I found this Gates documentary yesterday. Interesting.
Memo the Harvard: I think Morgan Freeman might make a better professor than Gates.;)

Listen to the first 3:30.

"I have to confess that I was surprised by Morgan's deep affection for the South, If I didn't respect him so much, I'd have thought he was whistling Dixie":rolleyes: (Do I detect a little chip? Or a life lived in the academic tower of isolation?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooj7LVa0JtE&feature=related

*** All right! Road trip & kegger ... D. C. style!!!! ***
 

I wonder if there's going to be a cab ride in everyone's future? As the officer, I'd demand that someone drive my butt home after a road-trip to the WH for a Presidential kegger...and I hope Gates has had enough "real life experiences" to realize the same thing... :rolleyes:

I wonder how Gates and Crowley will travel to the White House. Are they going to share a ride seeing as they are coming from the same place and going to the same place?
Will anyone get a private charter airplane? The auto execs tried that and it didn't work out too well for them.
Will the police provide an escort? Will the DC police administer breathalyzers on each of them as they leave the WH?

Inquiring minds want to know.

That's sort of a joke but it might ought to be an actual infraction. What if an actual black criminal (they still exist) had indeed broken into Gates' home and, with an accomplice, was busy extracting bank acct. info from him when the officer arrived? Imagine if the officer, in such a scenario, had been cowed by the sort of verbiage Gates spewed coming instead from a perp to meekly withdraw? We'd have had a different sort of uproar:

"The white police community doesn't take the needs of the Af. Am. community seriously!!"

It's a lousy conundrum because it's pretty clear that blacks do get more attention, of the unwelcome sort, from policeman often enough, and the hypersensitivity that has resulted ends up in a sort of "them who cried wolf" syndrome. I would use the original reference, i.e., "the boy who cried wolf" but that would open another can of worms just from using the word boy in regard to Af. Ams.

What Gates did is very much like what Limbaugh has been doing on Sotomayor and Obama: he loudly denounced the officer as a racist. It's bogus in both cases.

During my years of cab driving, I learned that any time a black guy got in the cab and opened with "ya'all ain't race prejudiced, are you?" it was time to watch out. A scam of some sort was coming.

Static.

Both Gates and officer were out of line, Gates more so, IMHO. It ends up being a sort of "no, mine's bigger."

IOW, If I don't like the results, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Slight difference though. I doubt Limbaugh, even with Bush in the White House, could count on help to chastise the other party for him. IOW, Rush could not count on Daddy to fix the matter for him.

Finally. Now they can get together and admit there was a clash of egos and
BOTH men behaved stupidly.

Police are ego/authority-driven creatures and smart people adapt to that
reality in any encounter with them. It is the same as dealing with a
dangerous animal with no capacity for rationality: Adapt your behavior to
theirs and you assume (passive) control.

Ironically, because police also see everyone they confront as a potentially
dangerous animal, they must also learn to adapt their behavior in situations
where historical precedent impacts a person's perception of them. What is
important is not whether Gates was "uncooperative," by why he may have been.

We would not lambast a holocaust survivor for his or her irate reaction to a
person dressed in black, white and red and behaving in a Gestapo-like
manner, because we understand the historical symbolism. Gates is of the
generation of black Americans who have first-hand experience with state-
sanctioned abuse towards them. From his perspective, his position and
accomplishments should shield him from further abuse. Officer Crowley's
perspective, despite his conviction that Gates was the resident of the house, is that he must strip away that shield.

Cops with fragile egos, or notions that they are always correct, have no
business wearing the uniform. Right now, at a Starbucks or other service
establishment, a worker is taking verbal abuse from an irate customer and
quietly dealing with it. Police can learn do the same, especially when they
are in the wrong.

Like any person of privilege, Gates played the "Do you know who I am?"
card. If the man in the house was named William Henry Gates (Microsoft)
instead of Henry Louis Gates, the officer would have immediately dropped
the matter. The question then becomes, "Why?"

Perhaps that will be answered, and understood, when Obama, Gates and
Crowley enjoy their beer.

While i think that some cops have an ego thing, I do not believe that Crowley fits that profile, and to assume that he ( and ALL cops) are like that is an immense insult to them.
Crowley is one of the guys who teaches other cops about sensitivity; there was a black cop at the scene. I see no evidence that he over-reacted or did anything wrong.
Gates seems to the racists with a chip on his shoulder--at least to me.

No, he teaches racial profiling. Sensitivity has nothing to do with it.

As broad a generalization as it may seem, I stand by my remark that police are ego/authority driven by nature (why else would they chose that profession) and by training; it is part of their job to be so -- but not at the expense of common sense.

Crowley's overreaction was the act of arresting Gates without good cause; he did not exhibit common sense and should have foreseen that the charges would be dropped quickly, and thus not wasted time with with it. He was not clearheaded at the time.

Race is a definite factor in people's perceptions of others. Gates had a preconceived notion of Crowley as a "typical white cop" (from a black man's perspective) and Crowley had a preconceived notion of Gates as an "angry black man" (from a white man's perspective). Both are equally unpleasant, and provocative, perceptions.

I was in my local Best Buy yesterday buying a DVD. There was a group of 5 or 5 young white men/boys huddled around one section for a long time chatting to themselves about movies. The store employees essentially ignored them. I guarantee you that if it were a group of 4 or 5 young black men doing the exact same thing, they would not have been ignored.

These types of perceptions are greatly amplified in police encounters, especially when the each party feels the other is behaving unreasonably.

I'm not able to read his mind but my hunch is he knew what would happen with the charges but went ahead. I suspect, and I have no proof, that he finally got fed up and decided to inconvenience Gates for all the crap. IF so, I have no issue. After all, how many times are you going to let me kick you in the nuts before you do something, in whatever form, to me?

The problem is more of "who's in charge here at the moment" and it never was about race...

Gates made it about race...he introduced it at the beginning of the encounter...either as a "knee-jerk" reaction to a white officer on his property or the fact that he was being questioned by a younger white person as to his legitimacy of being on that property.

Either way...Crowley had more authority (due to his position as an officer of the law) than Gates did...until it's determined, for sure, Crowley IS the controller of that situation.

Gates FAILED to realize the position he was in...
Gates FAILED to understand the situation he caused...
Gates FAILED to understand his civic duty to be respectful of the law...whether it was a dressed up white man or black man...
and finally, Gates decided to CHALLENGE the immediate authority above him during the initial meet...

Had Gates taken the position that;

#1.) The officer, regardless of color, had to know the facts before the officer could make a solid decision as to what the situation was EXACTLY...

#2.) And allowed the officer to perform his duties to SECURE THE AREA before allowing the "suspects" to interact with said officers...

He could have then showed a little deference to Crowley and company and Officer Crowley would have been able to respond in kind.

Remember...all officers risk their lives on such simple things as a traffic stop due to little things like a burnt out tail light or someone forgets to signal a turn at a stop light...the obituaries are full of officers that were performing normal tasks that ended up leaving a family and department behind because they let their guard down for a few seconds...seconds that mean the difference between life or death for those officers...

Gates is lucky Crowley didn't have a bad bone in his body or was ready to "break" for whatever reason...

Does it happen? I'm sure, somewhere, in a lock-up down the street from where we live and sleep, there's some loudmouth that got "Rodney'd" 'cause he couldn't keep his yap shut for 2 seconds...I'm not saying it never happens nor do I condone such behavior...

But, until I'm in a court with a room full of witnesses, I'm not about to make matters worse for myself (if I'm in the right and know it) by shooting off my mouth, spouting any and all street-smarts I can think of, to try to keep myself from sporting a shiny set of bracelets and a few bruises from "tripping" down a few stairs or walking into a door during my arrest...

And the fact that none of that happened (except for the bracelet part) should show EVERYONE that Crowley was the cool head in all of this and both the President and Gates should be apologizing and Crowley should be the only one accepting the apologies...period.

I hope that beer goes down really good with all of those in that room.

And, I hope the press and cameras get their asses kicked out and the microphones are shut off.

:rolleyes:

What useless news... they stopped coverage of MJ's death for this??

Gates says it's time to 'move on' from his arrest

BOSTON—Black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. says he's ready to move on from his arrest by a white police officer, hoping to use the encounter to improve fairness in the criminal justice system and saying "in the end, this is not about me at all."

After a phone call from President Barack Obama urging calm in the aftermath of his arrest last week, Gates said he would accept Obama's invitation to the White House for a beer with him and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley.

In a statement posted Friday on The Root, a Web site Gates oversees, the scholar said he told Obama he'd be happy to meet with Crowley, whom Gates had accused of racial profiling.

"I told the president that my principal regret was that all of the attention paid to his deeply supportive remarks during his press conference had distracted attention from his health care initiative," Gates said. "I am pleased that he, too, is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment, and if meeting Sergeant Crowley for a beer with the president will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige."

It was a marked change in tone for Gates, who in the days following his arrest gathered up his legal team and said he was contemplating a lawsuit. He even vowed to make a documentary on his arrest to tie into a larger project about racial profiling.

In an e-mail to the Boston Globe late Friday, he said: "It is time for all of us to move on, and to assess what we can learn from this experience."

In a statement to The Associated Press, Gates promised to do all he could so others could learn from his arrest..............

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/07/26/gates_says_its_time_to_move_on_from_his_arrest/

I still wonder if the tapes of Crowley's radio calls to the Dept. have any Gates background static. Wanna bet this proposed "commission's" investigation is a gloss-over?

What does that have to do with it?Crowley was probably acting within proper police procedure when he entered Gates' house uninvited, but once Gates had established his right to be there, Crowley should have left. That Gates was rude to him has nothing to do with it. Crowley should have left. Instead he lured Gates outside in the hope that Gates would commit a crime there. That was unjustified, especially if Crowley already decided to arrest Gates before they left the house.

And once they got outside, did Gates do anything that Crowley could have reasonably perceived to be a crime? Not that I've seen.Who cares? All this talk of whether Gates acted appropriately is a side show. Crowley was supposed to be the professional in this mess. He failed to meet that standard, IMHO.

My guess is that race had little, if anything, to do with Crowley's conduct. To me, it looks more like he was on a power trip. We will probably never know whether race was part of his motive. Crowley might not even know himself whether Gates' race had a subconscious effect on him.

1. By his account Crowley walked out to the porch. Gates followed him and continued his "talking". If he closes the door, it's over at that point. But: Nope, I ain't gonna let this go.

2. He lured him out of his house? You have proof of intent counselor?

3. The other officers on the porch (there were about 5-7 there by all accounts, even Harvard police) said Crowley followed proper police procedure. In fact, has there been any criticism of Crowley by anyone, anywhere, white or black, in law enforcement. Haven't heard it on CNN.

4. Gates brought up race. Gates brought in a reference about his mother. We will probably never know whether race was part of his motive....or will we? What's the point of bringing it up in the first place?
You gloss over Gates' behavior as a sideshow. It's what got his ass arrested and only what got his ass arrested.
You challenge the officer in front of 7 of his peers, your get what you deserve. In this case, a gentle handcuffing, a ride in the cruiser and a free tour of the PD, and the chance to make a documentary on police racism. ;):rolleyes: