Racial profiling or honest mistake?

Rent or own the property is under his care and he can order people off of it.

Wrong.

They commit at 58 as well.

and Barry O contributes his own stupidity to this issue.

LINK

Well, our president proved what pile of puke he is. He doesn't know all the facts about what happened, he admits that, but he proceeds to use incorrect English to insult the police and to claim racism. Congrats Barry you're an asshat.

If the bad guys were white the Ape in chief would never say a word.

You can be Harvard educated but you can still be a stupid, loudmouth nigger.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090721/ap_on_re_us/us_harvard_scholar_disorderly

Jesus....here comes the frivolous lawsuit.

No one knows all the facts about what happened except Gates and the first cop on the scene.

That doesn't stop all of us from speculating about what might have happened and having an opinion about it.

Granted, Obama's opinion gets more broadcast because he's president. But I wouldn't be surprised if Bush or someone else would have said something similar. Not that the officers behaved "stupidly" but "unfortunately" or some similar euphemism.

And while I again don't think that this was fueled by racism, it seems hard to dispute that blacks and Hispanics have a long history of being disproportionately arrested. To a certain extent that's because they commit a disproportionate share of crimes; to a certain extent it's that there have been conscious efforts to target minorities in drug and other cases and to a certain extent it's other factors. Reasonable people IMO can disagree about how much each factor contributes to that disparity.

If the facts are as Gates says, would you still think a lawsuit would be frivolous? If so, why?

Yup. I didn't say it when the city dropped the charges, but as soon as they did, that left the cops with their asses hanging out in the wind. And sure enough, tonight the Communist News Network announced that the guy is considering suing.

Place whatever value you'd like upon that part of the story but you cannot simply edit it out of the overall situation.

That's not disagreeing that is simply restating what I just said.

"the only difference lies in the motivation ascribed to the responding police officers."

Your statement clearly suggests that fame+connections+wealth=more appropriate response from police officers:

So what you're saying is that the sergeant, based solely on a subject's physical appearance, should be able to determine guilt or innocence?

Isn't that the exact mentality that offended Mr. Gates?

About six weeks ago, one of Alpha shift's patrolmen responded to an identical call. The man presented a driver's license with that address printed on it.

About five hours later, Charlie shift gets a call to the same address. The new homeowner came home from work and found his house ransacked. Our then suspect had been foreclosed and evicted six months prior and hadn't updated his license.

My 77 year old paternal grandfather carries a Smith and Wesson J Frame on his hip every time he leaves the house.

About a year ago, I responded to a call where a black gentleman in his late sixties was carrying a pimped out gold plated Taurus semi-auto. He'd accidentally flashed it when he was leaving a Walgreens. I stopped him, disarmed him, and secured his weapon until I could talk to his issuing Sheriff's Department and verify that his permit was legit* (He was issued one but wasn't carrying it on his person).

He turned out to be cool and I sent him on his way, but not until after having a come to Jesus meeting over accidental reveals and how he could be charged with disorderly conduct over it and how if he hadn't been nice, I could have arrested him and seized his gun effectively permanently because even though he did have a permit, he was committing a crime by not carrying it on his person.


* - Something I didn't have to do, by the way. I'd have been perfectly legit in arresting him on the spot, but since he seemed to be a nice guy and was complying with my requests, I decided to see if his story checked out there instead of arresting him and sorting it out back at the station.

What could have been done differently? Most people don't carry the title deed to their home IN their home, so what else could have been done?

This is going remarkably round in circles and someone made the point earlier that the cops had given one story and Gates another. I'm blindly trusting that the cops are going to be semi-professional in what they do and so also about this, thus (despite my better judgement), I'd have to say that the cops don't really have a motive for fabricating their side of the story, as opposed to Gates who is obviously trying to prevent himself from looking like a bit of a fool. Despite my earlier comments, it looks like he got caught out and is now regretting it.

Here's the actual incident report.

Well. it seems that they dropped the charges due to thier frivolity.


Beligerence is not a crime.

Going by the actual police report, then the charge was appropriate. Acting like an ass CAN be a crime.

Correct,

Right...

... and that's what I don't get. Gates had to know this as well. Something tells me that something occured in the initial response that stopped that from happening.

Sad to say, it wouldn't shock me. There are still areas of this country where a black man would be challenged to drive through without being harrassed by overze3alous cops. I'm not talking about young black men riding through with a mob of friends and the music blaring, but a middle aged to older black man in business attire in a tasteful car. It happens.

What Raoul says is the most likely case. Both parties exhibited some poor judgement.

I'm not editing it out of the situation. I'm saying that broad context is less important than the actual facts of what happened after the officer's arrival, and those facts are in dispute.

No, it's not. Facts<>motivation.

Facts are such things as: whether the officer identified himself when asked, when Gates identified himself and at what point in the confrontation, whether Gates insulted the officer's mama, whether Gates was warned before being arrested.

As shown above, the two accounts give different answers as to whether those things happened or not.

Motivations include such things as: sheer professionalism, anger at being disrespected, conscious or unconcious racism, etc.

The facts could be exactly as the officer says they were, and the officer still (potentially) could have been motivated in part by racism. In other words, the officer hypothetically would have given more slack to an obnoxious, raving guy who was complaining about being singled out because of his Republicanism or whatever.

The facts could be exactly as Gates says they were, and the officer could have been motivated by something other than the racism that Gates (in my view wrongly) ascribes to him.

That's what happened in this case, in my view.

Taking the officer's account of the events as true, a reasonable cop might have arrested Gates. Or an equally reasonable cop might have said, "You know what? To the extent there's a disturbance, it'll go away when I do. And in terms of his threats to get me, I'm confident that my union and my department will have my back. So I'm just going to drive off."

The average person doesn't have a lawyer of the caliber of a Harvard law professor who will come within hours of being arrested.

The arrest of the average person isn't going to result in a national news story and put pressure on prosecutors.

I realize you did, and I said above some ways it might have. But all in all, the advantages he got from being rich and well-connected probably outweigh the disadvantages (unless you presuppose that the officer specifically arrested Gates because he was rich and well-connected.)

Well, first of all, I am not saying it should be the final determination of guilt or innocence. As Zombie and others have said, there are 58 year olds presumably who have shot cops and broken into houses and committed other crimes.

Second of all, I'm not saying "solely."

I am saying to a certain extent it should be a factor.

There's a line between judging people by their appearances, which we all do and which all cops presumably use as a starting point, and racial profiling, where it becomes an ending point.

To be honest, I don't have that much of a problem with a police officer having the thought process, "Young black male in the hood, might be a threat." or "We got a call to be on the lookout for a Latino guy in connection with a car burglary, and this Latino guy is driving a fancy car. I'll pull him over to see what's up."

Where I have a problem is with the officer not having an open mind about the situation, such that even when it should be clear that the person in question is innocent, he's still getting the guilty treatment.

Yeah, the cops failed to bow before his towering greatness and kiss his ass.

Clearly the Cambridge Police need referesher training in "Yo Mama"
jokes to stay ahead of the bad guys!

Yeah, Mr.Harvard was probably incensed that some low-life cop didn't know off the bat who we was. How dare that commoner not realize the greatness he was standing in front of!!!

BTW the police do make occasional visits to my home (long story).
Anyway, I do hope they send a black cop next time, so I can throw the whole Race Card deck and act militant + beligerent.

It seems to me that a Harvard professor should be intelligent and well educated enough to know better than to say to an investigating police officer, "I'll talk with your mama outside".

Sorry, but I think Gates played the race card.

With how conflicting all the reports of what happened are, this is all a good illustration of how heavily biased the news can be despite attempting to sound as neutral as possible.

Sounds to me like it was one asshole butting heads with another asshole and making an unpleasant situation so much worse than it ever needed to be.

I wonder, can we try strapping little cameras to officers' heads, so that there's less ambiguity in these situations?

While semantics can be a fun game to play let's instead drop the excessive verbiage.

Which reduces your post to this:

Yes we all want our police officers to evaluate suspects objectively.

I'm not a college person (not that there's anything wrong with that) so maybe you collegiate types can tell me -
are most professors as "tits on a pipe wrench" useless and ignorant as this
fucking genius?

Bet this sheltered ass-clown would shit himself if he had to get a real job!

The more information that comes out the more it sounds like Mr. Gates is to blame.

Would've really helped out here, well for most folks. I suspect more than a few people have opinions that are immune to evidence.

What pisses me off to no fucking end is OBAMA on TV saying "the police acted stupidly."

WTF? Who made you the police procedure expert? Did Internal Affairs give you an honorary badge or something?

I know you're omnipresent, but you were right there when it happened? :IMHO!:

"We have a long way to go ending discrimination" my white ass!
So automatically giving a minority a "pass" before we have all the facts will help the situation?

Hey, he thinks he can manage the economy and healthcare, how hard can policing be?

I can't wait until he pushes for lowering all police, fire, miltary, etc. standards to get a more "diversified" force.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090723/ap_on_re_us/us_harvard_scholar_disorderly

An obvious racist.