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Whenever I read about an incident such as the one which happened with Henry Louis Gates Jr, in which a police officer arrests someone for, essentially, not paying them enough respect, the old Cartman line "respect my authoritae!" floats through my mind. After reading the officer's account and Gates account, I have no idea whether racism was at the core of Gates being arrested. But I will lay long odds that if Gates had done everything Sergeant Crowley had told him to do and done it snappish, well, he wouldn't have been arrested. My interactions with police in the US have all reinforced to me that even something as simple as a question is interpreted by many policy as a direct assault on their authority, and that they have no tolerance for any such thing. If a policeman in the US asks you to do something, or tells you, you'd best do it, right now, whether he has the right to order you around or not. And if you don't, be ready to deal with the consequences.
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Which is to say, I agree with lawyer Scott Greenfield, when he writes: But there is similarly a possibility, based upon a larger experience by those who follow the conduct of police officers, that this was unrelated to Henry Louis Gates' race. This encounter could have, and has, happened to whites as well as black, to Hispanics as well as Asians. To old women and young men.
Henry Louis Gates was arrested for engaging in "tumultuous" behavior. Only in Cambridge would the complaint use the word "tumultuous". But many a man forced from his castle upon the command of a police officer who refused to accept that he was at home would have been outraged. Tumult seems an appropriate way to act. The crime was Gates' hurling words at Sgt. Crowley at a time when the sergeant commanded him to be obsequious and compliant. Gates would not calm down. There is no law that requires him to be calm because a police officer ordered him to do so. Other than the expectation that we do what an officer tells us to do, no matter what.
It may well be that what happened to Henry Louis Gates reflects, as he is accused of screaming at Sgt. Crowley, "what happens to a black man in America." Because the black man happens to be the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, perhaps the pre-eminent black scholar, it will open a discussion that we still need to have, black president notwithstanding.
It is also possible, however, that what happened to Henry Louis Gates is the outgrowth of the conflict between law and order, order represented by police who have been empowered, in our post 9/11 age, to believe that their every command is the law, that our blind obedience is mandatory. Other than a few old-timers on the Supreme Court who live in a fantasy world where ordinary people can assert their rights and refuse to comply with the command of a police officer with impunity, this encounter between a distinguished scholar, within his own home, and a police sergeant who believes that his command is sufficient to create the divide between citizen and criminal, may offer the chance to question who commands whom in our society.
The counter to this is that "cops everywhere are cops". Now there's certainly some truth to that. But I will say this. I don't fear Canadian police the way I do American ones. My sample size isn't large, but I've found that unless there's a real crisis or threat (ie. not an unarmed 60 year old man), most of them don't demand instant obseqious obedience to their every demand and are willing to answer reasonable questions. In the US my experience has been that unless I want things to get unpleasant, I'd better click my heels, cringe and do as commanded. So, racism? I don't know. Could well be. But I don't think it's necessary to invoke racism to explain officer Crowley's behaviour. He was disrespected by someone who didn't obey his every command. To his mind he was even lenient, he gave his orders multiple times. Gates stepped out of line and needed to be put in his place, not because he was black, but because he was a civilian who wasn't doing what a police officer told him. The real dividing line may not be black and white, the real dividing line may be the blue line. You either wear the blue, or you don't, and Gates didn't. (Addendum: I read the police report when it was released. When I went looking for it today, it had been taken down both by the Boston Globe and the NY Daily News. How... interesting. Fortunately someone saved a copy. I'm so glad the press has an adversarial relationship with authority.) |
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