I've been mulling over the Henry Louis Gates imbroglio for the last couple of days and trying to compose a post that does at least minor justice to its racial and class implications, its town-gown subtext, and what it says about our attitudes toward police-civilian relations. I feel like I have some sense of the dynamics involved here -- I grew up in the Boston area, the son of a long-time Massachusetts State cop. Massachusetts is neither the stereotypical liberal utopia of some imaginations (nor the racist distopia advanced by others) -- it's a complicated, deeply rooted, oft-times parochial place laden with a certain chip on the shoulder aggressiveness steeped in issues of class.
I can't, on the other hand, pretend to know at a gut level how someone like Henry Louis Gates would feel upon being challenged in his own home by a police officer. About the best I can do is imagine my own cranky, middle-aged guy reaction to coming home from a long trip, finding I can't open my front door (because it has been damaged in a break-in attempt), finally getting into the goddamned house and then finding myself being confronted by a cop demanding to know why I was in my own house. Even without the racial context (a classic how'd you like the play Mrs. Lincoln caveat), I am pretty sure that I would be really pissed off and ready to explode.
My guess is that Gates may have unloaded on Sgt. Crowley pretty well. It would hardly be shocking. And it sounds like Gates probably resorted to the "don't you know who I am" gambit -- a favorite of cops since time immemorial. (I can attest from my father's experience that every guy in Massachusetts who has a cousin who is a city councilman thinks he is a VIP and thus entitled to speed, double park, or drive drunk.) So not only do we have a confrontation here with all of the immense baggage of a white cop confronting a black man in his home, we also have the class component of a Harvard professor berating a Cambridge cop. Clearly, no good could come of this particular dynamic -- and didn't. [I was amused to see that Crowley was once a security officer at Brandeis, my alma mater -- and a place where I was stopped by security multiple times over the years for looking like a townie.]
I think the onus for the blow up lies with Crowley. Once he had ascertained that Gates was in his own home, Crowley should have gotten the hell out of there. He should have apologized for any inconvenience he had caused Gates and retreated, even in the face of verbal abuse. Gates is a 58 year old man who walks with a cane -- he was not remotely a physical threat to Crowley. Arresting Gates and handcuffing him was an unnecessary escalation of a situation that Crowley could have ended by simply hopping in his patrol car and hitting the road. A police officer's job is to preserve the peace, not wield his authority to arrest and detain someone in order to assuage a wounded sense of pride.
Of course, this was a relatively minor abuse of police authority compared to the shooting of an unarmed man by BART police, the recent pepper spraying of attendees at a Francine Busby fund raiser in San Diego, the tasering of a 72 year old women in Texas, not to mention the seemingly endless series of bad shoots and racial abuses by the NYPD over the last decade, e.g. Sean Bell, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo. What I find astonishing is the number of people who seem to take the position that the only appropriate stance when confronted by police is to shut the fuck up. This does not really seem to be an approach befitting a democracy. (Of course some of the right wingers seem to think shooting law enforcement officers in the head is alright, as long as you aren't verbally disrespectful.) The growing tendency of police to escalate in even the most minor confrontations should be a concern to us all.
Having said all this, I winced when Obama weighed in on the case Wednesday night. He should have given the standard "I don't know all of the facts" pablum. Instead, he stepped all over his health care reform message by giving the idiots in the media a tasty racial story to obsess about. It was an uncharacteristically undisciplined moment by the President (one which I think bespeaks his genuine outrage about the case) and it destroyed the entire purpose of having called the press conference in the first place. (And I'm sorry, as someone observed (I think at Eschaton) you deal with the press corps you have not the one you wish you had.) I was glad to see him backing off a bit today -- who knows, if he gets Gates and Crowley to come to the White House, it may turn into a public relations triumph. But for the moment it seems a self-indulgent mistake.
i grudgingly think you are correct about obama, although i still like the moment becuase we see so few real moments from him (which, on the whole is a good thing; discipline gets things done). i also think that, having said what he said, he should not have backed down. it would have been better to refuse further comment.
the rest has little to do with your post SC and much to do with venting.
all of us try to live, consciously or unconsciously, in self-reinforcing universes; cops are no different, but cops have a lot more power over other people than most of us do. they therefore have commensurately greater responsiblities. even the supreme court, no friend of the ordinary person, recognizes this. see, e.g., city of hill v. houston, 482 u.s. 451; lewis v. new olreans, 415 u.s. 130 (particularly justice powell's concurrence). the problem is that the law only recognizes the problem after the cops exercise their petty power to arrest you and make you suffer in handcuffs, in jail overnight, in fighting the charge on first amendment grounds (among the very few cases we won on appeal in the bush era were some disorderly conduct charges that we won on first amendment grounds (surprise! they involved african-americans arrested on facts of lese majeste). i don't know how to make it different. i do think that condemning it, loudly and often is a useful thing, if not necessarily, in these particular (dire economic) circumstances by the president. for any person of any race to be arrested in the circumstances that gates was arrested is wrong. and, frankly, stupid. the president was human, but right, in denouncing it. i hope it does not hurt his other righteous causes.
the problem, as i see it day after day, is that power, even petty power leads to abuse. when one has power over others, some tend to personalize it, to flaunt it. cops have a very difficult jobs. unfortunately, like other people, they tend to emphasize their power in situations in which the threat to it is the least---an older gentleman, hobbled, armed only with his words and his hurt is an easy person over which to exercise power. that is not just a police problem; it is an american problem, but, if we are to address it we must address it publicly and not submit to the outrage of the blue shield.
in my job, i see a lot of cops. the overwhelming majority are good people, but even good people make mistakes. those mistakes needn't cost a job or a pension, but they should not be excused in the name of law enforcement and risk.
my favorite of my own cases is the one in which an immigration officer who had stopped my client explained at the suppression hearing that, although he had no radar gun and although the road was open and landmarks few, he knew my client was speeding because of this thing called the doppler effect. this amused me greatly, for i never expected to be able to beat the circuit's announced standard of showing defiance of physical laws. i won the case, but you sure can't tell why from the opinion---it would be too much for a court to say an officer made stuff up. i think that we must get past the idea that a dangerous, difficult job justifies whatever is done, and whatever is said in defense of what was done
Posted by: big bad wolf | July 24, 2009 at 11:59 PM
Yeah, I have to agree on the take on Obama, too, unfortunately. At least from a tactical standpoint. Morally, I am proud of him for what he said, and saddened to see him backtracking on it, to whatever degree he is. I don't blame him for that—healthcare is so much bigger than him, or his ego, or any effect this incidence has on race or the cops—but it's still disheartening to see him do it. That said, fuck the news media which has made him have to do that. They all have nothing but my hate.
You know, I am white. Pale white. About as white as you can get without being like one of those porcelain-faced redheads of brunettes that Marilyn Manson is always dating. And I am terrified of the cops. Yeah, it is a sad fact, but I can say with, like, 98% certainty that if it was me, personally, in that situation, no way I disrespect the cop. I am am my best behavior. I have heard to many stories, and had 2-3 incidents myself, to think anything other than cops are a dangerous, dangerous presence. They're like tigers. You run into a tiger, it might not eat you, probably doesn't even want to, and if you don't provoke it, it won't. But the thought is crossing it's mind, it can if it wants, and nothing bad will happen to it if it does. And if you make one wrong move, it definitely will. Whenever I see flashing lights in the rearview, my adrenalin kicks in.
So, I guess I don't understand what Gate was thinking, or really, what anybody who would do such a thing would be thinking. You don't yell at tiger for entering your campsite. This doesn't mean he was at fault, of course, even with the class angle(which, I'll admit, makes me slightly less sympathetic, though it in no way lessens the level of injustice perpetrated upon him). What he did was human. You shouldn't have to stop acting like a human just because a cop is around. But you do.
Posted by: Corvus9 | July 25, 2009 at 12:35 AM
Corvus9:
You are right. I don't know what Gates was thinking either. As sad as it is, you can't talk back to the cops, however justified it might be. I've gotten bogus tickets before. One time, I actually got a little irate and asked the cop why I was ticketed for when we both knew it was bogus. The cop added an extra $50 to the fine because I dared talk back to him. Come time to go to court to fight it, the judge reduced the ticket back to the original bogus amount. Yes, I got a $150 ticket that should have been thrown out reduced to $100 because I talked back to the cop. Tell me that is fair. And then cops wonder why people don't trust them.
Posted by: Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle | July 25, 2009 at 02:25 AM
i don't disagree that eyes down and submissive is the practical approach no matter how wrong the cop is, but i do think it is wrong to make this submission a civic virtue, rather than a practicality. and i think deference to what law enforcement says is not a virtue in a justice, no matter how good s/he is on other issues. senator leahey would seem to disagree. http://www.votesmart.org/speech_detail.php?sc_id=478693&keyword=&phrase=&contain=
Posted by: big bad wolf | July 25, 2009 at 02:34 AM
Wow!! I never thought that this will be such a big news. It went from Gates arrest to Obama apalogy. This has become more interesting than what I thought. So, I collected all the sites or articles (more than 250 sites or articles) related to this hot topic "Cambridge Police Unit Demands Apology from Obama". If you are interested take a look at news, video coverage, people views and reviews on this topic at the below link.
http://markthispage.blogspot.com/2009/07/all-about-cambridge-police-unit-demands.html
Posted by: sri | July 25, 2009 at 02:44 AM
in my narrow, righteous indignation i do not want to let pass that SC's title for this post is quite amusing and apt. a lot of capital invested, then backtracking.
Posted by: big bad wolf | July 25, 2009 at 02:50 AM
You go with the cops you have. I lost a father to an officer who thought shooting up a car that did not heed his stop request was a good idea. I lost a best friend to an officer threatened by an out of shape little geek wielding a phillips screwdriver at 50 paces. And that's just the ones I know personally, I know others who have been harassed and or killed by police.
So until we change how we deal with their misbehavior, and the rules they operate under, in no case do I believe you should stand up to a police officer.
Perhaps this is one place where I am cowed, but it is true. My spouse was angry at me tonight for calling the police on some angry guy behind our apartment building laying on his horn and starting arguments with passerbys.
Posted by: Crissa | July 25, 2009 at 04:27 AM
He should have given the standard "I don't know all of the facts" pablum.
Of course, he did begin his comments with that.
Funny how that's been ignored.
Posted by: oddjob | July 25, 2009 at 05:33 AM
Crissa, I'm so sorry for your losses. That's absolutely awful. Good God.
Sir C, I had pretty much the same take on this as you. I'll admit, though, at first I reflexively defended the president's wading in and denouncing the behavior as stupid. But then, when I saw the results--a media obsessed and a health-care discussion derailed--I wondered if our president having a rare undisciplined moment (I *think* that might have been anger in his eyes, but he's so damned cool and collected, it was hard to tell) was a good thing after all.
Then again, as oddjob points out, he *did* indeed preface his remark with the admission that he wasn't there, and he didn't know all the facts. With 20/20 hindsight, we can all opine that he ought to have just said, Listen, Skip is a friend, and I think it's best that I don't comment on any of this until all the facts are known. Next!, but then again, how could he not offer his thoughts on a matter that undoubtedly evoked memories that were as painful and personal for him as they were for the many black journalists who spoke of similar profiling incidents they'd endured? *HUGE sigh*
As you pointed out, the hyenas did indeed spend the following 24 hours (and more) braying about what was a singular incident.
My brother-in-law was profiled and subsequently pulled over for nothing, then dragged out of his truck and beaten and handcuffed, which actions would leave him with a badly broken wrist and damaged cervical vetebrae where the cop's boot stood on his neck. Like R, he's a tanned Italian with a ponytail, and he had with him, as he headed home from a big work project, his usual crew of Latino employees. Anyway, as you know, he won a record brutality case against the state, appeals of which are still pending. (He's our age, and his body won't be the same ever again, particularly his back.)
I think you and Pam Spaulding have the best take on this: the whole thing was a horrible intersection of race and class, of exhaustion and power-wielding--ultimately, of highly charged, emotional and professional circumstances--that turned out exactly as badly as one would have expected. I might wish that Obama didn't use the word "stupidly" which, to those who perceive insult and slight in everything the president says and does, probably did carry with it a faint overture of smart-man-looking-down-on-less-educated-one, but good God, I can certainly appreciate the personal worldview he brought to bear, even as a white, blonde-haired, green-eyed woman who's never been profiled. Unless you count various men assuming I am stupid, or that I'm monolingual and thus unaware of the (usually humorously) explicit things they're saying about me, which is hardly the same thing as racial profiling.
Posted by: litbrit | July 25, 2009 at 06:50 AM
(And yes - without doubt "town & gown" class issues are also a big piece of what happened, although I haven't seen many people beyond Sir C. and Pam Spaulding mention that.)
Posted by: oddjob | July 25, 2009 at 09:30 AM
Testing comments -- I've been trying to post one for an hour. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
Posted by: Sir Charles | July 25, 2009 at 05:45 PM