Will Someone Please Take Cambridge Off the Boil?

By now most people have heard the latest story on police brutality.  It seems that Harvard lecturer and PBS presenter Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for disorderly conduct in his Cambridge, MA, home and released on his own recognizance.  Later on, under public pressure, Cambridge dropped the charges and apologized.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/21/massachusetts.harvard.professor.arrested/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21gates.html

Since then, the internet has been abuzz with stories about how we really aren’t making any progress at all on race relations, and how the police are corrupt and racist, and so forth.  Even President Obama has weighed in, condemning the Cambridge police.  http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25310.html

This is how riots get started.

First of all, let’s take a look at the facts of the case (as far as I can make them out from half a continent away).  It all started when Dr. Gates arrived home after a long trip to find his front door stuck in the closed position.  So he did what anyone would normally do–try to get in.  This evidently disturbed a lady who called the police to report it.  The police arrived to find Dr. Gates inside the home.

So far so good.  I’m not sure what the prevailing attitude is in Cambridge, MA, but I for one would appreciate it if a neighbor called police to report someone breaking into my house.  I would also hope that the police, upon finding someone in the house, would not simply take their word for it that they belonged in my house–and if they found me in the house (and confirmed that I belonged), instead of an intruder, it doesn’t seem surprising that they would be interested in the possibility that someone else might be in the house without my knowing.

And yet that seems to have been the nub of the problem, or at least that’s where the stories diverge.  According to Dr. Gates’ lawyer, he showed the police his proof of identity and became irritated by their continued questioning.  Eventually he insisted upon being given the police sergeant’s badge number.  According to police, Dr. Gates was almost immediately confrontational, accusing the police of racism and getting very worked up.

Whom do we believe in this case?  It’s hard to say from this distance.  On the other hand, it seems improbable that anything resembling racial profiling could occur in Cambridge.  After all, this is Cambridge–a place as liberal as any, where 80% of the residents have some amount of college education, and the home of Harvard University as well as the Car Talk guys.  This is not the stereotypical small town stuck in the sixties.  The case is further cast in doubt by the photo that accompanies the CNN story, in which Dr. Gates is clearly shouting in the direction of a police officer who is clearly non-white.  That’s hardly proof one way or the other, of course, but it is food for thought.  There is also the fact that both sides agree that Dr. Gates refused the police officer’s initial instruction to step out of the house, thus opening the door (so to speak) for further confrontation.

In any event, what makes this so obviously (to so many people) a case of racial profiling?  Shouldn’t the police have investigated a break-in?  Shouldn’t the police have ensured he was who he claimed to be?  After all, not everyone watches PBS.  If there was any racial profiling being done, it seems like it would have been the “white woman” who called in to report the theft–which raises the question of how they knew she was white if she only called in, but that’s beside the point. 

And is there any outside eyewitness testimony?  Who took the aforementioned photograph? 

Would Dr. Gates be willing to testify in court that the police report is a tissue of lies?

There is such a thing as racial profiling.  There is also such a thing as a self-inflicted wound.  As far as I’m concerned, the jury in this case is still out.

Tags: Cambridge, Henry Louis Gates, PBS, profiling, race relations