Malkin Award Nominee
This post by R.R. Reno is a bizarre read. I’m entirely willing to entertain the view that race may have had much less to do with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates than many have claimed, or indeed that race may have had nothing to do with his arrest at all. Hence when one of Conor’s readers rhetorically asks, “Who can believe that [Gates] would have been hauled to jail if his skin were a different color?”, my immediate answer is that I can believe it – or at least, I can believe that he might have been hauled to jail if he were white or tan or yellow, and so that the question is whether this is a clear case of racial bias is one about which there can be reasonable disagreement. But the idea that we can know that Gates’s arrest “had nothing to do with race” is similarly preposterous, as is Reno’s claim that the arrest was simply “the result of the boorish and arrogant behavior of a very privileged and rich man who is used to getting his way”: for policemen can also act inappropriately from time to time, and sometimes their actions, like those of tenured Harvard professors, are implicitly or explicitly motivated by their mistaken convictions about race.
But suppose Reno is right in his diagnosis of the situation. Suppose that Gates did “mount an all out verbal assault based on his own presumptions about race”, and that the reason he did this is that he is “the coddled product of elite American society”, and so was outraged at the thought of a “policeman with a working class Boston accent and no advanced degrees telling him to show identification”. (Racism may be dead, but apparently elitism in America is alive and well.) Even if all of this is true, it still doesn’t follow that the policeman was without fault and that Gates owes him an apology, as Jacob Sullum rightly notes:
Notably, Crowley invited Gates to follow him, thereby setting him up for a disorderly conduct charge. “I told Gates that I was leaving his residence and that if he had any other questions regarding the matter I would speak with him outside the residence,” Crowley writes. He claims “my reason for wanting to leave the residence was that Gates was yelling very loud and the acoustics of the kitchen and foyer were making it difficult for me to transmit pertinent information to ECC or other responding units.” But instead of simply leaving, Crowley lured Gates outside, the better to create a public spectacle and “alarm” passers-by. The subtext of Crowley’s report is that he was angered and embarrassed by Gates’ “outburst” and therefore sought to create a pretext for arresting him.
The charge against Gates was dropped. But what are the odds that it would have been if Gates had not been a nationally famous scholar with many friends in high places, including the president of the United States? Instead of showing what happens to “a black man in America,” the case illustrates what can happen to anyone who makes the mistake of annoying a cop.
The crucial point here is that coddled Harvard professors are not the only ones who “pull rank”, act in ways that are “boorish and arrogant”, and use their “position[s] of superiority” to strike out at those who refuse to show them the appropriate “deference and adulation” (all those phrases are Reno’s). “The officer did what officers do”, Reno writes, “in order to assert themselves and show that they are in charge”. But perhaps he should have stuck with doing the thing that would best keep the public peace.
P.S. Will at Ordinary Gentlemen has written a couple of excellent posts on the Gates affair.
Filed under: civil liberties, media/culture
“But instead of simply leaving, Crowley lured Gates outside, the better to create a public spectacle and ‘alarm’ passers-by.”
So it’s Crowley’s fault that when he invited Gates outside to ask “any other questions,” Gates decided to follow Crowley outside not to ask questions, but to go ballistic on him in public? Sullum’s being silly.
Why didn’t Crowley just leave? It had been established that Gates was in his own home, and even if he was being obnoxious – which he was – there was no reason to allow the conflict to escalate any further.
Evgeni Malkin?
(sorry, yinzer, had to)
Judging from my experience with cops, Crowley sounds like an experienced officer who knows exactly how to manipulate a situation to suit his narrative. He baited Gates, changed the location of the argument to his advantage, and Gates fell for it all. Hook. line and sinker. You’d honestly think a professor would be a bit smarter than that, outraged or not.
So, what do we have here? A failure to communicate, or just two arrogant jerks going at it? My vote is with the latter.
CEK: Yep. And to be clear, judging from the police report I’d say that “arrogant jerk” is probably being too kind to Gates; he comes off like a downright asshole.
“Why didn’t Crowley just leave?”
So your suggestion is that Crowley should have simply refused to answer Gates’s questions? It seems to me that it would have been unreasonable for Crowley to refuse to answer questions that Gates had, given that Crowley had entered his home in an obviously contentious situation. So Crowley decided to exit the home yet give Gates an opportunity to ask questions. The fact that Gates abused that opportunity is his fault, not Crowley’s.
My suggestion is that he shouldn’t have arrested the guy for yelling at him.
[...] number of my libertarian friends—John Schwenkler, Joshua Claybourn, et al.—who have weighed in on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates have taking the [...]
It all seems so trivial. I can’t figure why anyone outside the Cambridge police department is even talking about it.
John, assuming your most recent comment was a response to me, I think the point about your suggestion as to whether the cop should have arrested Gates is a red herring.
The subject of our exchange, beginning with my criticism of Sullum’s point, went only to whether Sullum was wrong in his criticism of Crowley “luring” (apparently Sullum’s a mindreader, who can identify the cop’s intent) Gates out to the street. That is, the subject of the entire Sullum analysis that you excerpted.
On the entirely different question of what the cop should have done with Gates once Gates was out on the street, I simply don’t have a position either way. I’m hardly one to say we should repeal all public nuisance laws and other such regulations, and so the only question left is whether Gates’s conduct rose to the standard justifying an arrest under those laws. We simply have no idea whether the conduct did.
Even if Sullum is mistaken in the charge of baiting, that doesn’t undermine my central points, which were that it doesn’t follow from the fact that Gates was acting inappropriately that he’s the only one at fault, and – more crucially – that the desire to assert oneself as the man in charge is obviously not what a police officer’s actions should be guided by, especially when it’s been established that he isn’t dealing with a criminal.
Fair enough. I didn’t mean my criticism of the invitation point to suggest anything to the contrary.
What, exactly, is the Malkin Award?
… for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible – to give others a chance.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/awards.html
[...] John Schwenkler [...]
There was no violation of law. The case was dropped almost immediately. Ergo, the arrest should not have occured. It is scary how statist a lot of folks are. People seem to think police have all these awesome powers. They don’t. Gates is within a tick or two of being able to succeed upon a wrongful imprisonment suit.
The arrest is a natural consequence of the militarization of our nation’s police forces. With the militarization comes an us v. them mentality. The tribal games in the days after the incident demonstrate this tribalism acutely.