The New Republic

Wait, are you suggesting that the media and public pay more attention to the plights of famous people than they do to the more serious problems of ordinary people?  I find that hard to believe.

- FWright

July 24, 2009 at 10:50am

An aspect of the Gates matter that I don't think anyone has noticed is class.

How is it that a ten-year Cambridge police veteran did not know who Gates was?  He's one of Harvard's most famous professors.  Moreover, officer Crowley taught a racial-profiling class so one might assume he would have known a bit more than your average person about leading black professors in his town.

Likewise -- here I am speculating -- does Gates know any of the officers who patrol his community?  Probably not.

A commentary perhaps on the extent to which police officers and upper middle class professionals inhabit separate worlds, and the extent to which they will have difficulty interacting when those worlds, um, collide.

Dan

P.S.  Now that dueling lawsuits may be on the horizon, I think it's time for the policeman and the professor to have a beer (or a latte) and let bygones be bygones.  Maybe the professor could speak at one of officer's racial profiling classes and the officer at one of the professor's Harvard seminars.   At the least, they would get to know each other's worlds.

- dbuck

July 24, 2009 at 11:06am

"How is it that a ten-year Cambridge police veteran did not know who Gates was?"

Buck, do you think he knows who Dershowitz is, or even the President of Harvard university are?

Just because you know someone doesn't mean that a cop even a ten year "veteran" knows everyone you or I know.

I am glad he didnt' know him. Police need to treat every suspect as if they were famous and every famous person as if they an average citizen.

- J. Dyer

July 24, 2009 at 11:20am

Nicely put, dbuck.

I just wish people would stop calling this an example of profiling.  The cop was responding to a call reporting a possible crime in progress.  He did not choose to stop at the address because he saw a black man.  The cop's behavior strikes me as stupid and unprofessional, but it was NOT 'profiling'!

The press, and the individuals in this case should stop making mountains out of molehills.  We need to pay attention to bigger problems.

- kerFuFFler

July 24, 2009 at 11:26am

I suspect that if a reliable transcript of this incident ever becomes available, it will turn out to be a case of a swaggering, self important cop encountering a hair-trigger intellectual from a different world, as pointed out above.  Race is an overprint on this basic reality, but not the core.

The core is the cop swagger.  I, a middle aged white guy, hold a pretty beligerent attitude toward cops myself, based on several encounters with, pardon my 60s flashback here, pigs.  Continuing to pursue a breaking and entering complaint after Gates provided ID showing he lived in the house is inexcusable under any circumstances.

Would the cop have done that to a white guy?  Quite possibly, but anyone has to admit that that behavior is more likely when the cop is white and the homeowner isn't.

- gwcross

July 24, 2009 at 11:40am

I think dbuck is onto something regarding police interaction with the public. There are about half as many cops on the streets today, per capita, than 40 years ago, and those numbers are even lower in the suburbs. People who do not live in urban centers have so little interaction with the police that all such encounters are assumed to be arbitrary and capricious most of the time, even by white people. Every white friend and colleague who's been stopped by police for speeding in the last few years has complained of some kind of (obviously bullshit) profiling, since even though they were going 10 over the speed limit, another car had just passed them doing at least 15 over the limit, so why was the cop picking on them? Because cops like to target people in expensive cars, or they like to pick on women, or they're afraid to pull over blacks, or they know that people who are rich/working class/well dressed/young/elderly are less likely to challenge a ticket. I've heard all of these stories, and all of them from white people.

When encounters with police are so rare that even white people claim victimhood in situations where they admit to have been caught breaking the law, then how can we expect people of color to regard police encounters as any less arbitrary and humiliating?

So while a greater mixing of social classes might be desirable, simply putting more cops on the streets, and getting more suburban cops out of their cars, so that encounters with police are more common, might also go a long way to solving the problems exposed by the Gates arrest. And unlike social mixing, putting more cops on the street is something we can actually accomplish legislatively. If Gates had previously experienced nonconfrontational encounters with the police, he might have been better able to keep his cool when they came to his door last week. And if the cops who respond to calls in Gates' neighborhood had enough colleagues on the force that they could specialize in getting to know the neighborhoods they patrol, they might have been better able to respond to the break-in call in a way that would not trigger Gates's perfectly understandable response of escalation.

- rhubarbs

July 24, 2009 at 11:50am

Here is a link to the Police report:

www.thesmokinggun.com/.../0723092gates2.html

- J. Dyer

July 24, 2009 at 1:14pm

"How is it that a ten-year Cambridge police veteran did not know who Gates was?  He's one of Harvard's most famous professors"

Therein lies the reason why Gates was so outraged, I suspect.

- noga1

July 24, 2009 at 1:23pm

"How is it that a ten-year Cambridge police veteran did not know who Gates was?"

Buck, do you think he knows who Dershowitz is, or even the President of Harvard university are?

==========

J. Dwyer, that was more or less my point.  The police and the professors live in different worlds.  I don't know the names of the police who patrol my Capitol Hill neighborhood in DC.  Several reasons.  They live elsewhere.  They patrol in squad cars.  (Need I add, I don't get arrested much.  Ha!)  Thus, we have very little intertaction with each other.  

For the record, if an officer had stopped me thinking I was breaking into my house, I would have obliged him with courtesy.  Even if his questions seemed intrusive; the police have certain protocols they follow, and just because you know you're the homeowner doesn't mean he does.   His job is to be suspicious.  Besides, sneak thieves, door-to-door scam artists -- who plague many an urban neighborhhod -- have a seemingly innocent answer for everything.

I suspect -- opinion alert -- the professor got testy and things went downhill from there.

Dan

- dbuck

July 24, 2009 at 2:53pm

Rhubarbs,

Why have the numbers of cops dropped per capita so much?  Overall though I think that it would be a great idea to have cops get to know the people in the neighborhoods they are watching, though I'm not sure how, since walking a suburban neighborhood to meet people is a relatively low yield exercise most of the time.

On a side note, why is it that we seemed to have more of everything 40 years ago?  Who was getting shafted then that let us have more cops, better schools, etc?  It seems like every topic starts by pointing out how budgets are so much smaller than they used to be.

- acria multa

July 24, 2009 at 3:37pm

"I suspect -- opinion alert -- the professor got testy and things went downhill from there."

That was my point also, D. Buck.

j dyer

- J. Dyer

July 24, 2009 at 4:36pm

acria, taxes at almost all levels are lower today than they were two generations ago. In addition, governments at all levels do more things than formerly. So if you have less revenue but more responsibilities, you'll do less of the stuff you were doing previously. Like policing and education and health care, which before 1970 was often subsidized at the local level.

More concretely, police forces outside of the largest cities simply have not grown their personnel nearly as quickly as their jurisdictions have increased population. There's no automatic trigger in most places that says that for every 3 percent increase in population, you expand the police force by 3 percent. So the overall numbers don't keep pace with population, and your per capita quickly collapses. Not a problem in the short term -- it doesn't take 3 percent more cops to police 3 percent more people on a day-to-day basis. But if a suburb grows from 20,000 to 80,000, and your police force grows from 18 cops to 36 cops, to cite numbers from the suburb I grew up in during the 1980s, that will have a radical impact on the nature of policing in that community.

Simply put, Americans as a people prefer lower taxes and higher crime. In a democracy, we not only get the government we deserve; we get what we pay for. Personally, I'm for more policing, and more intrusive policing, and I'm willing to pay for it. But I'm in the minority on all three points. You do remember how conservatives fought tooth and nail to oppose putting 100,000 new cops on the streets during the 1990s, and after the temporary increase in police numbers was followed by the swiftest drop in crime rates on record, the GOP successfully killed the federal programs funding many of those cops? That was how the supposedly pro-law-and-order party reacted to the idea of putting more cops on the street, so you can imagine how little public support there must be for actually having more police on the beat.

- rhubarbs

July 24, 2009 at 4:38pm

I am with you, jackson. It sounds as though Henry Louis Gates became belligerent and as you say, things went downhill from then on.

- liberal reformer

July 24, 2009 at 5:15pm

Here is the latest,

"Obama invites Gates, Cambridge officer to the White House."

www.boston.com/.../obama_calls_cam.html

Looks like Obama has finally decided to put this behind him.

It's about time, Health care reform is important, this is a tempest in an expresso coffee cup.

- J. Dyer

July 24, 2009 at 5:41pm