Jul/090
Always Hide a Spare Key Somewhere
Have you ever been locked out of your house? It sucks pretty hard, even moreso if you’rethe pre-eminent black scholar.
BOSTON — Henry Louis Gates Jr., the nation’s pre-eminent black scholar, is accusing Cambridge police of racism after he was arrested while trying to force open the locked front door of his home near Harvard University.
Cambridge police were called to the home Thursday afternoon after a woman reported seeing a man “wedging his shoulder into the front door as to pry the door open,” according to a police report.
An officer ordered the man to identify himself, and Gates refused, according to the report. Gates began calling the officer a racist and said repeatedly, “This is what happens to black men in America.”
Officers said they tried to calm down the 58-year-old academic, who responded, “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” according to the police report.
Gates was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge after police said he “exhibited loud and tumultuous behavior.” He was released later that day on his own recognizance and arraignment was scheduled for Aug. 26.
…Counter said he spoke to Gates, who told him police continued to question him after he showed them his license and Harvard identification.
“They did not believe him when he said that he was in his own home,” Counter said. “He was totally mistreated in this incident.”
The incident report (pdf) was put online by The Boston Globe.
The account in the incident report certainly makes it look like Gates was an overreacting crazy-man, but that’s assuming officers only tell the truth. Officers who feel honor-bound to the truth are a cultural fabrication, a myth. In situations where it’s a citizen’s word against an officer’s, the cop usually wins. It would take a special kind of naiveté to not believe this is regularly taken advantage of. Take, for example, what just happened in Philadelphia.
WHEN AGNES LAWLESS and three friends were inside a Lukoil convenience store in the Northeast at 3 a.m. last August, they’d all but forgotten the fender-bender in which they’d been involved moments earlier.
There was little damage, and the other driver had left the scene, near Northeast Philadelphia Airport.
What they didn’t know was that they’d been rear-ended by the son of a police officer who was on duty, and dad was about to get involved.
Lawless was standing at the counter of the store, at Comly Road and Roosevelt Boulevard, smiling and chatting with the clerk, when she was grabbed from behind and violently pushed back with a police officer’s gun in her face.
…After a chaotic struggle, Lawless was arrested and charged with assaulting the officer.
Lawless and her three friends, all in their early 20s, filed complaints with the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. But in cases in which it’s a defendant’s word against a police officer’s, the benefit of doubt often falls to the cop.
Except when there’s video.
That right there is one of the many reasons I don’t trust the police, let alone an incident report. The odds are pretty good that the cop in the Gates situation is indeed a super racist, but I’ve been wrong before. Maybe Gates is just an asshole, who knows.
Still, I think I’m still going to trust a goddamn MacArthur Fellow over Officer Random.
