Dude, I may have only watched 15 years of Cops, but you totally blew off the procedure.

So, you’re a cop responding to an address after a neighbor calls about a break-in.

Are you given the address or given the legal name of the owner on the title?

Do you know if this home had been legally foreclosed upon in these trying economic times?

Do you know if his wife is living there and has a restraining order on him at the moment you arrive?

So, the cop is given an address and he shows up.

Do we know if the Professor had wine at dinner? Maybe spilled a bit on his shirt?

He shows him his I.D. and the cop says “Hold on one second, let me check this out.”

Do we know if the Professor was impatient, even if he wasn’t offensive?

The proper course of action if the officer was uncertain is to detain the individual until it is all sorted out.

Even though there is classism in society, let’s not distort proper police procedure. Change the laws, not whether officer’s can ignore them.

Even I would understand if I just broke into my own house and the officer wanted to err on the safe side.

Especially if I had just kicked out my roommate for stealing my laundry quarters.

@ Rud F–This is where you need to listen. I base my comments not on my definition of common sense as I do on what my ex would do (15 years as a corrections officer, Air Force before that), what a friend would do (he’s been a C.O. or cop for the past 5-6 years, currently with the housing authority police) and what my police co-workers would do (I have one to three officers who I work with on any given shift). I don’t know whether race was or was not a factor in this encounter. I do know that I’ve seen exactly one Cleveland cop show this kind of arrogance in 21 years. I know that none of the people I’ve mentioned would have taken this incident beyond confirmation of ID. They might’ve asked for permission to do a walk-through to confirm that everything was OK, but if refused, they would’ve left. Arresting and booking somebody means paperwork. It means hours of procedure, and the arresting officer may spend the majority of the shift working on that one arrest. It sounds very much like the arresting officer in this case let his ego take charge and decided to “make a point” to Professor Gates. Again, it’s not about skin, it’s not about money, it’s not about class, it’s largely about the cop making a choice that was bad for him and bad for the community.

The cops I know use de-escalation as a weapon. If you can defuse a situation, you have more power over it. When you have to use force, or when you need to arrest somebody, you want to make sure the circumstances merit the action, and you want to keep it as calm as possible. That didn’t happen in Cambridge. What I described is closer to what they would teach in academy. What happened is closer to the example they’d use in academy of what not to do.

The arrest and then un-arrest matters to every American, gays too. If you’ve complied with a request to provide identification, and you’re in your own home, and you’re breaking no laws, then there’s no reason for ANY of us to be carted off to the cop shop. The cop showed bad judgement. Whether or not Prof. Gates showed bad judgement is irrelevant, because he complied with the law and was in his own home, breaking no laws. It should’ve ended there.

I bet this will come as a shock to even you James…

When it was convenient to me, I claimed racism by asserting my father’s Puerto Rican heritage, even though I look as white as the whities when it benefitted me.

So don’t be getting all “Whities hate darkies” with me at the same time.

Kind of funky right James.

That people will assert, in times of strife, whatever will give them dominance over the current issue in the forefront.

Don’t be surprised, James, I’ve already announced my own transgressions in the area of race relations.

Maybe your own liberal Democratic readers of the days I could get into Dallas bars with one I.D. while even my bf’s had to show 3 I.D.’s because they were profiled as poor and couldn’t buy their own drinks so they had to steal everyone else’s.

Yeah. Great times for me being accepted by whities while my friends were treated as thieves.

Glenn Greenwald. I’m fucking looking at you.

Me and one of my reporters were heading to an after party after a night of carousing. While my friend was tending to his business I noticed a police officer just itching to see me pass out on the street.

Now, I had no intention of doing that so instead I decided to stare at him. Something he definitely did not like. He came over to us and decided to interrogate my reporter while I countered by interrogating his ride-along.

This continued for many hilarious minutes until the officer ordered me to go home. Well, I had zero intention of doing that so he arrested my reporter for drunk and disorderly.

My reporter was cleared after a 9 month slap and tickle pissing contest, so don’t feel that bad for him.

Meanwhile I meandered home calling the officer on duty to register my outrage.

This was a case of classism, not racism, so I didn’t want to leave the impression that all overstrung police actions are racially tinged.

Being as white as I am, I remember two incidents that are as indelibly imprinted in my mind as you may from your own past.

1) I was playing with my friends in NYC while walking my dog. So we thought it would be fun to have my dog chase them up onto cars roofs, hood, and down the trunk. My dog still has his full nails which used to dig in to the very slippery metal.

A police car rolled with two officers in it. The one at the wheel told me to stop. So as a young tween, I mouthed off to him and told him to shut it. He looked at his partner and they just drove off.

2) Some officers invaded a college party up in Albany complaining of loud noise and underage drinking. We were a very white crowd. I called up the mayor’s brother (we Irish stick together) and loudly, not to mention drunkenly complained. After the phone call I called the Lt. on duty and again loudly/drunkenly complained. In front of the officers (who I must mention were diverse racially).

My friends calmed me down and we shut the party down. But I still got to sleep in my own bed.

This is not to say racism isn’t involved. It could have been a residual, as they say of police feeling the need to establish authority, but I’ve stepped over the line so many times only to walk away satisfied that I gave them a piece of my mind to walk home and sleep in my bed unmolested.

I may do this saturday night, in fact. It’s become quite a sport amongst my friends.

Get white, go to Detroit.

You’ll be arrested for DWW (driving while white) and if you have the misfortune of trying to do business in that city, you’ll be reminded that “you’re not wanted here”. Complain about it, you’ll be accused of “lynching”.

Luckily, not many places in the nation are as hell-bent on REVENGE as Detroit. But as someone who was born there and tried hard to work and pay taxes there, I’ve had it with the notion that blacks are victims. For all my family’s efforts to stay and work within city limits, we were essentially run out of town by honest to goodness racism (“your business [translation and advertising] is not wanted here – why don’t you go back to the suburbs?”). I find it ludicrous that people really think that the white police officer would have let a white guy challenge his authority.

Being treated like sh*t by the police is undoubtedly a bigger problem for blacks than it is for whites – but to think that whites get special treatment on a consistent basis is simply not a national truth. Detroit, as we know, has been run exclusively by the black bourgeoisie and church mavens for almost 40 years. “The only way to eliminate segregation is to reverse it” – that was the city’s first black mayor’s warning to whites: you will be oppressed in our new city. Well, Coleman Young’s prophecy was self fulfilling. Of course, all of the city’s problems are still blamed on those same whites, who no longer live in the city. And no longer work there, since doing business in the burbs is so much easier.

Not everywhere is like Detroit, thank goodness. But it’s left me convinced that whites have no monopoly on racism. And to a degree that is not seen in minority populations, the white majority is itself a house divided so many ways that we all kind of hate each other, too.

And in that last sentence is the key: police officers of any color demand complete acquiescence because they hold a position of authority. Some abuse this authority, and others rush to judgment, while others are honorable protectors of the peace.

But to say that if Gates were white he would’ve suffered no consequences from yelling at a cop is bonkers. If Gates really thinks he can get away with mouthing off to a cop, then he needs to get out of the ivory towers and travel a bit.

Betcha dollars to donuts that if I were to drive him around Detroit after sunset, we would both be pulled over by cops, who would question us as to how we knew each other, what we were doing in Detroit, what we were doing in the same car, etc… Legal? No. Try not answering and see how far that gets you. I would get another DWW, and Gates would get a lecture on the dangers of driving around Detroit with someone who “wasn’t from Detroit”… Though the city’s birth registry would prove that latter point wrong.

I’m sorry to piss some people off with this rant. I am in no way claiming that whites have a harder time with racism than blacks, for that is hardly the truth. But I have a serious problem with those who promote the illusion that whites are treated with kid gloves by the police. That has never been my experience. Whites don’t watch each others backs – and nor do blacks. To believe that our law enforcement system works like it is supposed to is pure fantasy. We don’t live in the Netherlands or Switzerland. We live in a deeply corrupt nation. What do you expect?!

I refuse to deny that racism was an element in this story, but I equally refuse to believe that 1.) a white guy would’ve gotten better treatment for the same behavior toward a cop; and 2.) yelling at cops, with or without justification, is permissible in the USA (regardless of what the law says).

Our system is rotten, our people disenfranchised, and the rich always win. And FYI, the rich don’t yell at the police: they shut up and let their lawyers do the talking. That’s the winning strategy. Welcome to America.