What Gates v. Crowley Really Tells Us

Media pundits are falling over each other to give us condescending  lectures on what the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley tells us about race and police in America. 

Instead, what the punditocracy is revealing are it's own biases, and the extent that they distort the news. Racial profiling is a serious issue, but simply jumping to conclusions and providing biased coverage of one arrest doesn't help. 

CNN and the New York Times are perhaps the worst in their coverage of the Gates' case. It seems as if every one of their writers or talking heads wants to tell us how Gates is their personal friend (just like President Obama !), or how they've been a victim of racial profiling themselves (just like Gates) --  before giving us their perfectly objective commentary. 

Judith Warner's op-ed column in today's New York Times was striking. She knows exactly what was going on in the officer's head (based on what, her own vast experience in dealing with violence? telepathy?) claiming that Crowley felt "an out-sized sense of vulnerability." Yes, you can see how unreasonable it is for a lone police officer entering a potential burglary site to feel vulnerable. How silly of him. 

Only a few pages removed from Warner's smug piece is another NYT's article about a police officer responding to a 911 call -- where he was shot.  

In that other case, Officer Rodney Lewis responded to what he undoubtedly thought was another, boring domestic disturbance case, only to get shot when an unregistered gun fell from where it was concealed in the clothes of one of the parties. 

As with the Gates case, the people in the home are blaming, you guessed it, the wounded officer. 

As Hazel Campana put it, "It was an accident. I was letting them know they had the wrong person. All they was doing was cursing everyone out. They (police) don’t know how to talk to people. ” Yup, if the police had just been nicer to the parole with the illegal weapon, it might not have fallen, discharged and shot Lewis in the chest. They'll probably sue for the cost of the spent round. Officer Lewis, by the way, is black. 

So, let me counter Ms. Warner's speculation about what Sgt. Crowley was thinking with my own equally-baseless speculation. Crowley was off duty but volunteered to respond to a report of a potential burglary by two men. He goes to the door, by himself, and sees Gates who starts screaming insults at him when asked to identify himself. 

At this point Crowley is probably thinking: "Where is the second guy? Could he still be in the house? Does he have a gun? If this guy is the home owner why is he acting so strangely? Does he have a gun?" 

Several commentators, including former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, writing in the SF Chronicle, have noted that Gates is small and thus posed no threat. How big does a burglar or an erratic person have to be to pull the trigger on a gun? More to the point of this post where I'm focusing on the media coverage, how much insight and intelligence does it take to note that Gates' weighing 150 pounds is irrelevant to whether he is a threat to kill someone? 

The police officer didn't see himself entering the home of a famous person, he saw himself deliberately putting his life at risk, entering a potential scene of a robbery. That's not the same. So, if Crowley didn't smile at Gates and ask for his autograph, cut him some slack. 

I'm not contending the arrest was merited. I don't know, but I suspect it was not. Perhaps disturbing the peace laws need to be re-written. I seriously doubt that Crowley arrested Gates because he was black. More likely Crowley arrested Gates because he was condescendingly obnoxious and insulting.  The one thing I know is that pundits like Warner don't know either. Racial profiling is a real problem, but that doesn't mean that every arrest is based on race. 

The next theme of the pundits is to continually repeat verbatim, "This wouldn't have happened if Prof. Gates was white." Really? That's astonishing nonsense. 

Thousands of white people get falsely arrested every year. 

Since CNN is replete with comments this week stating or implying that whites are never falsely arrested, let's pick one CNN story from last August to dispute that. 

The mayor of a small town was at home when a SWAT team busted down his door, without a proper warrant in a mistaken drug bust, guns pulled, shot and killed his two dogs in front of his hysterically-screaming mother-in-law. Then they dragged the mayor down from upstairs in his underwear, pushed him to the floor next to the mother-in-law and the carcasses of the dead dogs lying in their own blood, where they handcuffed him. 

The mayor is white. CNN didn't report the ethnicity of the SWAT team members. 

Per CNN: " 'This has been a difficult week and a half for us,' Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, said Thursday. "We lost our family dogs. We did it at the hands of sheriff's deputies who burst through our front door, rifles blazing.' Police later cleared Calvo and his family of any wrong doing."

The Calvo family filed a suit last month, claiming the authorities' failure to knock or announce their entry, the "cold-blooded" killing of the dogs and "the degrading detention" of Calvo and his mother-in-law were the "direct and proximate result of a rogue, paramilitary culture" within the sheriff's department. 

Back to the Gates-Crowley incident: The media's need to position Gates' arrest as racially motivated continually tilts the coverage. We've heard from Gates in prominently-featured TV interviews that a black officer that arrived on the scene (six police cars arrived following Sgt. Crowley) "was his only chance" and that this black officer was sympathetic to Gates' and objected to how Crowley handled him. 

Finally, today, in an AP article buried online we hear from that black officer: "A black officer who was at Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s hone when the black Harvard scholar was arrested says he fully supports how his white fellow officer handled the situation. Sgt. Leon Lashley says Gates was probably tired and surprised when Sgt. James Crowley demanded identification form him as officers investigated a report of a burglary. Lashey says Gates' reaction to Crowley was 'a little bit stranger than it should have been. Asked if Gates should have been arrested, Lashley said he supported Crowley '100 percent.' " No video. Not even a photo. But I guess a photo of a black policeman would disrupt the theme. 

And ... 

"A multiracial group of police officers on Friday stood with the white officer who arrested a prominent black Harvard scholar and asked President Barack Obama and Gov. Deval Patrick to apologize for comments the union leaders called insulting. ...

"President Obama said the actions of the CPD were stupid and linked the event to the history of racial profiling in America," (Chief) O'Connor said. "The facts of the case suggested that the president used the right adjective but directed it to the wrong party."

Comments

[Ehkzu]

True enough, the Leftosphere has gone all atwitter over this, meanwhile ignoring the $1.4M/day marketing campaign by the healthcare denial industry against any and all reform efforts.

But it's also true that the Rightosphere has also gone all atwitter over this deeply unimportant event, with it crowding out nearly everything else, with a focus on how, implicitly, President Obama is an Angry Black Man with a chip on his shoulder who hates cops and wants to take away our pen- er, guns, prior to surrendering America to Hugo Chavez and Osama bin Ladin.

Which sounds like hyperbole unless you watch/listen to the Rightosphere's media outlets, where they've done everything just short of calling for Obama's assassination.

So yes, Gatesgate is a Rorshach test of any given media outlet; yes, it's been way overblown; yes, Gates probably asked for it by pursuing the "do you know who I am" tack, which no Black should pursue anyway, for what should be obvious reasons; yes, Obama put his foot in his mouth, especially in the context of a literal life and death struggle with the healthcare denial industry's efforts to continue parasitizing American taxpayers, but...

any discussion of leftist posturing relative to this should be accompanied by noting the equally vile exploitation of this incident by the Angry Billionaire's Club and their government/media servants.