The unfortunate arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home has set off a a media brouhaha, triggering a storm of reactions. Even President Obama chimed in yesterday, and answered a reporter's question relating to this incident with the following observations:
The problem is that President Obama hastily rendered judgment ("police acted stupidly") before all the facts became known. It seems unfair - indeed a moral violation (not a legal one) of the concept of due process - to condemn the police before hearing and analyzing policemen's version of the sequence of the events. Now that the policeman's account of the incident is being published and given due attention, the whole incident looks completely different:
President Obama was right only in his Point No. 3, namely that there is much to be improved on the serious problems of race and the criminal justice system. But with all due respect to the President, the whole incident may very well have been avoided had the professor heeded the advice given by Neely Tucker in today's Washington Post.
I have read many commentaries on the Skip Gates story, but Tucker's is the wisest of them all. The following words of wisdom speak for themselves:
When the Cops Are Called In, Anger Is a Dangerous Weapon to Brandish
By Neely Tucker, July 22, 2009
One of the common-sense rules of life can be summed up this way: Don't Mess With Cops.
It doesn't matter if you are right, wrong, at home or on the street, or if you are white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. When an armed law enforcement officer tells you to cease and desist, the wise person (a) ceases and (b) desists.
The End.
Like Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I am interracially married, currently live in a predominantly white neighborhood, have a healthy respect for armed men wearing uniforms, and have had the police come to my house in a confrontational manner, doing the job they're paid to do.
It happened when our house alarm went off at 2 a.m. a few months ago, on a night the electricity was off and the neighborhood was dark as pitch. WANH!! WANH!! WANH!! It sent my wife and me leaping out of bed. I sprinted downstairs with a baseball bat, our Rottweiler and a flashlight to confront any possible intruder. I checked all the windows and doors, the dog yawned, and it quickly became apparent that there was a short circuit from a rear door.
My wife called the alarm company and gave them the code for a false alert.
Then two cops showed up.
The first thing they did was ask me to step outside. The second thing they did was to ask me for my identification, to prove that I lived there. They were demanding and they were not friendly. They kept their flashlights in my face. They did not take my word for it that it was my house, though I was as white as they were.
Once I showed them my driver's license with the address, they asked if anyone else was inside, and then they asked if they could look around the place.
I was irritable in that middle-of-the-night kind of way, but it did not occur to me that they might be picking on us, the salt-and-pepper couple on the block. What occurred to me was that they got a call about a home alarm going off and they had to secure the premises before they could leave. And I was thrilled to have them search the entire house, because my wife's 9-year-old daughter was murdered in a home invasion in Silver Spring six years ago. The police came running then, too, but it was too late.
So I told them about that, and they then politely told my wife what they were doing, and they swept the house, room-to-room and closet-to-closet, and then walked the back yard as well. They came back to the front door, these young white cops, and assured my African American wife that there were no bad men in the house or on the property, and that we were safe.
And then they left.
I tell that story to tell this one: The guy who owns the house across the street, another white guy, rents out the place. One time when it was empty, he went over there late one night to do some work on the interior, turned on all the lights. A neighbor noticed the lights on in the empty house and called the police, who pulled up a few minutes later.
He got angry at them for asking them to prove he owned the place. Yelled. They yelled back. Threatened to arrest him. Only the intervention of our next-door neighbor, vouching for the guy, ended the situation.
America can be a funny place, and it can be mean and hard. Bad things happen to good people who are white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever, and some of those things are caused by people breaking into houses. The police, when they show up at a residence or a liquor store, don't know what's what or who's who. The good cops are there to have people (a) cease and (b) desist. The bad cops still have a badge, a gun and the legal authority to haul your butt downtown.
So you want to make friends, join the glee club. You want to yell at people who are lousy at their jobs, go to a Redskins game. But, all things considered, Don't Mess With Cops. It usually works out better that way.
But I think it's fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry," Obama said. "No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And No. 3 — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that's just a fact."
The problem is that President Obama hastily rendered judgment ("police acted stupidly") before all the facts became known. It seems unfair - indeed a moral violation (not a legal one) of the concept of due process - to condemn the police before hearing and analyzing policemen's version of the sequence of the events. Now that the policeman's account of the incident is being published and given due attention, the whole incident looks completely different:
But Sergeant Crowley said Thursday that he was only protecting himself when he asked Professor Gates, whom he did not recognize, to come out and identify himself. Daytime break-ins are not unheard of in the neighborhood, he said.Sergeant Crowley described the woman who reported the possible break-in — who works at Harvard Magazine, on Professor Gates’s street — as “reliable,” and said that while the professor did not “look like somebody who would break into a house,” his tone was troubling. In the police report he filed, Sergeant Crowley said Professor Gates had refused to step outside and, when told the sergeant was investigating a possible break-in, said, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” According to the report, Professor Gates also accused the sergeant of being racist and yelled that he “wasn’t someone to mess with.” Sergeant Crowley said he tried to identify himself several times but the professor was shouting too loudly to hear.
President Obama was right only in his Point No. 3, namely that there is much to be improved on the serious problems of race and the criminal justice system. But with all due respect to the President, the whole incident may very well have been avoided had the professor heeded the advice given by Neely Tucker in today's Washington Post.
I have read many commentaries on the Skip Gates story, but Tucker's is the wisest of them all. The following words of wisdom speak for themselves:
When the Cops Are Called In, Anger Is a Dangerous Weapon to Brandish
By Neely Tucker, July 22, 2009
One of the common-sense rules of life can be summed up this way: Don't Mess With Cops.
It doesn't matter if you are right, wrong, at home or on the street, or if you are white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. When an armed law enforcement officer tells you to cease and desist, the wise person (a) ceases and (b) desists.
The End.
Like Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I am interracially married, currently live in a predominantly white neighborhood, have a healthy respect for armed men wearing uniforms, and have had the police come to my house in a confrontational manner, doing the job they're paid to do.
It happened when our house alarm went off at 2 a.m. a few months ago, on a night the electricity was off and the neighborhood was dark as pitch. WANH!! WANH!! WANH!! It sent my wife and me leaping out of bed. I sprinted downstairs with a baseball bat, our Rottweiler and a flashlight to confront any possible intruder. I checked all the windows and doors, the dog yawned, and it quickly became apparent that there was a short circuit from a rear door.
My wife called the alarm company and gave them the code for a false alert.
Then two cops showed up.
The first thing they did was ask me to step outside. The second thing they did was to ask me for my identification, to prove that I lived there. They were demanding and they were not friendly. They kept their flashlights in my face. They did not take my word for it that it was my house, though I was as white as they were.
Once I showed them my driver's license with the address, they asked if anyone else was inside, and then they asked if they could look around the place.
I was irritable in that middle-of-the-night kind of way, but it did not occur to me that they might be picking on us, the salt-and-pepper couple on the block. What occurred to me was that they got a call about a home alarm going off and they had to secure the premises before they could leave. And I was thrilled to have them search the entire house, because my wife's 9-year-old daughter was murdered in a home invasion in Silver Spring six years ago. The police came running then, too, but it was too late.
So I told them about that, and they then politely told my wife what they were doing, and they swept the house, room-to-room and closet-to-closet, and then walked the back yard as well. They came back to the front door, these young white cops, and assured my African American wife that there were no bad men in the house or on the property, and that we were safe.
And then they left.
I tell that story to tell this one: The guy who owns the house across the street, another white guy, rents out the place. One time when it was empty, he went over there late one night to do some work on the interior, turned on all the lights. A neighbor noticed the lights on in the empty house and called the police, who pulled up a few minutes later.
He got angry at them for asking them to prove he owned the place. Yelled. They yelled back. Threatened to arrest him. Only the intervention of our next-door neighbor, vouching for the guy, ended the situation.
America can be a funny place, and it can be mean and hard. Bad things happen to good people who are white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever, and some of those things are caused by people breaking into houses. The police, when they show up at a residence or a liquor store, don't know what's what or who's who. The good cops are there to have people (a) cease and (b) desist. The bad cops still have a badge, a gun and the legal authority to haul your butt downtown.
So you want to make friends, join the glee club. You want to yell at people who are lousy at their jobs, go to a Redskins game. But, all things considered, Don't Mess With Cops. It usually works out better that way.
Professor Gates was frightened by the police. That is a pretty common reaction when you are black or brown.
ReplyDeleteEvery black or brown person has heard about Amadou Diallo. White folks will say that the shooting was justified. Or they have all but forgotten about it. Black and brown folks don't see it that way. Every one of them sees himself or herself as the next victim... and they are afraid. Fear makes some people cower, but it makes others act out defensively.
Police need to be told that they are not going to be received in the same way in black and brown homes as they are in white homes. Even black and brown policemen need to hear this.
I agree with President Obama. The police acted stupidly. And I don't for one second believe the police reports, which are written by the exact same men who carried out the arrest and the exact same men who could be trying to cover their backsides.
Finally, if the police had encountered Henry Kissinger instead of Henry Gates, and even if Kissinger got upset about it, would they still have arrested him? Somehow, I don't think so. Neither should you.