Not the Time to Play Devil's Advocate

Just as upsetting to me as the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest, Emily, is the way that so many people have been responding, including in our own comments section. There’s this reflexive defense mechanism that so often kicks in with white people (of which I am one) in situations like these; an urge to stand up for the white person accused of discrimination because hey, I’m white, and I’m not racist. I’ll admit, I feel that pull too at times—I cringe at people who fling around groundless accusations of racism (or, in some of my family members’ cases, anti-Semitism), just as I do at knee-jerk liberals, or anyone else whose overly-simplified attacks risk trivializing complex issues.

But this is not a case where people should get all smug about being “brave” and “honest” enough to question whether race was a factor; to suggest that maybe it was Gates who was out of line, not the cop. In all the steps of this story—the neighbor who called the cops, the way the officer spoke to Gates, the fact that the kerfuffle between them, no matter how much it was instigated by Gates, led to an actual arrest—it is just so hard to imagine that not one of them was influenced by Gates (and his driver) being black.

Blogger Kate Harding has a thorough explanation of why declarations that race isn’t a part of this arrest are coming from a position of white privilege. And to “people are trying to be all devil’s advocatey about it and suggest that Gates bears responsibility for making matters worse,” she offers this: “I’m sorry, who wouldn’t be a belligerent prick after getting off a long flight, coming home to a jammed door, then finding a cop in your living room accusing you of trying to steal your own shit? I sure would.” Ditto that.

P Starling, one of our favorite Double X commenters, takes the argument further, explaining from her experience on the police force that even if Gates were being a belligerent prick, that’s still not enough reason to arrest him:

[T]here is something here that no one has pointed out, probably since civilians usually don't realize it: the cops are soooooo used to that crap. If they arrested and processed everyone who gives them a hard time in a standard day, the streets would empty. In most states, in fact, disorderly conduct (which is indeed a crime) is not actually punishable by time in jail. It's a citation-level offense, along the same general line as letting your dog run around off leash.

In the seven years I worked for the police, there were many times when my coworkers would have loved to arrest someone on the "being a general asshole" clause. They never did. Not once. Because it would have been an abuse of power.

Photograph of Henry Louis Gates by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images.

Tags: henry louis gates, Race

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Samantha Henig is the associate editor of Double X, and can be reached at samantha.henig@doublex.com.

Comments

@diggyg

By: P Starling | Sat, 07/25/2009 - 14:05

True--I liked the Obama press conference bit about Sgt. Crowley's lawn. That was great. And I hope Crowley does have a beer with Gates and the president.

I think I react particularly strongly here because of my experience with the police. I saw the abuses of power that don't get on the news, the ones the president will never comment on. It wasn't most cops, but there were a few who earned every complaint they got. So, yes, overreaching is very common. The police are normal people with families and frustrations. Some are people of integrity, and some aren't. All make mistakes. But it was my absolute responsibility to treat all the people who needed my help with respect. It's an absolute responsibility of everyone in public safety. You mustn't just mess with people because you can. That's the core of being a cop instead of a thug, and it's something I take very seriously.

As someone who still carries a fairly weighty badge (yes, I'm a novelist, but I do have a day job), I am constantly aware of the effect it has on the people I approach. It frightens lots of them. I spend a significant amount of my work day reassuring the people I approach that it's a routine matter, no one is in trouble, I'm just collecting some information. There are plenty of times when I'd really like to throw a little weight: "You, there, it says FEDERAL on the pretty shield, could you get your ass in gear and let me go where I need to go?" But I don't. I can't. While I defend any private citizen's right to be a loudmouth, it's a right I no longer have as soon as I start waving the badge around.

Generally speaking, I save it for the weekends.

@P Starling

By: diggyg | Fri, 07/24/2009 - 21:14

Looks like this story's losing steam now (but the big winner seems to be Sgt. Crowley, no?).

Anyway, I'll add one comment: this kind of inappropriate police behavior might be wrong, but it's not shockingly wrong. I think Americans more or less assume that cops sometimes push their weight around, and the public is not likely to find that angle, devoid of race, to be particularly compelling. (We tolerate much worse: e.g. prison rape).

Also: since liberals from Gates, Crowley and the President, down to bloggers overreacted, maybe liberals really do need to ask themselves/ourselves some brave and honest questions.

really?

By: WinstonX | Fri, 07/24/2009 - 03:59

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filling in the blanks, @P Starling and others

By: diggyg | Fri, 07/24/2009 - 01:10

P, you make some good points, and I'll address them in a bit, but first, let me paint out my own imagined sequence of events - keeping in mind that this narrative is far from definitive and that, of necessity I've filled in details where the facts aren't available (as we've all done).

I think you've got a cop, who prides himself on his professionalism, and his expertise in race-neutral policing, and you've got a proud, cranky (or tired?), oversensitive world famous academic. I think the cop felt personally insulted that a) this guy that knows nothing about him and his (reportedly) laudable work on police-minority relations would fly off the handle and throw around wild accusations of racism and unprofessional conduct, and b) that Gates was lording his status and position over him, pushing him around like he was the king of England.

I've come around a little bit on Gates (from your comments, and also from watching Stephen A. Smith on Hardball tonight). Maybe/probably he's been the victim of actual racial profiling before, maybe that's conditioned him to be distrustful of cops (especially when he, a Harvard professor, knows the truth of the situation, and being questioned on it).

In any case, the interaction hit a sore spot for both men. They both felt that they'd spent a lifetime establishing their credentials and were having that history questioned by a complete stranger.

Furthermore, the cop also felt threatened because Gates was calling his politically connected buddies and trying to "pull rank" on him.

And then the guy with the badge decided to take the other guy down a peg.

And that's the way it might possibly have happened. (I reserve the right to completely change my story as more facts emerge.)

Gates and the cops.

By: ryanbeed | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 23:27

There is some rightness here.

There is some wrongness as well.

I'm with everyone pointing out that the cop had no right to arrest Gates. This is very clear. I find the attitude that complete submission is the only proper response to police to be extremely offensive. Take race out of it even. No one should feel like they have to be submissive to police. They're public servants for god's sake. It's their job to keep the peace, they should expect some abuse from the wrongly targeted. At the very least.
Hell, I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is kidnapping. If any other citizen had behaved like this cop we'd have them up on charges. This cop refuses to even apologize. Unconcionable.
I think that the racial issue really clouds the water on what is a real issue of police abuse. Maybe we should stop thinking about that the cop is thinking and start acting on what the cop is doing. If we keep cops from abusing anyone then we will keep cops from abusing blacks. It's time to really hold them responsible for their actions. It seems like every week a cop is tazing an old lady or arresting a black man or kicking in the wrong door or beating up a stoner or doing something else that makes me think they're less then human.
Maybe it's time to start really cracking down on the people who abuse the public trust by being thugs with badges or throwing their weight around or being a little too violent.
If a private citizen behaved that way they'd do serious hard time. Seems only fair to apply the same standard to police

@diggyg

By: P Starling | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 22:00

I love discussing this stuff. Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Everyone else, feel free to chime in. This isn't a private party.

I'll start out by saying that I don't mind speculating about Sgt. Crowley's motivations, since his behavior was essentially illegal and inappropriate. Whether he likes it or not, that makes it public domain for comment. I feel very strongly, too, that the police need to hear public outrage when they overstep. My own experience with police work suggests to me that it is too easy for the majority of good cops to uphold the occasional bully. It's a matter of brotherhood. The louder we respond to these failures, the more actively the police monitor themselves. As far as the reasons, Crowley's given us no alternative explanations. We have to run with what we have, and all we have is a weight of evidence pointing to one conclusion, compared with lighter evidence in other directions.

I agree that Gates's knee-jerk reaction to the cops is possibly the most interesting part of this story. He said again and again on his interview at The Root that he felt scared as soon as the cop spoke. That fear of the police is mentioned by black commentators on this matter as well--Marjorie Valbrun, Wil Haywood, Jimi Izrael. Gates was born in 1951. Don't you think that his fear of police is honestly come by? It may strike you as racism or prejudice, but it strikes me as one of the scars of the 1960s and 1970s. I may not understand it on a gut level, but I can respect it. I would agree that in 2009 Gates should confront this attitude and examine it mindfully--except, oops, he DID get arrested for nothing when he made a fuss in front of a white cop. In the face of that experience, I'd feel kind of silly insisting to him that times have changed and he has nothing to fear.

@P Starling

By: diggyg | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 20:27

I was a bit sloppy in the wording of my last post. What I meant was that to cite Obama's involvement as evidence of this cop's transgression being "so egregious" is to draw the wrong conclusion. (The more right conclusion is that Obama made a mistake by taking his eye off the health-care ball).

Ironically, the point I was trying to make is that when it comes to race one has to be careful and precise about the language one uses.

I'd like to expand a bit on my response to your previous post... I'll start with the stuff we can agree on (hopefully?):
A)He probably shouldn't have been arrested. Let's go ahead and call this an abuse of authority.
B)In the heat of the moment, Gates said some things that probably can't be justified.
C)The weight of history suggests that it's not statistically unlikely for a white cop to mistreat a black man due to racist tendencies.

Now Occam’s Razor is a nice place to start when formulating possible explanations, but just because racism is the most likely explanation, doesn't mean that other explanations are absurd (e.g. a townie cop abusing his authority to take an arrogant prick down a peg, or maybe the cop had himself just returned from a trip to China and was also irritable due to tiredness, etc). And since we're talking about an actual person's character, and career, maybe a little restraint is in order, no matter how "hard to imagine" non-racism narratives are for you.

Anyway, we're not just talking about one cop and one black professor. This thing is news because we all want to use Gates as a stand in for black America, and this other guy as a stand in for America's police. But the racism angle is complicated precisely because of the ambiguity about the cops motivation, and the general prickishness of prof. Gates (you're getting off to a bad start when you have to make the argument that "people have the right to be jerks").

The more interesting angle is that Gates automatically assumed he was being *targeted* on account of his blackness. (Unlike the cop, Gates has spoken about what was going on in his head during this event.)
Forget about whether or not Gates is responsible for "making matters worse." Let's just examine his thought process. What led him to this conclusion? Was this conclusion reasonable? It seems to me that this is the more compelling "teachable moment" and that certain Harvard professors have their own unhealthy prejudices when it comes to race and profession. That he and others have continued to bandy about accusations of profiling is unfair and unwarranted, but -I think- also very revealing.

@Lisa96, @diggyg

By: P Starling | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 16:14

@Lisa96: I think the officer was within the law when he followed Gates into the house as Gates got his ID. But it was after the ID had been provided that Gates was arrested, when there was no longer any question of probable cause related to the burglary report. It's not until that happens that this goes from the cops doing their job (and getting a hard time about it) to the cops overreaching. The cops would LOVE to have the authority to arrest** people for being jerks, but they really don't. Being a jerk (at least Harvard professor-style) is a First Amendment right.

(**Actually, arresting someone is a paperwork mess. What the cops really want is the authority to issue a $50 citation for "behavior intended to annoy the hell out of an underpaid public servant who's just trying to do his job, for Pete's sake!")

And you can't give us only a piece of that story about the crown! :-)

@diggyg: I think we're arguing to cross-purposes. In fact, xxreader made the same argument on Marjorie Valbrun's post. You're both right--showing up on a burglary complaint is not racial profiling. Gates assumed that some idiot had seen him and thought, "Hey, black guy in fancy neighborhood! Must be a burglar!" So Gates made some accusations that were nearly certainly incorrect: that the cops were profiling him or harassing him, while in fact they were responding to a legitimate police call in a legitimate way. If the cops had checked it up, thanked him, and headed home, Gates would have owed them a big-time apology, and I'd be ranting about him and the Rev. Al making a fuss over nothing.

It was afterwards, when the officers knew there was no reason to detain him and did it anyway, that it got ugly, and that's where I think the racial implications are pretty much inescapable. Because no sane cop thinks he's going to get a real conviction on the Mass. disorderly conduct statute when the requirements are so obviously not met. It's just a way to give Gates some trouble. But that "two wrongs don't make a right" thing is especially true for police officers, who carry guns, who are sworn to uphold the law, and who outnumbered Gates six-to-one. So Gates = jerk, but he's a jerk with a legitimate complaint.

I used to spend a 40 hour week teaching new hires a class that boiled down to the statement that no person, no matter how stupid or obnoxious or self-serving, is exempt from the protection of the law. That's what's at stake here, even if Gates acted like a total dick, even if he's now using this to increase his public profile, even if he made rash and stupid accusations to cops just trying to do their jobs. His character and his motivations are irrelevant. He still doesn't deserve to be arrested without having broken the law.

@PSterling

By: diggyg | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 15:14

sorry P, you've got it backwards. if you're the POTUS and you don't *know* that race was involved, then you shouldn't be commenting, especially not during a primetime news conference on your #1 legislative priority.

Gates (and others: Sharpton, etc) made very specific accusations - namely, that he was the victim of "racial profiling" (actual Gates quote: "Now that is the worst racial profiling I’ve ever heard of in my life.") The facts do not support this assertion. Let's say that he was arrested because a racist cop decided he was being too uppity - that's horrible, but it's not racial profiling, and it doesn't excuse Gates' own assoholic behavior.

The explainer left something out

By: Lisa96 | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 15:13

The officer asked for Gates' ID and he refused. According to the Explainer, the officer could not detain him without probable cause.

He had probable cause; a break in had been reported.

If Gates had simply provided his ID and thanked the officer for checking on his home, nothing would have happened.

Instead, Gates was an a$$, was belligerent and threatening. And yes, I believe a white man would have been arrested for that.

Of course, I was nearly arrested for wearing a burgerking crown and giggling.