I’m about as on the outside of the controversy over the disorderly-conduct arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as you can be, but since everybody else is weighing in …
I can see why both Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, and the arresting officer, Cambridge, Mass., Police Sgt. James Crowley, are firing venomous volleys back and forth in the media just as they did the day of the July 16 incident at Gates’ home.
I say this after having read and studied the police report from the incident, which I have to point out Gates has said contains inaccuracies as to what happened when Crowley answered a call from a neighbor of Gates about a possible attempted break-in at the Gates home.
But assuming that the police report gets it at least somewhat right, I can see if I’m Gates reacting the way he did to Crowley’s request to speak with him on his porch upon arriving at the scene.
“As I turned and faced the door, I could see an older black male standing in the foyer of (redacted) Ware Street,” Crowley wrote in his report.
“As I stood in plain view of this man, later identified as Gates, I asked if he would step out onto the porch and speak with me. He replied, ‘No, I will not.’ He then demanded to know who I was,” Crowley wrote in the report.
I’d want to know the officer’s name, too, and why he was there. But again assuming that the police report is at least somewhat accurate on this, Gates seems to have overreached in this respect. According to Crowley’s report, he repeatedly demanded from Crowley his name, which Crowley said he offered but Gates wasn’t able to get because of his repeated loud protestations.
So here’s where you could say that Gates was quite a bit in the wrong. Where Crowley could have done things better is revealed next in his police report. After writing that he had come “to believe that Gates was lawfully in his residence,” Crowley noted that he “was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me.”
So here we get the sense that Crowley is starting to get ticked. That becomes obvious next. “Due to the tumultuous manner Gates had exhibited in his residence as well as his continued tumultuous behavior outside his residence, in view of the public, I warned Gates that he was becoming disorderly,” Crowley wrote.
“Gates ignored my warning and continued to yell, which drew the attention of both the police officers and the citizens, who appeared surprised and alarmed by Gates’s outburst. For a second time I warned Gates to calm down while I withdrew my department issued handcuffs from their carrying case. Gates again ignored my warning an continued to yell at me. It was at this time that I informed Gates that he was under arrest,” Crowley wrote.
So what we have here is a police officer reacting to an overheated situation by adding fuel to the fire.
I can understand what Crowley and his superiors in the Cambridge Police Department have said regarding Crowley’s initial response to the call on the attempted break-in. No question he had to respond to the call in such a way to protect his own safety in the face of an unknown situation, and no question Gates could have made his job a heckuva lot easier by responding to Crowley’s initial requests to speak with him with a cooler head.
That said, Crowley indicates in his police report that he had ascertained that Gates was “lawfully in his residence.” No break-in, case closed, then, right? So Gates is upset that he was approached by an officer while standing in his foyer and asked to speak to him about a reported attempted break-in at his residence. What’s hard to understand about that? And what’s so hard to understand that maybe leave well enough alone and just walk away?
It’s not hard to understand from the report why Crowley arrested Gates. It wasn’t because he was concerned about his safety. Let’s look at it again – “Gates ignored my warning and continued to yell, which drew the attention of both the police officers and the citizens … .”
Crowley was being shown up, and he didn’t like being shown up.
I don’t know that there’s a race factor here, though I can see where you could say that. You’ve got a black Harvard professor over here and a white middle-class cop over here. I’ve seen a commentary defending Crowley on a news website that I read frequently where the author referred to Gates as an “uppity black.” There’s your race issue right there.
That said, I’m of the mind that Crowley just overreacted to a situation that it was probably easy to overreact to, that this kind of thing probably happens more than we know, and that this wouldn’t have made national headlines if it didn’t happen to involve a white cop and a prominent African-American scholar.
My final thought is that this could be dealt with in the here and now a lot better than it is being dealt with, and that it’s not confirms that those of us who want to believe that we’re in a postracial America are still just wishful thinkers to that end.
– Column by Chris Graham
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