Sorry For SLOW Postings; Yep, You Guessed It -- Professional Duties. Ok, Here Go: Another View Of The Louis Gates Vs. Police Saga.

The Profiling Prof
Skip Gates’s stereotype fails to pan out.
By JAMES TARANTO

In our comments yesterday on the Henry Louis Gates tumult, we argued that Gates, in accusing Officer James Crowley of racial profiling, was himself engaged in stereotyping. “It’s clear” Gates opined, that Crowley “had a narrative in his head”--a racial narrative in which Gates, a “black man,” was robbing “a white person’s house.” In truth, it is anything but clear that Crowley was following such a narrative. Gates is not clairvoyant; the source of the “narrative” he described could only have been his own head.

But we are not clairvoyant either. Although there is no evidence that Crowley had invidious racial motives, and the claim that he did seems implausible to us, we cannot prove that he was not thinking what Gates imagines he was thinking.
Gates, however, has managed to get tripped up by his own prejudices. Another Gates quote we noted yesterday was this: “If [Crowley] apologizes sincerely, I am willing to forgive him. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling. . . . That’s what I do for a living.”

As it turns out, that’s what Crowley does for a living. The Boston Herald explains:
Crowley . . . has taught a racial profiling class at the Lowell Police Academy for five years.
His academy class, which he teaches with a black police officer, instructs about 60 police cadets per year who spend 12 hours in the classroom, said Lowell Police Academy Director Thomas Fleming.
“He’s a very professional police officer and he’s a good role model,” Fleming said. “Former police commissioner Ronny Watson, who is a person of color, hand-picked Sgt. Crowley. . . . I presume because he would be the most qualified and most professional. He’s a very good instructor. He gets very high reviews by the students.”

The Herald quotes Lawrence Hickman, a black Boston policeman who teaches alongside Crowley: “He’s well versed in the subject matter he taught. He is the right instructor for the subject material. . . . I’m an African-American police officer, If there were any issues or if I thought he was biased, I would have addressed that. We all do the same job and we all know how things get spun out. The bottom line is he was there answering a call for help, he responded as a professional police officer.”

Now of course as a matter of pure logic, a policeman who is a respected expert on how to avoid racial profiling could be a practitioner of it as well. But then as a matter of pure logic, an eminent Ivy League scholar could run a burglary ring on the side. Humans are complicated creatures, and they do sometimes lead weird double lives. But one does not normally assume they do absent any shred of evidence.
Given what we now know about the incident and about Crowley, it seems fair to surmise that Gates erred during the incident in imputing racial motives to Crowley, that Gates would not have become as angry as he did absent this mistake, and that a less-angry Gates probably would not have been arrested. ”My sense is you’ve got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve it the way the wanted to resolve it,” Fox News quotes President Obama as saying, and that seems right to us.

We still think, as we wrote yesterday, that in the incident itself, Crowley was more in the wrong than Gates. In a confrontation between a policeman and a private citizen, the former has far more power, and concomitantly more responsibility. But in a public debate over race, the black Harvard professor is the one with authority. Neither Gates’s social status nor his race absolves him from the responsibility of acknowledging and working to overcome his own prejudices.