I think the title of the thread is backwards.
It should read:
Racist Professor and Combative Cop.
1) Mass. law is clear: when asked for name and badge number, officers have to give it.
2) There was nothing overtly racist in the cop's response-he got a burglary call, he had to check it out.
3)The Prof. was a bunch of things: sick, tired, old, uncooperative, pissed off at having to break his own door down, and, well,
black. He naturally didn't respond well. If he had, none of this would happen.
4) After the cop had it sorted out, and was leaving,
he should have just kept going-they handcuffed the man on his porch,not the sidewalk, and, frankly, arrested him for not repsecting the cop's authrority, nothing more. He hadn't done anything but yell at the cop, and he'd have stopped if the cop just left.
Bad calls on both sides, no "profiling" involved.
yorkshirelad said:
The game you are "laying" is that you deny that your judgement is skewed by Gates' race. If a white professor had been beligerent to the cop and had been arrested for disorderly conduct, it would never had made the news and if it did, (due to the *** in question being a mate of Obama's)Obama would have shrugged the question off with a "no comment" and YOU wouldn't care less about the arrestee. How do I know this? Because you're as transparent as a prison cell tv.
Studies have shown that people tend to align themselves in conflict with people of their same perceived race. It's that simple-wrong and right don't enter into it, and sometimes that "perceived race" is
blue. Obama should have kept his mouth shut, but he clearly doesn't know how to: a more "Presidential" thing to do would have been to offer no comment on a local affair that he didn't have all the facts about. He is, however, entitled to his opinion, whatever factors got him there, and however misguided it might be. To say the police acted "stupidly" might be a bit over reaching, but Sgt. Crowley was clearly fed up, and that's the place he acted from, not any particular good judgement: how likely is a riot in such a neighborhood? How likely would the Prof. be to keep "shouting" (there seems to be some question about his ability to raise his voice, due to illness) once the object of his anger had departed the scene?
As for the Prof. himself, well, it's not the way I'd have handled it, or the way I've handled it in the past. Personally, though, I'm well known for not losing my cool-for being unflappable. I think it's kind of a given, working with the things that I do, that one maintain the majority of one's emotional responses internally,and act outwardly as appropriate to the situation. That's me, though-and I have to say that, while externally I've been compliant and cooperative in my interactions with the police, and most of those have generally been more than pleasant, without a hint of "racial"
anything, some of them, back in New York, well, some of them had me seething
internally. A man gets confronted in his own home,
told to step out on the porch, and, while a cooler head (like mine) might have immediately connected the arrival of the police with the forcing of the front door and simply cooperated-or even maliciously complied in the hopes that he'd be arrested for breaking into his own home, and thus could
really sue-Skip Gates clearly could not.