to allow authority figures to abuse their power than the other way around.
Henry Louis Gates may have acted like a jackass in his house that day. But Sergeant Crowley arresting him for being "tumultuous" was an abuse of his discretion, a fact which is backed up by the fact that the District Attorney used his discretion to decline to prosecute. Racially motivated or not he behaved "stupidly" and the president was right to say so.
Read the whole thing. It's worth your time. Come back here to discuss it.
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Comments
nothing that long about this case is "worth your time", IMHO.
What's more worth your time is a poll on politico.com:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25356.html
47% say race had nothing to do with the arrest.
That's all you need to know. Obama got the message and he backtracked on taking Skip Gates' bait and unnecessarily bringing up race.
We don't need to talk about race more in the US; we need to STOP talking about race. Skip Gates shouldn't have brought up race, neither should Lynne Sweet, or Barack Obama. Stop bringing race into problems that have nothing to do with the color of our skin.
Let's talk to each other as human beings! the more we talk about race, the more we see each other in terms of race, the more likely we are to subconsciously act differently when we see someone of another color, the more likely we are to think that we are being treated differently b/c of the color of our skin.
We elected a Barack Obama president in Massachusetts because we don't give a shit what color his skin was. No one gives a shit what color Skip Gates' skin is, not his wife, not any Cambridge PO. Hopefully he gets the message and shuts the hell up about it.
If he wants to make a film about Massholes, i'll watch it. If he wants to make a film about being an overpaid professor whose skin is black and who loves to talk about every situation being about that tiny part of his DNA code, i'm changing the channel.
the article's not so much about race as police and citizens
...this situation actually has far broader implications about all citizens' relationship to the police and the way we are expected to respond to authority, regardless of race. I've watched too many taser videos over the past few years featuring people of all races and both genders being put to the ground screaming in pain, not because they were dangerous or threatening and not because they were so out of control there was no other way to deal with them, but because they were arguing with police and the officer perceived a lack of respect for the badge.
I agree. This is not a racial profiling case.
Cops
You have to listen to a cop at the scene because you don't always know why the cop is there or what he is doing there. After you are free to go, file a complaint or ask to speak with the officer after. I have a friend that is a cop and he says that the bad cops that keep getting complaints end up at the desk or fired if its bad enough.
This Gates guy had 3 warnings to keep quiet or he would be arrested. He wanted to get arrested. Next time, file a complaint and if Crowley has enough of them, he will be dealt with.
If there were 1000 disorderly arrests every month or so we would have a problem. This is not a serious problem.
wanted to be arrested? Silliness.
Prof. Gates did not want to be arrested. Really. Think for a second. There is not a single logical reason why he would want to be arrested in this situation. If he wanted to be arrested, he likely would have committed an arrestable offense, which he did not.
More ass-u-me-ing
Agreed: I think it is unwarranted to assume that Gates "wanted to get arrested."
Disagreed: there are plausible reasons that a person in that situation might have wanted to get arrested, so we shouldn't say that there aren't. (Though I personally think that it is unlikely Gates wanted to be arrested, and, again, certainly we do not have evidence sufficient to go around accusing him of that, nor to publicly speculate that.)
A little Remix
You have to listen to an armed and dangerous person at the scene because you don't always know why the armed and dangerous person is there or what he is doing there. After you are free to go, call for help.
- riffing off of Digby teh Blogger here - when it comes down to people saying we have to deal with cops like we would with any armed thug, we do have a problem.
tired subject already...
come up with something new anonymous. Stop saying the same thing over and over.
"Racially motivated or not
"Racially motivated or not he behaved "stupidly" and the president was right to say so."
laughable and way too long. the writer is a blowhard.
So now the President has to comment on every single act of perceived or fake injustice that happens in every town in the country?
No.
He commented on a case that had nationwide attention when he was asked about it at a press conference. He also knows one of the players in this fiasco very well, and lived in the city the event occurred in. He made a mistake commenting the way he did, most would say, but its not like he came out and spoke about a random case. Far from it.
Acting?
"Henry Louis Gates may have acted like a jackass in his house that day"
As the details about this continue to emerge about this, it becomes more and more clear that Gates wasn't "acting" at all. He is an authentic jackass, through and through.
The "white" neighbor who called the cops in the first place, was reacting to several recent break-ins in the area, one of which at that very same address. She also didn't mention race at all during her 911 call (even though it would have been appropriate to do so for suspect description purposes) Oh, and she's Portuguese, not Anglo-Saxon. Surprise!
The cop who acted "stupidly" is a leader in racial sensitivity training, and was the very cop who performed mouth-to-mouth on a dying Reggie Lewis in an attempt to revive him. Yeah, lots of racist guys love any excuse to lock lips with a black man, don't they. Happens all the time.
A black cop on the scene backed the arrest 100%. And he was of the same rank (Sgt) as the arresting officer, so he was not scared of talking poorly of another cop with a superior rank.
Gates and his accompaniment of Professional Victims backed off significantly over the weekend, to the point that even Gates himself declared the issue "over". Why? Two main reasons: 1) Revelation of the above and many other points and 2) His attorney heard (or at the very least, heard-about) the police audio recordings of what REALLY happened.
Oh well, professor. Nice try. Better luck next time.
The saddest part about all this is that it trivializes the instances of REAL racism happening across our nation. There is no shortage of genuine racism going on, so there's no need to fabricate things, Skippy.