Blue Moon
President Obama has invited Sergeant James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to the White House for a beer to try to clear up hard feelings over Crowley’s arrest of Gates for disorderly conduct two weeks ago.
Notice how, now that the facts have come out, no one is taking Gates’ side anymore; now those who initially sided with Gates are arguing that both men are at fault and that we should learn from this incident and move on.
If anyone still cares, however, the fact is that both sides are simply not at fault.
Here are a few myths and misunderstandings about Crowley’s arrest of Gates:
Crowley overreacted in arresting Gates.
Well, not according to the Cambridge Police Department; the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association; the Massachusetts Municipal Police Coalition; the Cambridge Multicultural Police Association; mixed-race police unions around the country; Sergeant Leon Lashley, the black cop who accompanied Crowley; or black public figures such as Bill Cosby and Juan Williams. Other than that, all the experts agree-he overreacted!
Gates’ behavior was not an arrestable offense; Crowley should have walked away after Gates’ identity had been established.
According to police protocol in such an incident, you leave the scene only once all actors are quiet and all issues have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. You do not slip away when one party is still unhinged, screaming like a lunatic, insulting a police officer’s mother, badgering and disrespecting officers, and frightening a group of neighbors who have gathered out of concern. If the object of investigation is not calm and shows no signs of calming down, it is not police procedure to leave such a raving maniac poised to cause additional trouble. The police have seen enough cases in which angry residents have gone on to cause further mayhem that it’s foolish for anyone to second-guess the cops and pronounce that they should have known what Gates would do next. Gates had dozens of opportunities to cooperate with Crowley’s attempts to defuse the situation and back away, and every time he chose not to. That is why he was arrested.
Crowley works for the public and should have been more respectful of Gates as a resident of the community.
Gates’ wealthy Harvard neighborhood had experienced a rash of break-ins in recent months, including Gates’ own home. The job of a public servant such as Crowley is to forcefully protect property owners-once they are definitively identified as such, which Gates made difficult to accomplish-from those who would aggress against them and their property. That is what Crowley was trying to do. Had Gates lived in a poor neighborhood and the two men trying to break in been real burglars, and had Crowley let the men get away without proving they lived there, his department would no doubt have been faulted for ignoring “black-on-black crime.”
Crowley arrested Gates because he was “disrespected.”
Crowley did not arrest Gates because he felt “dissed”-he was acting lawfully in response to Gates’ disorderly conduct, which involved Gates’ following Crowley to the porch, yelling epithets about Crowley’s mother, and startling a group of pedestrians who had gathered on the street.
Crowley is guilty of “racial profiling.”
Ignoring the fact that “racial profiling” does not, by definition, take place when an officer has been called to a resident’s home to investigate a burglary, there’s far more evidence that Gates is guilty of “class profiling”-singling out a working-class cop for abuse because he thought Crowley wasn’t powerful enough to stand up to him.
Both men are prejudiced toward those from different backgrounds.
I can’t say how Gates feels about working-class cops, but Crowley had been hand-selected by a black police commissioner to teach a course on how to avoid racial profiling, which he has done for the past five years. I think that gives him just a bit of credibility in claiming he does not go around engaging in egregious on-the-job racial discrimination.
Only people who were there can judge what happened; it’s Crowley’s word against Gates’.
Not having been there myself, I’ll nonetheless trust the judgment of a universally praised sergeant on the force who has taught an anti-racial profiling class for five years; the black sergeant who accompanied him in the arrest; the Harvard University Police officers who appeared as backup and witnessed the scene; the Police Department who trained Crowley and tracked his implementation of protocol; and Emergency Communications and 911 Center staff who received updates on the incident in real-time. They all happen to support Crowley.
The police dropped the charges against Gates because they knew their case was weak.
The prosecutor’s office, not the Cambridge Police Department, decided to drop the charges, most likely because of Gates’ status in the community and because he raised such a stink about it. The Cambridge Police Commissioner has since publicly stated that he wishes the charges had not been dropped and that Gates were forced to defend his actions in court under a strict examination of the evidence.
Obama should have criticized both men for their bad behavior.
Obama should have refrained from making a summary judgment on a local case until he knew the facts. He is president now, not a rabble-rousing community activist trying to “promote awareness” of social ills.
Crowley reports to the mayor of Cambridge, the governor of Massachusetts, and the president of the United States, and he should have accepted their criticism without question.
Crowley was backed up by his superiors and by his department. He does not report directly to the mayor, the governor, or the president, and he is not contractually prohibited from speaking up and defending himself against spurious allegations by citizens.
In any event, it appears that Crowley was big enough to agree to meet Gates and Obama at the White House. In the meantime, he can look forward to the audiotapes of the arrest being released soon and clearing his reputation.
Blue Moon-The Marcels-1961
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