Apple of Doubt

“I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

As everyone and their neighbor already knows Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. was arrested for disturbing the peace. The particulars surrounding the incident and the perspectives of both the professor and the officer have been widely documented so I won’t rehash the details here.

It’s very easy to read racism into the event. It was a white officer who arrested a black man under suspect conditions. Those factors are all too familiar to those who have been exposed to racism from the police. However I don’t think this particular incident was specifically a racist one. The neighbor who called the police made no mention of race (by her own account, though 9-1-1 tapes have yet to be released as of the writing of this post), the officer in question taught classes concerning racial sensitivities and racial profiling, and there doesn’t seem to have been any racist language used by the officer. So I doubt that the officer was motivated by racism.

However I can certainly understand Gates’ reaction. A white man arrived at his home uninvited and demanded that he exit his home and present proof of his identity. Anyone would be taken aback. But Gates was perhaps too familiar with tales of police racism and he reacted. Some have made outrageous claims about Gates’ motive but I think that it’s unimportant. Imagine if instead of an African-American scholar it was a vocal anarchist who reacted loudly and rudely to the officer. Either way the officer’s actions were uncalled for.

The crime that Gates’ was initially charged with, before the charges were dropped, was disorderly conduct. However the only crime that can be divined from any of the accounts offered is “contempt of cop“. He was arrested after shouting at the police officer, claiming that the officer’s actions were racist, and possibly insulting the officer. All of which are protected speech. Nothing Gates did was expressly against the law.

I believe Lawrence O’Donnell, writing for Time magazine, categorized it best when he wrote:

Gates: You’re not the boss of me!
Crowley: I am the boss of you.
Gates: You are not the boss of me!
Crowley: I’ll show you. You’re under arrest.

Yet some, almost exclusively from the right , have taken the view that Crowley’s actions were perfetly justified. Some have said that Gates “deserved it”, or that one should “never talk back to the police”. An LAPD officer writing at the National Review under the pseudonym Jack Dunphy says, “And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own [hide].”

As Radley Balko writing in Reason magazine said, “too many conservatives took the instinctively authoritarian tack“. There exists a view that the police are a moral authority that should not be questioned. Policeman are however, men, and they are men who willing to take on a job that is based on exerting control over fellow human beings. Every duty they perform is an opportunity for abuse of their power. Balko’s article gives many examples of police misconduct and it’s easy to find anecdotal accounts online of those who were unfairly treated by the police. Police should be criticized and should be questioned because power ought to be scrutinized.

I don’t think there was racism involved. However I think that arresting a man for simply being rude to a police officer should never be a crime. This is not a case anywhere near as heinous as the Oscar Grant shooting or other recent tragedies of police misconduct but it is a disturbing glimpse into how people view the police and the power of police authority. It is, as has been said, a teaching moment. I think the lesson to learn is that the police power is something we should all be weary of.