… under extremely strange circumstances.
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He was arrested in his house. The police said he was disorderly when they interviewed him about a (nearby?) break-in.
This is a rambling old luxurious house, just around the block from our house on Shady Hill Square, and inches from the house our friend Peter owns (his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, bought it).
I’m trying to open the police report and read it now. Hold on.
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Well, okay, here’s the police report.
And here’s how things look — in a VERY preliminary way — to old UD.
There had been a previous break-in at the Gates house, and the front door wasn’t working right. A woman walking by saw two black men with backpacks pushing up against the door as if to break it in. She called the cops.
But it seems likely that they pushed the door in that way because that was the only way to open it since the break-in. Or I guess attempted break-in.
Okay. So a policeman responds to her call and begins to talk to Gates, who is most decidedly unpleasant to him. Did the policeman provoke the unpleasantness? Maybe, maybe not. Is Gates so angry being racially profiled in various ways that he took his rage out on the policeman? Maybe, maybe not.
In any case, it seems clear that Gates lost it and shouted and made a big scene.
It is not at all clear that the policeman should have arrested him. So Gates is screaming and out of control. So what. He’s still in his house. He’s not going anywhere. The thing to do at this point, it seems to UD, is leave. It seems to UD that this was not so much a racial as a class encounter between a high-handed Harvard professor (“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” said Gates, obnoxiously.) and a cop insulted by Harvard obnoxiousness.
But if you work the Harvard beat, you need to be able to take it. You need to be able to walk away when high-handed people who think they’re better than you are mouth off. I’m guessing the policeman lost his cool.
But this is WAY preliminary…
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Update, New York Times. Still a bit murky.
July 23rd, 2009 at 7:30AM
Cops sometimes use a more colorful term for their charge "disorderly conduct". They call it "contempt of cop."
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:40AM
I agree that arrest seems an overreaction, under the circumstances. But Gates did run out of his house screaming obscenities at the cop *after* they had resolved their initial dispute and the cop had decided that Gates wasn’t robbing his own house, so one really has to wonder what in the world Gates was thinking. Did he want to get arrested, just to prove a point? To put it bluntly, cops are assholes. I say this as a white woman who’s met many cops, some of them in her own family. They become cops because they like the power and the carte blanche to bully as a professional duty. This has nothing to do with race, and while perhaps exacerbated by class, even class isn’t even the primary factor. This encounter has a strong individual vector: an arrogant and puffed up Gates with an instinctive distrust of cops, and a professional bully who responds in the way he’s been conditioned to respond to arrogance and self-puffery. I dislike it that Obama, who’s usually above such trivialities, saw fit to comment on this situation and thereby gave it both the prominence and exactly the racial vector with which Gates has been so strenuously trying to invest it. But nobody ever wants to look at their mistakes as individual or characteristic anymore, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.