Discretion and Arrest Power

I think there are two separate issues that will tend to be conflated here. First, whether officers should have the ability to induce violations of the law leading to arrests in this fashion and, secondly, whether the officer’s behavior was racist. Maybe they are really related, but not directly. I am not thrilled with officers’ ability to play this game, but as long as citizens have the means to avoid these traps I’m not sure it’s a huge problem to be arrested for disorderly conduct if it’s also easy to get those kinds of charges dismissed (which I think it should be). Here it seems that Gates could have avoided the arrest if that was the outcome that he desired. As to the issue of racism, granting police officers discretion in these cases make charges of racism extremely difficult to assess. As we can see in many other areas, it is difficult to detect racism behavior or practices by directly observing conduct- you must also look at outcomes. How you would do this in the case of policing is not clear. And this is even before you get to the issue that officers have additional discretion in that their accounts of events will always receive an overwhelming amount of benefit of the doubt.

Two things:

First, I can’t believe this hasn’t been referenced yet, but it seems appropriate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkQKOBiHyNU&feature=related

Second, I’d like to second Paul Gowder @2, and add that the “prudential dodge” (appearing quite frequently in the previous comment thread) needs to be recognized for what it is. Basically, it seems to boil down to the claim that, if your rights are being violated by a police officer, the only wise thing to do is acquiesce and defer to their authority.

I have never heard Gates referred to as ‘Skip’ before. But his Wikipedia entry does refer to ‘Skip’ as a nickname.

Do any of you have some familiarity with Gates on a personal or collegial level that justifies referring to him as ‘Skip’? Assuming no, isn’t this condescending, maybe even “racist”, to assume such familiarity with such a distinguished professor?

@4 – I’ve heard people say “Skip” throughout the academy. My sense is that it is a legitimate nickname he uses with friends, but that other academics use it as a sort of way of showing their connection to him. Sort of like the scene in “Quiz Show” where the Jewish lawyer comes back enamored of spending time with Charles Van Doren and his crowd. His wife says something like, who are you, going around talking about “Bunny Wilson.” The husband says, “they call him Bunny,” to which the wife replies, “That doesn’t mean you have to.”

(I don’t mean this to say that there was anything wrong with the title of the original post, just giving my sense in response to Daniel’s question.)

The best one can say about cop in this case is that he seems to have very poor conflict management skills. It’s easy to see how this could be the result of the kind of practices Henry mentions, even aside from any intention to create an arrest. That is, the cop might simply have wanted to extricate himself from the situation after being accused of racism, and misjudged Gates’s willingness to pursue the accusation outside the front door.

In some work with local youth–some white and working or middle class–I discovered that a surprising number of them who had been arrested on very shaky grounds. Another incredible thing was that the police almost always taunted them and occasionally assaulted them (e.g., by forcing them to the ground violently, kneeing them in the back, throwing them against a wall or the floor, etc.) if they responded in any way to the taunts. I did know one Haitian kid who ended up with some visible (non-permanent) injuries on his face, that he showed me. Basically, he questioned his treatment and was put down, pretty violently. He had this idea that he could do something about this. But, of course, he could not do anything. He could file a complaint that just went into an enormous pile of complaints against the PD.

The story is outrageous but one thing you might wonder what is motivating the officer or what kind of framework makes this–which is really very bizarre, actually–he is black so yes racism but he is older, it is his house, he has a cane, it was all on his property, etc.–look like a good idea. I think that racism frames and initiates many of these event–but I wonder if there is also not something in police culture that allows them (prompts them?) to react (overreact) to what they perceive of as instances of disrespect.

Judging from what people who’ve had run ins like this with the police is that police officers are not in the least bit deterred by the concern that there will be repercussions for them. Which suggests that there almost never are.

Can’t believe nobody’s brought up season 4 of the Wire here.

they’re about to start showing Season 4 here in the UK this evening, so if possible no spoilers please please please!

Thought I’d direct interested folks’ attention to Lawrence Bobo’s article about the Skip Gates incident, printed in The Root (link):

“If Skip Gates can be arrested on his front porch and end up in handcuffs in a police cruiser then, sadly, there, but for the grace of God, goes every other black man in America.”

Alan makes a good point. God forbid that any of us stand up for our rights in the face in the face of the divinely authorized power of the State and its agents.

The Jocks v. Tavernier case recently decided by Sotomayor is of a piece with this story.

I think that race definitely is a component of this story, but the larger component is the ridiculous level of entitlement many police officers feel they have when it comes to pushing around innocent citizens.

In America, rights only exist in theory. Judges, the police, and local officials will generally ignore them. If you sue, they will pay you off. They will not, however, change their behavior.

No, but seriously, there has been an admirable (and to me, somewhat unexpected) show of anti-authoritarianism from various CT commenters on this and other recent police-related threads. Paul Gowder’s question is a good example (and trotsky’s attempted rebuttal fails on the fact that police investigation had already revealed there was no burglary going on, by the time Gates was arrested).

It’s intuitive that police work will appeal to authoritarian types, thus the police profession will tend to select those types. And they will tend to abuse or overreach their authority. As a political conservative, I regard this and certain other problems in the justice system (for instance, violence and rape in prisons) as being fundamentally intractable. This is not to say that abuses should be tolerated, or reforms not made where possible (and I’m far from happy with the status quo); only that with the best of intentions and the best possible formal systems to prevent abuse, abuses will still happen. I hope I do not have to argue why we need to have a justice system anyway.

For the more progressive readers here, I suggest that your skepticism of police authority should be applied more broadly, and maybe inform your politics. Because everything I said above about the police applies in spades to their bosses’ bosses’ bosses, the politicians. Politics as a career appeals to authoritarians; it provides opportunities for (and inducements to) corruption on an unimaginable scale; and politicians abuse their offices and overreach their authority so consistently that it’s never much of a surprise. It’s true you hardly ever see them hitting anyone with a stick, but the real misery and damage they inflict is by far the greater.

Progressive politics, so far as I can see, is only ever about increasing the scope and scale of state power. Occasionally, in campaign, a progressive will argue for increasing individuals’ freedom, but once in office they never actually do it. Instead they continually seek new crises, new rationales to increase government control (and their own personal power along with it) and reduce individual freedom. Note that this setup doesn’t give them any incentive to actually fix anything. I don’t care to debate the merits of e.g. cap-and-trade or Obamacare, I merely point out that all progressive solutions go in the same direction, and invite you to draw your own conclusions.

Progressive politics, so far as I can see, is only ever about increasing the scope and scale of state power.

And conservative politics are only ever about pretending there’s no other kind of power. One can be just as oppressed by robber barons as by bureaucrats, by private rent-a-cops as by real cops. Anybody who’s lived through the last couple of years should have noticed that, for crying out loud.

Some of us like the idea of private and public power keeping an eye on each other.

Politics as a career appeals to authoritarians

CONSERVATIVE politics as a career appeals to authoritarians.

I still need to write a post in which to embed the utterly true joke that the military/industrial and police systems actually do work in the way in which public choice theorists think the whole government works.

I guess if I see you taking your kitty to the vet I can assume that what you want to do is pay veterinarians.

Well, if I pay the veterinarians, but don’t bother taking the kitty, you’d be justified in your assumption.

…conservative politics are only ever about pretending there’s no other kind of power.

Oh, I don’t know. In some cases, I’m more sympathetic to talk of Evil Corporations than you might suppose. Still, when it comes to government power vs. money power, you’re comparing apples to atoms.

CONSERVATIVE politics as a career appeals to authoritarians.

Whereas progressives just want to make the world a better place, I suppose?

Conservative politics, as far as I can see, is only about stealing candy from little children and murdering innocent puppie dogs.

You know, now that I really, really think about it, you’re right.

when it comes to government power vs. money power, you’re comparing apples to atoms

Yep.

Exxon Mobil revenues: $443 billion
GDP Denmark: $342 billion

UK number of government employees: 600 000
Wal-mart number of employees: 2.1 million

Engels no one every says things like this on CT but: I heart you.

I was once in a somewhat similar situation … in my mid 20s, I locked myself out of my girlfriend’s family’s house in a tony part of Brookline, and climbed in an unlocked front window. A few minutes later I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a police car racing down the long driveway, and answered the doorbell to find another policeman (from a second police car) with a hand on his holster. He was extremely tense. I was extremely startled. I was very, very polite to him, and a bit worried since I couldn’t prove I was there legitimately — I called my girlfriend on the phone, and she convinced him everything was OK.

Without wanting to make any judgements about the Gates case, I imagine that things would’ve been different if I had started screaming at him early on in the interaction. Fortunately for both of us, I wasn’t inclined to assert myself, being young and having just climbed into somebody else’s front window. But it’s worth noting that 1) police responding to B&E calls can be pretty worked up; and 2) these sorts of interactions depend in delicate ways on split-second judgments, and very small factors can make the difference between good and bad outcomes.

Of course, from where I sit, I have no idea whether the policeman acted inappropriately to Gates, or whether Gates was needlessly rude in some way. I just keep thinking back to my own experience and reflecting that it was fortunate that I had absolutely no pre-existing hostility to the Brookline police — as far as I was concerned, their job was to protect me, and this probably showed in my demeanor.

MotSQ @39,

thank you for that interesting and relevant anecdote about your youth, for extraordinarily large values of “interesting” and “relevant”. Come back to us when you are, in stark distinction to the facts with which you have wasted our time, (i) a distinguished middle-aged professor at a prestigious university who (ii) was entering your own house when accosted by the po and (iii) identified yourself to the lawmen as the rightful occupant of the house and (iv) were arrested nonetheless.

…their job was to protect me, and this probably showed in my demeanor.

and we know who’s demeanor really matters, don’t we?

I am glad Mr. Gates had the opportunity to see firsthand the results of police authority, racist or otherwise, which he says he has written about but not experienced before. In the way I am glad Martha Stewart went to prison, whined about conditions, and promptly forgot her “friends” there after release.

I also note that had this happenned to a person of any race, in South Boston, Chicago’s South Side, or Bedford-Stuyvesant, it’s way more likely he would have five police boots on his neck and get tasered.

Here’s a typical statute regarding “Obedience” that mainly refers to regulating traffic. Since “disobeying, “resisting” and disorderly conduct are the most common excuses for police abuse, let’s look:
—-625 ILCS 5/11-203—-
Sec. 11-203. Obedience to police officers. No person shall wilfully
fail or refuse to comply with any lawful order or direction of any police officer, fireman, or school crossing guard invested by law with authority to direct, control, or regulate traffic. Any person convicted of violating this Section is guilty of a petty offense and shall be subject to a mandatory fine of $150.

Police discretion to enforce compliance with their every demand at threat of arrest and assault is a bedrock of the police state. And here we are.

Truly it’s a wonderful country.

A black man can greet a police officer responding to a burglary in progress with a tirade of righteous abuse and upon his arrest his penalty is $40 bail, charges dropped the next week, and his good friend the Harvard Law professor defending him pro-bono.

Life ain’t perfect, but if these are our racial incidents, we’ve come a long way.

By the way, just in the interest of employing the scientific method instead of speculating, let’s have everyone reading this thread react as Gates reportedly did in your next random encounter with a police officer. The data on arrest rates will be interesting no matter how they turn out.

Blimey Mrs. Tilton @41, that was a spectacularly sour and bad-tempered response to poor old MSQ @39, for extraordinary large values of “sour” and “bad-tempered.”

Are you suggesting only identical situations are “interesting” and “relevant,” not comparable ones?

At the risk of coming over all Freakonomics, one of the central problems seems to be that the police officer is incentivised to escalate clearly non-violent situations, in contrast to violent (esp. armed) or potentially violent ones. And the citizen is basically in a Catch 22 – accede to the intrusion/infringement despite your innocence, or confront the officer and risk breaking a sweepingly broad law (or simply a trumped up charge). Maybe there should be a blanket law, similar to entrapment jurisprudence, saying that a non-violent infraction that would not have occured absent the police intervention is not illegal. But it’s possible that this would capture some things that should still be crimes.

I don’t know if the discretion problem is tractable, but regardless, an extremely robust internal and external complaints and discipline mechanism is needed. Pretty much everywhere, though, it’s lacking.

The progressive vs. conservative tit-for-tat in this thread reminds me of the fundamental difference between communism and capitalism. Under communism it is dog eat dog, whereas under capitalism it is the reverse.

asm @49,

Are you suggesting only identical situations are “interesting” and “relevant,” not comparable ones?

no, I’m suggesting that MotSQ’s experience is not particularly comparable at all and hence that his anecdote is irrelevant in the strict legal sense of the term. That he claimed otherwise marks him as naive, cognitively dim or intellectually dishonest. Because I like, for all my sourness and bad temper, to give people the benefit of the doubt*, I’m presuming (absent evidence otherwise) that the first of these three explains MotSQ. If you are really arguing that “young kid caught breaking into somebody else’s house” is meaningfully comparable to “middle aged man entering his own house and pointing that fact out to a policeman who then proceeds to arrest him”, which of the three explains you?

* Except, of course, to people like “Trotsky” who make it plain that they have fully exhausted any such benefit.

By the way, just in the interest of employing the scientific method instead of speculating, let’s have everyone reading this thread react as Gates reportedly did in your next random encounter with a police officer. The data on arrest rates will be interesting no matter how they turn out.

Do you suppose African-Americans and white people have “random” encounters with police officers at roughly the same rate? I’m quite willing to believe many police officers will arrest individuals of any race who they believe haven’t shown the appropriate respect for authority during such encounters, but if some groups of people are subjected to things like “stop and frisk” at rates much higher than other groups, there’s plenty of room for racism to do its work.

Ginger Yellow: “Maybe there should be a blanket law, similar to entrapment jurisprudence, saying that a non-violent infraction that would not have occured absent the police intervention is not illegal.”

Did you know about the incident a few years ago in Florida where a high-ranking black police officer was stopped by a highway patrolman for speeding. The black officer thought that he was being discriminated against and protested, demanding that the patrolman’s superior be called to the scene. Things quickly got out of hand, as the patrolman’s video showed. (IIRC, this case was shown on Court TV.) At one point the patrolman asked the the black officer to sign the ticket he had written out, and advanced on the black officer. The black officer refused and backed up, raising his hands in a ward-off gesture. The patrolman’s clipboard touched the black officer’s upraised hands. Result: one of the charges against the black officer was assaulting a police officer. (!) I kid you not.

“The patrolman’s clipboard touched the black officer’s upraised hands. Result: one of the charges against the black officer was assaulting a police officer. (!) I kid you not.”

There was a similar case of “police assault” with a deadly weapon (an orange) a couple of years back which I tried and failed to Google for my post – it was only turning up Orange Order marches and Orange County incidents.

@ No. 12 and others. As anyone who has ever had any “professional” encounters with the police will attest, they are, for the most part, thugs. And they are, you know… armed thugs. Cops in smaller cities tend to be the worst— they don’t have very much to do (except write tickets), and respond to every call with sirens blaring and adrenaline up. Everything is a macho confrontation with cops in general and the small-towners in particular.

On the other hand, in Chicago i came to our office one morning to find a brick on the floor and our glass door vaporized. The Chicago Police Department’s reaction when i called it in was (literally) “Well, what do you expect us to do about it?”

Substance McGravitas (I like that!) almost says something with that bit about the kitten, but his metaphor begs the question, exactly what kitten are progressives taking to the vet?

Literal kittens. We like them.

Also, not submitting to police authority when they are undercover and illegally sitting on your property can get you killed: the agitator, NYtimes.

musaical mountaineer:

“All you have to do to make me look like a chump is point out a case where progressives are trying to liberalize or de-governmentalize, well, anything.”

Drug laws. Abortion. Intellectual property rights. Restrictions of labor migration. Ag subsidies. A host of private liabilities related to negative externalities of profit-seeking behavior. Levels of military spending. A host of states’ leverage in criminal enforcement, especially as it relates to nonviolent crime prevention and prosecution. The market in tax avoidance. Regulatory arbitrage. Corporate “personhood”.

Still, the larger point remains: state power is as much evident in the ability of Merck, Coca-Cola, or AIG to give and take-away a citizens’ livelihood as it is in the ability of the State to do the same. Economic relations, except anarchic bartering economies, are inescapably a product of the State.

And this foundation gives us perhaps the clearest way to distinguish Progressive from Classical Liberal: the former can freely acknowledge this truth whereas a Classical Liberal must employ a rigid ideology to obscure it.

I’d like to get back to the cops issue. I’ve seen and have heard from many friends (I am black and grew up in Newark, NJ) many instances of police overstepping their legal bounds – although none have ever been committed against my person. This is nothing new for an inner city kid. My concern is why are the police constantly fearing for their lives when they respond to a call? It seems to me that there is some connection with the aggressive behavior of some police officers, with the fact that many of them are scared as heck when they go into a situation.
Let me put it in perspective, I happened to be working at a government facility, guarded by a Marine detachment of some sort. Inside the building I was working in someone had forgotten to lock a door or secure safe or something and the MPs came to investigate why the alarm was going off. although they had there weapons drawn, they did not point them at me. They spoke clearly and calmly for everyone to pull out their ids and show them. They acted with a great deal of restraint in a possibly dangerous situation. They were trained.

Somehow I get the impression that many of the officers that find themselves afraid when they enter a situation are simply poorly trained or are not proper material to be in law enforcement.

Abortion, contraception, sexual behavior more generally.

Okay, I’ll give you a teensy point there, but it’s mostly for things that happened in the past. Right now you don’t hear any prominent progressives arguing e.g. that the morning-after pill should be legalized. Maybe they think it should be, but it’s not all that important.

As for “sexual behavior more generally”, what about the freedom to reproduce? Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, is down with compulsory population controls, sterilants in the water, and other stuff that sounds so crazy and wicked that I feel like a member of the tinfoil-hat brigade just bringing it up.

Drug decriminalization.

Okay, another teensy point; we’ll let progressives have the credit for medical marijuana. But the War on Some Drugs is going full-steam-ahead under this progressive government. How much for drug enforcement in the latest budget?

Restrictions on police power.

What restrictions?

Opposing warrantless surveillance.

Except when Obama does it.

Against all that, I can stack the Stimulus or Stabilization or whatever it will have always been called tomorrow; the nationalization of banks, auto manufacturers, and healthcare; and draconian regulation of energy. That’s the real progressive agenda, the one they’re actually working on.

I think a lot of progressives-in-the-street really would like to see liberalization in the areas you mentioned. I’m sure a lot of them wanted other changes Obama promised. Some of those people have been sorely disappointed. If you want to tell me that Obama isn’t a real progressive, I can support that argument several ways. Trouble is, if you were an American progressive, you voted for him. Maybe you didn’t want…this…but you got it.

In fact, this is really the nut of what I’m trying to say. On your own terms, by your own desires, you shouldn’t support this guy. He’s not good for Social Justice (reaches for gun) or The Environment, or Human Rights, or Democracy. He’s good for Barack Obama and Barack Obama’s buddies.

Someone (I think it was V. I. Lenin) had a term for idealistic folks who naively supported the cynical power-freaks at the top of the Communist food chain. It’s so impolite that I’m not going to mention it, and anyway I don’t think it was necessarily stupid to support Obama. But it was wrong. Why should he be exempt from the same skepticism and scorn you showed George Bush? What has he done to earn it?

My concern is why are the police constantly fearing for their lives when they respond to a call?

In the UK, as far as I am aware (my sister has dated two police officers), they don’t. Maybe it is that in the US if you are serious about commiting crimes then taking a gun with you is pretty much expected, where in the UK it is very rare – you would only take a gun along if you planned on using it as part of the crime (armed robbery or whatever).

Stats: UK firearms offenses ~21k, about half of which using air guns, or about 0.2% of all crime involves firearms. Of the remaining ~11k, only 43% involved the weapon being fired, and over half the time when they were fired it was blanks/pellets.

37 police officers in the UK have been killed while of duty from 1985-2007. Searching ODMP for agency “police” over the same time period I get 2274 results (981 for cause of death “gunfire” alone, as there are some deaths in that database that wouldn’t have been counted in the BBC article). Even adjusting for population that it quite a lot more.

Economic relations, except anarchic bartering economies, are inescapably a product of the State.

If by that you mean a state is necessary to enforce contracts, copyrights and patents, and provide currency, then I wholeheartedly agree. I’m not a freakin’ anarchist. But the state isn’t “producing” anything except, as it were, the soil in which an economy can grow. Now I’ll go over your list of stuff. If I leave something out, it’s because I don’t know what you’re talking about; clarify if you like.

Restrictions of labor migration.

You mean, not securing the Mexican border? That’s nonfeasance, not liberalization. It would be liberalization, I guess, if they were to eliminate the legal requirement of securing the border.

Ag subsidies.

I’m not so sure. Obama used to be a big corn-ethanol booster. I do find this somewhat out of date Reason article in which Obama takes away some subsidies and points out the whopping savings, while redirecting the money to new groups. Of course, you can prove anything using Google. If you have a link with actual data you might want to put it up now.

A host of private liabilities related to negative externalities of profit-seeking behavior.

What does this mean? Poor people who got snookered into high-interest loans will be allowed to not pay? That’s liberalization?

Levels of military spending.

Chumped!

Correction – so many weapons in my country – the US.

The alternative [Obama], thanks to our rigged electoral system, was a senile loon and his mentally defective running mate.

That suggests that in electoral politics, at least at the national level, there is no alternative to supporting increased state power. That wasn’t quite musical mountaineer’s point, but it’s closer to it than I’m comfortable with.

at the national level, there is no alternative to supporting increased state power

Bingo! I voted for the candidate most likely to defeat Obama, but I can’t bring myself to admit his name because I HATE him. Indeed, of all the national political figures, he was the only one whose statist shenanigans had fucked me over personally.

See, that’s how to get foul language out of me. Just mention McWhatsisname.

Jared @58: 1. Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons (who is black) seems to be protecting the police: “Let’s not focus on the Police Department. It’s all of our problem.”

There’s a solution I can get behind: don’t fire the cop, fire all the white people!

An officer responds to a suspected burglary.
Finds Gates inside his own home. After speaking to Gates he is then satisfied that there is no burglary. The officer not liking how Mr. Gates treated him then uses a common tactic to induce behavior that may allow an arrest.
How is this in any way excusable?

Trotsky — I would expect any American to be able to yell at anyone who is in their home for a spurious reason.

Nobody disputes that cops have a very legitimate interest in maintaining control of situations; their lives really could be at stake in any given incident (at least in the US with its huge number of armed maniacs). What puts the Gatesgate cop in the wrong is that, once he ascertained that he was dealing with the legitimate resident and therefore there was no crime nor risk to public safety that required further investigation, he had both the opportunity and the obligation to de-escalate and withdraw- and he instead decided to go on a power trip. I’m quite confident that none of the good cops I know would dispute that this was a poor decision. He needs, at the least, some retraining.

If Gates had been Palestinian or any other non-Israeli ME male this post would not exist.
Also it is, from the air around the story, and from Gates’ public demeanor generally, highly probable that Gates was scornful and insulting in non-provable subtle ways. This is obviously not a point that can be argued beyond the assertion, but I do assert its likelihood, unfair as that may be.
In at least some pertinent ways this is a black and white issue wherein the cop is the lower on the hierarchy. Racist history of America as it stands, still it isn’t always that easy to spot the good guy. These days.

Where is the awesome Mrs Tilton? Some commenters didn’t get the point or can’t help themselves.

We could simply adopt the convention: @ X, see, mutatis mutandis, 41 and 55.

In the news recently: policeman hunts down an ambulance driver to punish him for “disrespecting” him and ends by putting an EMT in a chokehold — as well as delaying an ambulance on its way to the hospital.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Oklahoma_trooper_on_leave_after_altercation_with_ambulance_personnel

In my few encounters, I’ve always taken the attitude that the cop was a public servant doing a job I sure as heck wouldn’t want. Usually respect and politenesses are repaid. So my hunch is that Gates was probably primed to interpret things as a racist incident, and probably was disrespectful and uncoorperative. Of course there is little doubt that being black Gates had reason to fell that way, it’s just that I think that if you treat a cop as a hardworking underpaid professional doing an unpleasant job (and you are thankful he is doing it), the odds are pretty good you can avoid difficulties.

Now, as for anecdotes, mine doesn’t involve a police officer at all, just a few second encounter at a four way stop in St Paul. Basically I and a black man driving a beat up (-it would be generous to call it a junkyard special) vehicle reached the intersection at the same time. As I had a near new vehicle I naturally deferred to the other driver, clearly the assymetry of potential losses being so uneven. Well the look on his face, he was completely flabbergasted. I am convinced it was the first time in his life he had ever had a white man defer to him. So I gotta believe that many blacks drive like they are walking on eggshells, cause they just know cops are out waiting for the slightest excuse to get them.

“Do you suppose African-Americans and white people have “random” encounters with police officers at roughly the same rate? I’m quite willing to believe many police officers will arrest individuals of any race who they believe haven’t shown the appropriate respect for authority during such encounters, but if some groups of people are subjected to things like “stop and frisk” at rates much higher than other groups, there’s plenty of room for racism to do its work.”

I don’t disagree with much of what you’re saying, but taking race out of the equation, and subsituting age, do you agree that police stop and frisk people under the age of 21 at rates that are much higher than people over 75? Why do they do that? Is ageism at work? Would capturing this data enlighten either the ageist beliefs of police or provide anything else of use?

sg: Also British police aren’t so great either – witness the recent murder of a passerby at a demo. Or the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Neither of these were murder, and sg knows this, he’s just stirring shit.

Or their rape conviction rate which could be just good ‘ole British incompetence but might be something a little more sinister.

She’s doing the same here.

sg: Also British police aren’t so great either – witness the recent murder of a passerby at a demo. Or the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Neither of these were murder, and sg knows this, he’s just stirring shit.

Nuh huh, both could arguably be called murder, if you know anything about the legal definition of murder. At the absolute very least, they were manslaughter (which I believe is called 2nd degree murder over in the States).

There are nasty scary men with military weapons wandering all over the joint. And outside of the centre of the station it’s very easy to find gangs of paramilitary-looking cops in blue overalls searching passing Muslims and looking very, very nasty while they do it.

That’s because they are paramilitary cops. The gendarmerie is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence.

I don’t think many people here are saying Gates is or was in this instance “nice”. And how exactly does a citizen “bully” someone with a gun and the power of arrest?

If Henri were jet-lagged and mildly ill after just returning from halfway around the world, only to discover that somebody had jimmied and damaged his front door while he was away, and on top of that aggravation a cop started messing with him instead of doing his job i.e. looking for the burglar, I bet Henri would also find that he was “having a bad day”. I KNOW I would.

Would it have been prudent for Gates to keep a more civil tongue in his head? Obviously. Does that excuse the cop for being a butthead? Obviously not (and you can safely bet your life that he got a major tongue-lashing from his supervisor about it). I really don’t understand why some people have trouble holding these two simple ideas in mind simultaneously.

Would it have been prudent for Gates to keep a more civil tongue in his head?

note that the “screaming” thing is only there in the cop’s report – according to Gates he didn’t raise his voice (and indeed currently has bronchitis).

Or their rape conviction rate which could be just good ‘ole British incompetence but might be something a little more sinister

Actually it’s due to twenty years of concerted effort to raise the rape reporting rate, but I suspect that the person who wrote this wasn’t really interested.

Maybe Gates’ goal wasn’t to be “prudent.” Maybe he wanted to use his position to stick up for people with less power to do so – the exact opposite of what an ‘asshole millionaire’ would do. Using your status to help others is admirable, I guess – except when a Black person isn’t suitable deferential while doing so.

“A citizen bullies by saying things like this: ‘how do you dare questioning me – do you know who I am? I’ll get you fired in 5 seconds. What is your name? Tell me your name. I want to know your name.’”

Even if this was how it went down, I wouldn’t call it bullying. I’d call it sticking up for your rights against an asshole cop who’s abusing his authority. Most non-police have effectively zero recourse when something like this, or even much worse, happens. So I don’t think you can call it bullying when someone who potentially does have recourse threatens to use it.

Ginger (and again: these are all pure groundless speculations) – when you say “sticking up for your rights against an asshole cop who’s abusing his authority” you’re assuming that Boston’s infamous “do you know who I am?” (DYKWIA) makes its first appearance in response to some sort of abuse of authority. But that, in fact, is not obvious at all; DYKWIA is known to pop up here and there without any provocation whatsoever, or, perhaps, with a very slight, almost imaginary provocation. If that’s the case, I’m afraid “sticking up for your rights” doesn’t apply here; often a DYKWIA is simply a manifestation of arrogance.

These things do happen, you know. Even Harvard professors are not immune. Or, maybe, Harvard professors – especially.

Dr. Gates was probably upset and angry when he asked for Sgt. Crowley’s ID info. He was accused of breaking into his own home and based on his life experience, that was unfair, although based on the actual circumstances, it was not.

Sgt. Crowley didn’t like an angry citizen yelling at him for doing his job, so instead of trying to understand why this incident had triggered such anger in Dr. Gates, he escalates the situation, and arrests him. A very stupid power play that will forever tarnish what appears to have been an impressive career.

Do police officers really think that a lack of sufficient respect is a crime? The more they abuse their power in this way, the less respect we have for their profession. People who carry badges, tasers and guns need to show more self-discipline.

I imagine some folks will want a link to Safety Officer description as I talked about above. Currently working on that: google doesn’t return good results :-/

From what I can see, apparently Safety Officer is exclusively a University position. Wow.

Anyhow, here is one example that looks pretty good. I advocate that this kind of job description should be a basic standard model for a beat cop’s job.

…Compare with “safety officers” elsewhere, though. Unfortunately, it seems they don’t explicitly require applicants to have taken any coursework in diplomatic negotiation, defusing hostility, etc. And they don’t list such things in the job description. Neither do they list informing the community about one’s official role and duties. Sheeeeeeesh.

Either they genuinely emphasize it on the job and provide that training upon hire (good!), or they give it on-the-job lip service (bad!), or they don’t require such training at all (very bad!).

I’ve searched google for “safety officer” programs and, uh, most seem to suffer from the problem above: they don’t seem to actually identify hostility-defusing and diplomatic negotiation as concrete job duties. At the very least, these are not usually emphasized as primary duties. This is a problem!

The officer’s report presents a detailed and plausible narrative of events. The statement from Gates does not. It lacks detail, has narrative gaps, and this absence of detail makes his arrest seem not merely a “bad call” but totally unfounded. It also makes a demonstratively false assertion that Gates did not and could not have yelled at the cop or caused a general disturbance – which is flatly contradicted by the photograph of Gates on his porch screaming at the police. The passerby who took the cellphone photo states he was screaming. This lends credence to the police union’s assertion that all was done properly. Whether or not Gates was “lured” outside hardly excuses his demeanor or legally invalidates the arrest. As someone who has been on the receiving end of unwarrantedly abusive and in one case deranged behavior by police officers, I am not predisposed to believe their accounts, but in this case the preponderance of public accounts seems to favor the officer. However, it’s easy to imagine that the details could be different, and many have, with varying degrees of plausibility.

The officer’s report presents a detailed and plausible narrative of events.

Having been in the room and an active participant when many such narratives were crafted, developed, revised, and polished, I would like to suggest that “detailed and plausible [and cleanly favorable to the writers]” is usually a goal held in contradistinction to “accurate to what we remember actually happened.”

It’s amazing, for example, what seems like threatening behavior when you’re reflecting back on a situation and trying to identify… threatening behavior. It’s impossible to fail to find the language that makes your case for you without saying anything objectively inaccurate.

And if you don’t find the language, someone else will help! I was surprised, on several occasions, to read an official Incident Report and learn that I was doing something very sensible like “monitoring” when I distinctly remembered standing there paralyzed with fear and confusion.

Memory is quite adaptive — shall we say malleable? — and it’s easy to sit down together and achieve consensus about what each of us actually did. For some definition of actually that incidentally happens to be mutually advantageous. And hey, that… adaptiveness… along with help from others, who helped me fill those “gaps” in my memory… has probably saved more jobs in one year than you or I could ever guess.

Also: Spell-check wants to correct “adaptiveness” to “deceptiveness”. :-)

Writing reports is part of the job. The officer included in his report an account of his confusion and incomprehension, which is the very opposite of the retroactive restructuring to achieve certainty that Salient describes.

An arrestee, especially one against whom the charges have been dropped, is not obligated to provide a narrative, perhaps the problem here. Gates needs to offer more detail.

The officer included in his report an account of his confusion and incomprehension, which is the very opposite of the retroactive restructuring to achieve certainty that Salient describes.

Certainty? Naw.

In our report-crafting, deference to our confusion and incomprehension was our most frequent tactic. It’s very useful, because (usually) saying “I was confused by so-and-so” means “so-and-so was acting irrationally, which justifies my response.”

For example. Why did my coteacher and I order so-and-so to leave the classroom? Well, we felt we needed to, because we were confused by so-and-so’s behavior, and it seemed plausible to me that so-and-so might be threatening my coteacher! (Why did we actually kick so-and-so out? Depends on your definition of actually. What we learned in collaboration with the other folks helping us craft the report is, a circumstantial definition of “actually” that doesn’t make us vulnerable to any pesky lawsuits!)

I’m exaggerating. A little.

I understand the temptation to construct a scenario in which the officer is suspect for both understanding/remembering events too well and not well enough. However, he is obligated to provide a narrative, and that’s what he has done. It has not been shown to be false in its details, and much of it can’t be, as a good deal of the events it describes occurred within the house out of view of others. However, Gates’ version contains a demonstrable falsehood, the assertion that he was not yelling or causing a disturbance, which is contradicted by the accounts of multiple officers and civilian witnesses. Whether he was goaded into such actions by behavior the officer omitted from his report does not excuse the actions, or the less than candid denial of them, I would think.

Whether he was goaded into such actions by behavior the officer omitted from his report does not excuse the actions

snarkfree, Gates’ actions need no excuse. Even if we take the police report as the gospel truth testified. Every thing the police report accuses Gates of doing is both legal and understandable.

Salient, the police report specifies that Gates was engaging in disorderly conduct, which is not legal.

Did you even read Henry’s original post? If not I suggest you go back and do so now.

snarkfree, speaking of narrative gaps, how did the police officer get into Gates’s house?

Gates may or may not have been an asshole about this. It doesn’t matter.

But of course it does matter, how could it not? It is, indeed, a very important part of the story.

Perhaps Mrs Tilton @41 and @55 would quit slanting the facts in order to support her own conclusions. I for one, would find that much more relevant and interesting.

“(i) a distinguished middle-aged professor at a prestigious university who (ii) was entering your own house when accosted by the po and (iii) identified yourself to the lawmen as the rightful occupant of the house and (iv) were arrested nonetheless.”

No argument with (i). As for (ii) he had already entered the house when the LEO began investigating who was home. So the LEO had no idea whether he was there legally or not. (iii) He needs to do more than just verbally claim ownership. Like showing some ID when requested. Any B&E guy worth his salt can claim “It’s my house.” The LEO would be negligent just just take him at his word. (iv), the arrest came afterwords, and for an entirely different set of behaviors, which have been well documented.

But you knew that. But it doesn’t create quite the inflamatory story that way, now does it? I think you’ve exhausted your benefit of the doubt as well.

What this really comes down to is is it justifiable for the LEO to arrest someone who is screaming at them in a public place. I’ve been amazed at the number of commenters who have thought such behavior was legal. It was most assuredly not. It doesn’t take much to be guilty of creating a public disturbance.

Add to this that given the large number of truly unpleasant people the police are forced to deal with every day, judges are predisposed to giving them a healthy benefit of the doubt. Just look at how SCOTUS has whittled away at the exclusionary rule in 4th Amendment jurisprudence. Police have the authority to act differently than John Q. Public, and JQP had best remember that.

You don’t have to like the police, but you do have to behave like a mature adult around them. Even Harvard faculty members are smart enough to know that.

Not from a legal standpoint

Yes, and from a legal standpoint too. If there is a lawsuit – do you really believe Gates’ behavior is not going to be examined, analyzed and taken into consideration?

Suppose you call my mother whore and I punch you in the face. Do you think the legal story goes simply: “Henri punched Steve in the face”?

“Steve found it really surprising that Henri punched him in the face.”

Unfortunately I was forced to tase Henri 15 times. The coroner’s report lists cause of death as “heart disease”. Case closed.

Want to get run in, and (depending on who you are) possibly have the crap kicked out of you in the process? Ever so politely and deferentially, ask the cop who stopped you for his name and badge number. THAT was Gates’s “crime”.

It really is pretty simple, all you have to ask yourself is: was this situation (and charge) avoidable by the officer changing his behavior in a way compatible with his responsibilities in the course of doing his job. Further more, did the officers behavior escalate the situation in an avoidable way (or worse, could different actions have diffused it). As the answer is clearly yes, on both counts, the officer messed up.

But how can you be so sure “the answer is clearly yes”?

Officer Carlos Figueroa wrote in his report:

As I stepped in, I heard Sgt. Crowley ask for the gentleman’s information which he stated “NO I WILL NOT!”. The gentleman was shouting out to the Sgt. that the Sgt was a racist and yelled that “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO BLACK MEN IN AMERICA!” As the Sgt. was trying to calm the gentleman, the gentleman shouted “You don’t know who you’re messing with!”

I stepped out to gather the information from the reporting person. __. Ms. _ stated to me that she saw a man wedging his shoulder into the front door as to pry the door open. As I returned to the residence, a group of onlookers were now on scene. The Sgt., along with the gentleman, were now on the porch of __ Ware ST. and again he was shouting, now to the onlookers (about seven), “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO BLACK MEN IN AMERICA”! The gentleman refused to listen as to why the Cambridge Police were there. While on the porch, the gentleman refused to be cooperative and continued shouting that the Sgt is racist police officer.

But how can you be so sure “the answer is clearly yes”?

Very simply: Because regardless of how intractable Prof. Gates was or was not (i.e. avoiding any argument about the accuracy of the various police statements and claims made by Gates and others), according to the police report at some point Prof. Gates did demonstrate his identification to the satisfaction of the officer, establishing that there was in fact no crime being committed. (NB charges were laid for actions after this time)

At this point, Sgt. Crowleys only proper course of action was to apologize (profusely if needed, to calm the situation) and immediately leave (as quickly as practical). At that juncture, there was no situation to control (needed or otherwise) that was not of his own construction, and that he did not have the power and responsibility to remove.

Police may not like being told to “get the [insert whatever explicative you want] off my property” any more than you or I would (perhaps even less), but it is their responsibility to suck it up and do so in a case like this.

@ snarkfree:
Writing reports is part of the job. The officer included in his report an account of his confusion and incomprehension, which is the very opposite of the retroactive restructuring to achieve certainty that Salient describes.

This is oblivious at best. Let’s go back to the report in the original post:

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.

What transparent bullshit. Are the walls of Gates’ kitchen and foyer lead-lined? Was Officer Crowley using walkie-talkies from a dollar store? Was a SWAT team about to be dispatched and arrest everyone in the neighborhood unless Crowley called them off? If not, then there was no reason Crowley had to go outside right then and bring Gates with him. If you use even a tiny bit of critical thinking it’s obvious that Crowley wanted to get Gates into public view before he had calmed down and made up an excuse for it.

@157: I concede your point. A perfect, ideal, a “strictly by the book” cop, a robocop – he would’ve apologized profusely and left. I doubt such a cop exists in real life, though.

All things considered, in this imperfect world the actual outcome appears more or less just and reasonable; to me at least.

A.P.: “Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley has taught a class on racial profiling for five years at the Lowell Police Academy. Academy Director Thomas Fleming says Crowley is “good role model” who was hand-picked for the job by former police Commissioner Ronny Watson, who is black. In the class, Crowley teaches officers not to single people out based on their ethnic backgrounds.”

This is really getting interesting. I suppose the next thing will be an mp3 recording off the police radios of the incident. Police say it shows Gates screaming prior to his arrest, if you can believe them.

In any case, Prof. Gates should have been prudent enough to know not to be disrespectful to an authority figure who is licensed to kill. Still, it isn’t a big deal to be arrested and released four hours later.

Now that’s the authoritarian personality type at work. It’s your fault because you didn’t behave nicely. And anyhow, you haven’t been punished much this time…What is scary is how many other Americans on this thread take it for granted (even if they don’t approve of it) that if you upset a cop you can expect to be made to suffer for it. Once the police stop respecting the fact that they are servants of the public, you are on a very dangerous slope.

Yeah, kmack is being ironic, magistra. He or she agrees with you.

Although one could argue that if you are acting as an asshole, loudly insulting and upsetting anybody, cop or no cop, you can expect some sort of unpleasantry. Common sense.

Chaplinsky, a Jehovah’s Witness, had purportedly told a New Hampshire town marshal who was attempting to prevent him from preaching “You are a God-damned racketeer” and “a damned fascist” and was arrested. The court upheld the arrest and wrote in its decision that:

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

– Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942

So yes, a certain level of verbal belligerence towards the police is a crime. This is also initial source of the legal leverage for establishing laws for both hate speech and sexual harassment. Now you are seeing the cost.

The officer’s report presents a detailed and plausible narrative of events.

I once considered writing a science fiction novel, set in a world in which time travel was ubiquitous, so much so that normal concepts of cause and effect had completely broken down because everyone was always going back in time and changing the way things happened. The idea was that in such a society, they would still need some way of handing out praise, blame and punishment, and that they would settle on “narrative unity” as a weaker replacement for “causal responsibility” – ie, you would be considered guilty of a crime and sent to jail if that was the explanation of things which seemed most satisfying to a judge and jury of literary critics. My central character was going to be a hardboiled cop/deconstructionist called Bugsy Derrida.

kmack,

when police officers cause a great deal of trouble for members of ruling elites, without good cause, they almost always have to back down and apologise with extreme deference. This is true in all democratic countries at all times. The problem is that in the US being black is very good prima facie evidence that you are not a member of the ruling elite, and cops therefore are more liable to make that this mistake with blacks. Political correctness gone mad? No, political normalness, which may always have been mad.

Earlier in these threads dsquared you commented in support of oversight of the police; now you are quoting a report which recommended no serious action be taken in respect of 2 cops who killed a man in cold blood. The report finds these police didn’t warn him, that he didn’t move, he didn’t know they were after him and till they emerged in front of him on the train and shot him without warning, and that there was no evidence he was a threat. It finds that every piece of their testimony was false. But you think they didn’t commit murder? Have you forgotten how at the time they claimed he “jumped the barrier”, “wore a bulky jacket” and “ran away”? Why were they telling those lies within minutes of killing him, do you think? For shits and giggles?

ahh, I see, I’m having a version of my old classic “signal/noise ratio” troll thrown back at me.

I don’t think it’s a rule of this blog that I be familiar with all your past arguments, and i’m certainly not familiar with this one. I’d like not to infer anything, but I wonder what proportion of reported rapes you consider to be “noise”? Given that British rates of reported rape are lower than other comparable countries but their conviction rates are also lower, what should we conclude? More of the British crime statistics series are “noise”? This reflects well on the police, does it? And if this data series contains so much noise, how can you be confident that the historical increase in rape reporting rates is not also just random chance? In some parts of the UK the conviction rate is 2 or 3%, in others it is 20%. More noise in the West Dorset data? How?

This is certainly some strong and clear-headed oversight you’re applying to your own police force.

Rural counsel @ 145,

assuming that lawyers are not thick on the ground out in the countryside, one feels sorry for your local bumpkins, who have no other choice when seeking legal advice than to turn to a liar, and an incompetent one at that.

You know, I don’t dislike the police, actually; certainly not in the blanket sense of disliking “the police” in inverted commas. I do dislike, very strongly, authoritarian bullies. I dislike their apologists even more, and your penultimate paragraph exposes you as an apologist par excellence for (let me borrow, for irony’s sake, a phrase popular with the American political faction you doubtless support) jackbooted thuggery.

You’re also a fairly stupid apologist. The responsible prosecutor’s office very prudently elected to drop all charges. But then, the lawyer responsible for that decision is almost certainly at least moderately competent, and knows why it would be for the best not to have Crowley’s report examined too closely. But hey, why don’t you get in touch with our colleague in Cambridge, urging him or her to reconsider and prosecute Gates to the full extent of the law? What could possibly go wrong? You could point out that judges are predisposed to give cops the benefit of the doubt. A successful prosecution (and, as you so compellingly argue, there can be no doubt that the prosecution would succeed on all fronts) will teach John Q. Public the important lesson that he had best remember his place when being questioned by the police.

In fact, when we come right down to it, that’s what’s really important, isn’t it? I mean, even though Gates had adequately identified himself to Crowley as the legitimate occupant of the house, and even though Crowley subsequently arrested Gates after Gates demanded (as was his right) that Crowley identify himself with name and badge number — in other words, even though Gates was right and Crowley was wrong — what matters here is that a civilian got uppity with the state security apparatus, and quite properly felt a bit of boot for it. So go for it, counsellor. I’m sure the prosecutor will give your professional judgement the full consideration it deserves.