WASHINGTON--It began with a routine tip about a suspected burglary, with a white cop squaring off against a Black suspect. Now, the president and the rest of the nation are weighing in. More than a week after prominent Harvard University Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested by Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley, the highly charged police action has drawn the country into a national debate about police tactics, race relations and President Barack Obama’s commentary.
President Obama on the Thursday backed off a statement he made the day before that Cambridge police “acted stupidly” during the July 16 incident. He said he never intended to call the officer “stupid” for arresting Dr. Gates on a disorderly conduct charge, which was dropped. Sgt. Crowley, a police academy instructor on the dangers of racial profiling, said earlier in the day that he did nothing wrong and will not apologize to Dr. Gates. The professor didn’t speak publicly Thursday.
The Gates story has captured the nation because it has a “perfect storm” of ingredients, said Katheryn Russell Brown, a law professor and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at the University of Florida.
The ongoing question of whether the U.S. has moved past racism combined with the fact that Dr. Gates actually studies African-American issues--all taking place on the hallowed confines of Harvard--provided for this explosion of interest, Mrs. Brown said.
“Many people want to believe that now that we have an African-American in the White House, that now we can get past all this race stuff,” said Mrs. Brown, who wrote “The Color of Crime,” a book about race, crime and justice.
Even police appear to be split along racial lines about whether the officer acted appropriately when he responded to a call for a possible burglary at Dr. Gates’ home and later determined that the professor merely had trouble getting into his own house.
The Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, called President Obama’s remarks “premature.” Jim Pasco, the union’s executive director, said the president “should have waited for all of the facts to unfold.” On the eve of its national convention, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, sided with President Obama, saying the police had acted “irrationally.”
“Once Dr. Gates was identified as the lawful resident of the house, the [police contact] should have ended,” said Joseph McMillan, the organization’s president. “The department should seek Dr. Gates out and offer an apology.”
Dr. Gates, 58, has numerous honorary degrees and is considered one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Black culture.
“I am astonished that this happened to me; and more importantly I’m astonished that it could happen to any citizen of the United States, no matter what their race,” Dr. Gates was quoted Tuesday on The Root website. “I want to do what I can so that every police officer will think twice before engaging in this kind of behavior.”
Edwin Dorn, a former dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and author of “Rules and Racial Equality,” said the magnitude of the Dr. Gates arrest can be understood through the reactions from Blacks and whites.
“If one conducts a survey, one will find that overwhelmingly Blacks feel that this was an example of something that is part of their DNA--police discrimination, oppression, racial profiling. It’s likely that you’ll find a much larger percentage of whites believing, just instantly, that it was Dr. Gates who behaved intemperately,” Mr. Mr. Dorn said. “It’s an example of how the races still view things very differently.”
He said whites are far more likely than Blacks to believe that police officers arriving at their doorstep are likely to do the right thing. Far from the case, Dorn said, for Blacks.
“From an African-American perspective, what it said is, ‘If it happens to a guy like….Dr. Gates, just imagine what happens on darkened streets with people who are not prominent,” Mr. Dorn said.
Sgt. Crowley has shown no sign of backing down. He has gotten a flood of support and emotional posts on law enforcement Websites, including policelink. The officer is himself an icon of sorts in the Boston area: 16 years ago, he tried to save dying Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when the basketball player crumbled on a practice court with heart problems.
“I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star,” he said at the time. “I wasn’t working on a Black man. I was working on another human being.”
Mr. Crowley was then a Brandeis University police officer.
This week, the 42-year-old father of three told the Boston Herald, “I just have nothing to apologize for” in the Gates incident. “It will never happen.”
There was no hint of the controversy that would follow when the sergeant responded to a routine call to investigate a possible noon-hour burglary in Cambridge.
A female caller said two Black men with backpacks were on the porch of a home on Ware Street. One of them, she said, was wedging his shoulder into the door as if “he was trying to force entry,” according to a police report.
Dr. Gates had just returned from an extended trip out of the country. The other man, the professor’s driver, was, apparently, assisting Dr. Gates, who was having trouble entering the house.
According to the police report, Dr. Gates already was in the house when Sgt. Crowley arrived. Sgt. Crowley then asked Dr. Gates to step outside because the officer was investigating a possible burglary.
The remark, according to the report, set off a volatile exchange that led to Dr. Gates’ arrest. Sgt. Crowley said Dr. Gates repeatedly referred to him as a “racist” police officer. At one point, according to the report, Sgt. Crowley said an enraged Dr. Gates told him that he “had no idea who I was messing with and that I had not heard the last of it.”
Sgt. Crowley said Dr. Gates eventually provided him with a Harvard University identification card and that the officer was “led to believe that Dr. Gates was lawfully in the residence.” But the tense verbal exchange continued, with Dr. Gates following Sgt. Crowley to the front porch where, according to the report, the professor “continued to yell at me, accusing me of racial bias.”
Sgt. Crowley said Dr. Gates was arrested after ignoring the officer’s warning that he was “becoming disorderly.”
In a televised news conference Thursday, Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas stood by the sergeant’s actions and his department.
Commissioner Haas, who is white, described Sgt. Crowley as a “stellar” member of the department.
“I don’t believe Sgt. Crowley acted with any racial motivation at all,” he said, adding that President Obama’s remarks “really stunned” the department.
Nevertheless, Commissioner Haas said a special panel would be assembled to investigate the incident.
President Obama, who gave the controversy new prominence during a prime-time news conference last week, described Dr. Gates as a personal friend. The president is no stranger himself to issues of racial profiling. In his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” he described several such instances from his own past.
“I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger,” President Obama wrote.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the president’s remarks the night before were misinterpreted.
“Let me be clear, he was not calling the officer stupid,” Mr. Gibbs said. He said President Obama felt that, “at a certain point, the situation got far out of hand” at Dr. Gates’ home.
Analysts said the dispute has riveted much of America because it touches some of the deepest differences in race relations.
Whites “don’t live with the daily knowledge that their children may be arbitrarily subjected to police brutality or profiling,” said Michael Eric Dyson, Georgetown University sociology professor and author of more than a dozen books about African-Americans, race and culture.
“Black and Latino people tell their children if they dream of insulting a police officer, they’d better wake up,” Prof. Dyson said. “The consequences can be death.”
David Harris, law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the book, “Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work,” said the Dr. Gates case resonates because it shows that minorities, regardless of education, status or age, can be made to feel vulnerable.
“It’s a universal part of the Black American experience and nothing protects you from it,” he said. “You can achieve the American Dream in every facet of your life, and it can still happen to you.”
