Clarence Page: "[Henry Louis] Gates' Crime? Contempt Of Cop". I AGREE!

Gates' crime? Contempt of cop
By Clarence Page

I disagree with President Obama.

I don't think the Cambridge, Mass., police officer who arrested Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., for “disorderly conduct” in his own home acted “stupidly.” Sgt. James M. Crowley's use of legal force was excessive, in my view, yet well tailored to fit Gates' real offense in the police sergeant's eyes: “Contempt of cop.”

As just about everyone on the planet knows by now, Sgt. Crowley visited Gates in his home to find out if he really lived there. A female passerby had seen Gates and another man forcing open the stuck front door of his own home and summoned police for a possible burglary. The sergeant says the scholar repeatedly accused him of racism and made derogatory remarks about his mother, to wit: “Yeah, I'll speak to your mama when we get outside.” Not nice.

But Gates and his lawyer dispute Crowley's account, calling it exaggerated and partly fabricated. After Gates was released and the charges were dropped, President Obama rekindled the controversy by saying Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” during the encounter. Obama later backpedaled a bit. He called the sergeant “an outstanding police officer,” yet maintained that “it would have been better if cooler heads had prevailed.” Indeed, it would. But that's not easy when two versions of pride come into conflict.

Obama knows Gates as I do, as a jolly 58-year-old scholar and multimedia star who walks with a cane. If he was “loud and tumultuous,” as Crowley claims — and that Gates disputes — I would not excuse such behavior. Nevertheless, I would argue that he hardly poses a physical threat as long as he does not swing his cane at you.

Yet it is not hard for me to believe he might lose at least a little of his cool after arriving home tired and jetlagged from a trip to China, only to find a police officer checking him out to see if he really lived in that nice neighborhood.

So does Paul Butler, a black George Washington University law professor and former Washington, D.C., prosecutor who has seen other minor misunderstandings explode into a blamestorm, especially when they involve possible prejudgment by race.

“The police were right to investigate the call,” he said. “The former prosecutor in me says the police have to ask who you are and what you are doing. It is an unpleasant aspect of urban policing. … But I can certainly understand how in your own home you reach a tipping point and you feel as though you have had enough — and I understand how it would make a black man ‘loud and tumultuous.'”

Or as the late Lu Palmer, a black political journalist-activist I used to cover in Chicago, used to say, some situations are “enough to make a Negro turn black!” Even the biracial and normally reserved Obama seemed to be speaking from that black cultural memory as he perhaps-too-quickly attached “racial profiling” to this incident before he knew all the facts.

Like Obama, Butler is a Harvard Law School graduate and, like Gates, he has been arrested for a crime that, in his case, he did not commit. In his clever and remarkably even-handed book, Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, Butler recounts his experiences with admirable evenhanded toward racial profilers and the profiled. It is understandable to take race into account sometimes, he allows, but it should never be the sole reason why you suspect someone.

Yet he does not call Gates-gate a classic case of racial profiling. In the world of civilian-police relations, says Butler, it was more of a classic “Who's the Man?” contest. Racial or not, he told me, the incident stopped being good policing and became a Who's-the-Man episode after Gates handed over his I.D. As Crowley prepared to leave, according to his own arrest report, which has been posted on thesmokinggun.com , Gates kept yelling at him.

That's the point when the officer should turn around and leave,” Butler said. “You know the man is going to be yelling at you, but you leave.” Maybe so, but, according to Crowley, Gates was yelling at him in front of his fellow police officers. In long-standing police-civilian etiquette, that's “contempt of cop.” You disrespect the police officer, the officer has ways of showing you that he has a longer billy club.

In that sense, Crowley and the other officers probably never expected Gates' arrest to hold up and it didn't. Now people across the country, including me, are arguing about what happened as if we were there in Gates' house and can read the minds of everyone involved. Based on our own experiences, it is easy to feel as if we were, even when we only fool ourselves.

Clarence Page is a columnist with the Chicago Tribune. His email address is cpage@tribune.com.